Poetry Centered

Dawn Lundy Martin: Our Present, Long Moment

• University of Arizona Poetry Center • Episode 54

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Dawn Lundy Martin selects poems of urgency, tension, and devotion. She shares Daniel Borzutzky responding to massacres with a poem that must be written (“Written after a Massacre in the Year 2018”), francine j. harris negotiating what can be contained and what cannot (“in case”), and Ada Limón choosing astounding devotion ("State Bird"). Martin closes with an excerpt from “A Fable of the Regime,” which engages with the present, long moment of American history.

Watch the full recordings of Borzutzky, harris, and Limón on Voca:
Daniel Borzutzky (January 10, 2019)
francine j. harris (September 3, 2015)
Ada Limón (April 5, 2018) 

You can also enjoy Lundy’s performance as part of Black Took Collective and her participation in a panel discussion at the Poetry Center, part of the Poetry Off the Page Symposium from 2012.

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.

[GENTLE MUSIC]

JULIE SWARSTAD JOHNSON:

You're listening to Poetry Centered, where you'll hear three live recordings of poems chosen and introduced for you by a guest host. This show comes to you from the University of Arizona Poetry Center and our archive, Voca, an online collection of recorded poetry readings that took place at the center over the past six decades. I'm Julie Swarstad Johnson, the Poetry Center's archivist here to welcome you. Today we're joined by poet and essayist Dawn Lundy Martin. She's the author of five books of poems. Most recently, Instructions for the Lovers, which came out last year. Dawn co-founded and directed the Center for African-American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh, and she's now professor and distinguished writer in residence at Bard College. Her memoir titled When a Person Goes Missing is forthcoming. For this episode, Dawn brings together poems by Daniel Borzutzky, francine j. harris and Ada Limón, drawing connections between these voices which speak with urgency, explore tensions, and finally, turn toward wholeness. She closes with her poem"A Fable of the Regime." Dawn, thank you for being here. Welcome to the show.[MUSIC CONTINUES]

DAWN LUNDY MARTIN:

This is Dawn Lundy Martin, and I'm recording from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where I'm visiting at the moment. Thank you to the University of Arizona Poetry Center for inviting me to talk about poems by three poets. I've chosen people I adore, whose poems I greatly admire, and who I'm always learning something from. Daniel Borzutzky, francine j. harris, and Ada Limón. The first poet, Daniel Borzutzky, is a poet and translator, and winner of the National Book Award for poetry. He's translated many poets from Spanish into English, including Cecilia Vicuña and Raul Zurita, both Chilean poets. A heritage Borzutzky shares. It's relevant that Borzutzky works with poets whose lives have been affected and altered by the fascist Pinochet dictatorship in Chile because the poem I have selected,"Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018" by Daniel Borzutzky, recorded on January 10, 2019, gives language to the violence of repressive regimes. This poem was written after the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh in 2018, where 11 people were killed. I was living in Pittsburgh at the time and remember the grief and grieving that permeated our city. Tree of Life is also the synagogue where Borzutzky became a Bar Mitzvah. The enduring nature of any poem is irrevocable from its compelling nature. In the case of Borzutzky written after a massacre in the year 2018, the massacre within the poem endures in part because the massacre outside of the poem endures. But it's not one massacre, it's many massacres, it's all massacres. It's massacre written into the stain of humanity. It's Fanon's colonized who died anywhere from anything. This is a both/and poem. A poem that can be read explicitly about the many centuries plight of Jewish people, and also explicitly about the Tree of Life massacre, and also explicitly about other atrocities. The poem begins this way. They dream of a massacre that can take place in public and in private at the same time. So if we're reading this poem in 2025, like I am, we might be thinking about the ways in which horrific images of massacre from Gaza to the Sudan and from Haiti to Ukraine fill the small screens of our phones all over the world, very public and for all to see. Televised, as it were. The private might be the imagination or the psyche of those about to be murdered, or it might be the private self regulations of those subject to murder or incarceration by the regime. The private might also refer to how the regime punctures the sacred spaces of those it persecutes. I think all good poetry does multiple things at once, and I like how we're required to read this poem in conversation with six other poems that have the same title. The book that these poems are collected in also has the same title. And in this poem, the we are audacious parasites whom the administrative body disappears via a series of brutal and technological means. Toxic waste, scrap metal heap crushed into stacked cars. The mystery in the poem arises from both the allegorical and the dystopic. One meaning for allegory is the image of another, literally, speaking about something else. I've already talked about how "Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018," which is the final poem in the series of 7, speaks about one thing and is simultaneously speaking about other things. In its most haunting, dystopic imagining, however, we are very destabilized by how not only the disappeared and the killed are considered by the regime, but how they consider themselves. We're left to wonder what of the administrative bodies perspective has been internalized? And what seems like something approximating self-flagellation, as if the voice of the regime becomes the voice of the victimized. There's so much urgency in all of Borzutzky's poetry. And here, it's as if the poem could not not have been written. Here is Daniel Borzutzky reading"Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018."[GENTLE MUSIC][AUDIO PLAYBACK]

DANIEL BORZUTZKY:

And I'll conclude with this poem, which will take about five minutes to read. Title, again, "Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018," which begins with an epigraph from Coleridge, who says, quote,"to see is only a language." Which is from his poem written during a temporary blindness in the year 1799. 1. To see his only-- and I can't speak it today. They've wrapped a heavy blanket over my face. The cops deliver the influenza, but before injection, they need to wait for someone to fix the central heating. No one wants to interrogate me until they fix the central heating. I chatter with a broken refugees in this prison, our faces wrapped in darkness. 2. A list of frozen bodies. A lost list of unclaimed bodies. A lost list of privatized bodies. A lost list of bodies they seized. We are the lost list, but we don't know where they keep us. 3. The border bisecting the infected-- the border bisecting the infected fumes of the infested factories. The utopia of statelessness. The utopia of transience. They tell us Lake Michigan is the Central America of the Midwest. They send us here so we can share hepatitis swabs with dirty immigrants. Hold on to your DNA, refugee citizens. The only question about life is, what does it mean to live it? 4. Financiers selling bodies, speculators selling blood and sperm, they slink into the webs of the city. They tell me I don't have the right to grieve over my own body. They tell me to pray and to grieve is illegal. 5. What did he shout before he massacred the grandmothers? What did he shout before he massacred the worshippers? What did he shout before he massacred the nurses, the silent praying skeletons? He was on his way to the river the blood would never reach. He was on his way to the Nazi meetup the blood would never reach. The stock market just opened. The exchange value of a slaughtered Jew is like the exchange value of a slaughtered Jew. If your body is on fire, a private firefighter will put it out much faster than a state one. The death of a sensuous lung. 6. The song of the ram's horn by the river. The early Americans marched to meet the caravan in the desert. An authoritative body tells me I can't disembody my body without disembodying the collective body's body. And if I disembody the collective body's body, then I will have to disembody the imagined community's body. And if I disembody the imagined community's body, then I will need to ignore the fields of multiple destruction today. I dip my finger into a cup of blood and wish for plagues to destroy the emperor. I need to destroy the nation state. But when will I find the time? 7. The bourgeoisie pay taxes to kill immigrants. Bathe in the cryptocurrency of a bank that will never exist. 8. The song of atonement at the river sings. Pray harder and the massacre will go away. Pray harder and the massacre will not turn into another massacre. Pray harder and the poor people will become rich people. Pray harder and the slaughterer will turn into a butterfly. Pray harder and the 30 million white males with guns will turn into a river of testicles rolling down the street. When they repossess my body, my heart will soak in petroleum and my mouth will be a baby in a cage. The poetry of the shattered bone and the flame of the human document. 9. The catastrophe is caressed ad nauseum. The greased up multitudes are not afraid to say the same thing over and over again. Death leaks from their shoes, and the slaughtered Jews are like slaughtered Jews. I dream about returning to a prayer that doesn't exist. It disappeared yesterday when they assassinated the morning and turned our life into spectacle. 10. You hid behind the soldiers with machine guns running down the street. You were playing for plagues and wishing your parents would come out of the building alive. The worshippers of the dead trees knew that where there is a first kill, there will be a second. Where there is a third kill, there will be a fourth, a fifth, a 500th. The anecdote destroys the analysis. 11. The emigrants split their bodies into communal assets. To assimilate, they must stand by the river with a prophylactic angel in their hands, disguised as a rocketing hedge fund. In the rupture, in the rubble, in the pathological eye sockets, in the counter odyssey of the whites of your eyes, in the parliamentary assault rifle, the parliamentary machine gun splatter. The illegal bodies in cages are painted over by the analytics and mathematics of the hemisphere. How do you quantify the broken toddlers rolling on the ground? How do you quantify the murmuring grief of the Americas? 12. Marines medicate mothers and mixed their milk with mononucleosis. Millionaires multiply in the machinery of mourning. Manufacturing mausoleums for martyred Marxists in Mercedes. Middle managers mistake manipulative merchants for munificent moralists. A military massacre on the municipal motorway is like a military massacre on the municipal motorway. Metaphysical mayors mediate the mythology of mystical markets while monitoring the murders of migrants. My mouth is filled with words. Thank you.[APPLAUSE][END PLAYBACK][GENTLE MUSIC]

DAWN LUNDY MARTIN:

The second poem I want to share with you is titled "In Case" by francine j. harris. Recorded on September 3, 2015. harris grew up in Detroit, and her poems tend to reflect that edge and sass. A 2025 Guggenheim fellow in literature, she's a maximalist poet when it comes to how she creates textures inside of language, and layers those textures to form an additional voice in the poem. This poem, "In Case," commands our attention at its first utterance. I carried a clit, in case. In case it wasn't rape. What does it mean to carry a clit? Is it distant? Distinct from the body? In case it wasn't rape helps us understand that the tension that wants to be produced is between two possibilities that have to do with pleasure on the one hand, and pain on the other as the poem moves on between restraint and freedom between filth and forced silence and what cannot be contained, what cannot be controlled, and what can. But what happened in the world of the poem? Is it all speculation? The poem hinges, at first, on the repetition of in case, which is sometimes anaphora at the beginnings of lines, but not always. In case is either a conjunction or an adverb. When it's used as a conjunction, we don't know if the thing is present, if it happened or not. What's brilliant about this part of speech and its usage in this poem that grapples with rape, is that it mimics the way doubt is cast on rape. It's a claim, a matter of fact in our contemporary societies and cultures. This is how the poem begins to mount its evidence in section one."In Case" is a poem in three sections. Whenever I see a poem in sections, I think of the sections like movements in music, both self-contained and somehow, sometimes rather inexplicably, bleeding into each other and the larger whole. harris, however, gives us a suture between the sections when the last line of one section is repeated at the beginning of the next, but with a slight difference, as in, in case I could hear sheets flap, like a punch in the thigh at the end of one section, and the next section begins this way. One punches thigh open, another writes script. At first, the punch is a part of a simile. The speaker hears the sheets flap like this punch, which is really all we can think about now. Forget the sheets, which are either flapping or not, it's a punch we remember, and then the punch, again, when it becomes an actual occurrence. It did happen after all. White ash of punched cunt. White follicles ripped. We survive. Or, in harris's words,"and we are not winter." In the final section of the poem, which frankly, the whole poem is all surprises and irreducibility, irreconcilability. But this final section is really its own kind of surprise. Speaking becomes its concern. All kinds of entities want to silence our mouths. All dark and thick, our mouths got us kicked, writes harris. I feel entirely gutted by this poem and it's traveling. The way we begin at a kind of death and then work toward our shut up, our shut up, our shut up, almost like an internal voice screaming in our heads. Here is francine j. harris reading this astounding poem,"In Case."[GENTLE MUSIC][AUDIO PLAYBACK]

FRANCINE J. HARRIS:

I'm going to read just a few poems from the manuscript or the book.[LAUGHTER] The second book. So the second book is called Play Dead. I think this is actually the first time I've read from this book now that it's in actually in the form that it's going to be in. So this is one of the early poems. It's called "In Case." It's in three parts."In Case." 1. I carried a clit, in case. In case it wasn't rape. In case the kiss was your lovely. In case you suck a sore tooth. In case you were steady. Your hand was steady. In case you could talk. I carried a clit, and a wrist in case-- in case I could rub it, and you could bleed it, and we could talk it down off a ledge. In case you could hear me. In case I could walk. Following all things pedestrian like beds and pricks. In case the gates would open. In case the drink was sweet. In case the flagpole's empty. In case I could hear sheets flap like a punch in the thigh. 2. One punches thigh open, another write scripts. Pens, white gown and white banner and white sheet and white cover and dove and white birch and parchment and white cinder and slab brick. White ash of punched cunt. White follicles ripped. And we were not winter. All dark and thick and full of mouth. 3. We were not wonder. All dark and thick. Our mouths got us kicked. You ask a principal, a counselor, the man in the room. Our mouths got us running, soup water from sewers and gentler weather keeps chicks. Our mouths got us full to black rim to red blather, toward trouble. A generous flight of stairs. Our mouths got us hissed ridiculous. You ask a shaman, his snake of women, his clavicle stick. Our mouths got us bitter ass whipped. Pick our owners, our switches, our licks, our shut up, our shut up, our shut up.[END PLAYBACK][GENTLE MUSIC]

DAWN LUNDY MARTIN:

It's been dark times so far. I've talked about poetry that deals with repressive regimes, mass shootings and rape. Now, I want to talk about love. We need love to make it through this shit. This shit that seeks to kill us. It is life sustaining, love. It is life giving. It is what makes it worth it to be on this planet with others. Love is the other side of that human demon we witness in Borzutzky's poem. Ada Limón is the 24th poet laureate of the United States. Her poem "State Bird" is about moving to Lexington, Kentucky for love. It begins, though, in resistance or in conflict. Confession, she says, I did not want to live here. The second line reveals more. Not among the goldenrod, wild onions or the drop seed. Which is to say, she did not desire this particular beauty, but it is beautiful, especially in her rendering. And when we read it, we think, I'm not sure if I believe so much that I did not want to live here. It depends on where here is and whether here is in fact in love. Hmm. Goldenrod, the first plant mentioned is from genus solidago, which means to make whole. The conflict is between that itch toward more wholeness or Eros and quotidian want, the wants of the everyday. I love how "State Bird" comes to the pull of desire."Our bricked bedroom like the mouth of a strange beast yawning to suck us in each night like air." The double simile has such energy in conveying the pull into the bedroom, both actual and metonymic, like the mouth of a strange beast yawning to suck us in and like air. Both animal and raw and necessary for life like air. This poem astounds us with its devotion. In the end, it matters what we give into and how we hold it. Who and what we let lift us up and hold us in the speaker's address to her love, or perhaps love itself, she says, basically, wherever you go and whatever you do, I will be singing your song. Please join me in listening to Ada Limón read this luminous and tender poem, "State Bird."[GENTLE MUSIC][AUDIO PLAYBACK]

ADA LIMÓN:

I'm going to read a poem now that oftentimes people wonder why I ended up in Lexington, Kentucky. I see their perplexed faces.[CHUCKLING] And it was for love. And I will tell you that I once had a psychic tell me that I had a bumper sticker on me that says, will travel for love.[CHUCKLING] I think that might be true. This poem is a love poem about moving to Kentucky. And you'll see, it's hard for me to read in Lexington because of the first line. This poem appeared in the New Yorker in 2012, I think."State Bird." Confession, I did not want to live here. Not among the goldenrod, wild onions or the dropseed. Not waist high in the barrel aged brown corn water. Not with a million dollar racehorses, nor the tightly round wound hay bales. Not even in the old tobacco weigh station we live in, with its heavy metal safe doors that frame our bricked bedroom like the mouth of a strange beast yawning to suck us in each night like air. I denied it, this new land. But love, I'll concede this. Whatever state you are, I'll be that state's bird. The loud, obvious blur of song people point to when they wonder where it is you've gone. You can see why that can be a little hard sometimes to read in Lexington.[END PLAYBACK][GENTLE MUSIC]

DAWN LUNDY MARTIN:

I'm going to read now from a project that I'm working on with Dana Bishop-Root. It's a collaborative project where we document and critique and resist and make satire against and of this long moment in American history. The project is called violence with service. But I'm going to read to you an excerpt from a long work that begins the book. And it is titled "A Fable of the Regime." From "A Fable of the Regime." Very soon it became apparent that the arrests were abductions or kidnappings, that are part of the nation state's plan was to perform a government that resembled other governments that we'd heard about or read about in school. It didn't seem possible that the abductions of dissenting people were happening, so it took us a minute to catch up to the fact. We were flying first class flights across country and vacationing like usual, la-di-da. We were going to the farmer's market, where young, smiling farmers sold their wares. We were having cocktails at rooftop bars with silver views. This pleased the regime. We were the cover for its cruelty. We were the Americans doing American things, as always. Some of us were accused of doing un-American things, such as speaking or voicing opinions. We were placed on lists that described our actions in terms that did not resemble the actions. Those of us on the list were against things like mass murder, arrests of people and their placement in prisons in foreign countries, and what the media called a chilling of speech. Things proceeded like this without much interference from those who said they represented the people. The abducted and the jailed and deported people weren't called anything. They were just gone. The lawyers were also mostly gone, so there were few to defend the jailed and deported who increased by the thousands. Big law firm lawyers were afraid and making deals with the regime to represent the regime instead of the people. This was clearly blackmail. One had to wonder what dirt those who called themselves justice had on the lawyers. What was contained in the Manila folders marked top secret. Some judges, who had the power to do so, told the regime to stop being illegal and cruel, but these orders were ignored. To terrify the people, those who conducted the abductions wore hoods and masks. Not enough was said by the media or the people about this fact. One day, the people organized mass protests all over the country. We made clever signs and chanted against the doings of the regime. We documented our signs and participated on the internet. We were very proud of ourselves. We did not focus on the masked hooded men. It's as if they had always existed like new weather, like thunder snow. The protest came and went as if the protests never happened in the first place. These were trying times. They were times requiring international and internal rigor. The kind of international and internal rigor that required a lot to happen at the same time. Researching how fastest states historically get created, preparing for multiple unknown futures and waiting, most people were exhausted and depleted. We still went to work. We tried to pay our bills on time. We filed taxes. We still fretted about deadlines and took meetings. We worried about the small stuff as much as we ever did. There was an elegance to the way we held, the complexity of the moment and all the studying, fears, coverages, plannings and doings. We did all the things and held the elegant complexity in our bodies, even though the regime had stabbed the economy to death and many older people lost more than half their retirement savings and their health care. They were counting on those savings to support themselves as they age and as they needed more health care, but the regime wanted the rich to get richer and the poor to just die. And yet, as if caught in an impossible, irresistible propulsion, the people, the we, could not stop the pattern of doing this.[GENTLE MUSIC]

JULIE SWARSTAD JOHNSON:

You've been listening to Dawn Lundy Martin and this is Poetry Centered. Dawn, thank you so much for bringing these poems to us today. Listeners, thank you always for taking the time to be here with us. We have one more episode coming up in this set. Samyak Shertok will be our host two weeks from today, so don't miss it. Thanks for listening to these recent episodes, and check out the back list if you haven't already. There's a huge range of voices to enjoy. Take care. We'll see you soon.

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.