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Speaker 1: Hello everyone, and welcome back to The poet Speaks Podcast.
Speaker 3: Now our next guest.
Speaker 1: Body of work deals with place, ecology, memory, and cultural reckoning.
Speaker 1: She's published five celebrated poetry collections. Her bookwork Work in Days,
Speaker 1: was one of the New York Times Best Poetry Books
Speaker 1: of twenty sixteen, twenty twenty four to twenty twenty five.
Speaker 1: She will serve as a poet Lord about Serena, California.
Speaker 3: Everyone, Welcome to the pols Speaks Podcast. Test Taylor, Test,
Speaker 3: how are you?
Speaker 2: I am so happy to be here. Thank you, Amanda,
Speaker 2: absolutely so.
Speaker 3: Tell us a bit. Where are you at currently right now?
Speaker 3: In the world.
Speaker 1: We love to find out where our guests where we're
Speaker 1: talking to them from, how far away we are in
Speaker 1: a digital space.
Speaker 3: So where are you at currently in the world?
Speaker 2: Right now, I am sitting in my living room in
Speaker 2: a little bungalow in Elsaito, California. That's the town I
Speaker 2: grew up in. I left. I lived in Boston and Brooklyn.
Speaker 2: I did the writer thing on the East Coast for
Speaker 2: a while, and then I ended up back in the
Speaker 2: little town I grew up in. It is a suburb
Speaker 2: that is between Richmond, California and Berkeley, California, and in
Speaker 2: some ways you could just think it was a boring
Speaker 2: little suburb, but I actually think there's a lot of
Speaker 2: fascinating stuff about it. It's the endpoint on a lot
Speaker 2: of people's migration routes. It's been the most diverse school
Speaker 2: district in the country since the nineteen eighties. I grew
Speaker 2: up and went to public school here, and one of
Speaker 2: the cool things about coming back and getting to be
Speaker 2: the poet laureate is I'm going back into the schools
Speaker 2: that I attended and just looking at them a few
Speaker 2: years later down the road, thinking about all of the
Speaker 2: places and stories that converge here. I really love that.
Speaker 2: Another thing that's cool about the town of El Crito
Speaker 2: is that the photographer Dorothea Lang photographed the Great Depression
Speaker 2: and photographed a lot of people in shelterlessness and migrancy.
Speaker 2: She actually had a note to herself to do a
Speaker 2: photo essay on El c Rito in the nineteen forties.
Speaker 2: She thought it was a fascinating place because again it
Speaker 2: was getting built up really fast. People were coming together
Speaker 2: to work in the shipyards. Richmond had the first desegregated
Speaker 2: workplace in America in the nineteen forties, and at the
Speaker 2: same time, people who lived in El Cirito Japanese Americans
Speaker 2: were getting taken away for Japanese tournament. So has it
Speaker 2: been a place of like fracture and paradox and possibility.
Speaker 2: And it's also very beautiful. It's literally right across the
Speaker 2: Golden Gate. You can stand at the edge to stand
Speaker 2: in the Elsrito bart station and you're looking straight into
Speaker 2: the mouth of the Golden Gate, watching the fog come
Speaker 2: in or go out every day. So, I don't know,
Speaker 2: it's like, it's an interesting thing to try to describe
Speaker 2: your home. I love that that's your first question.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, And it's one of those things too, you know,
Speaker 1: because I actually grew up in Sacramento, California. I don't
Speaker 1: know if you're familiar with this nor cal Unite, but
Speaker 1: I grew up in Sacramento and I went to school
Speaker 1: for undergrad at UC Davis. Actually my brothers went to
Speaker 1: school UC Berkeley, but very familiar with that area. I'm curious,
Speaker 1: you know, because already you have such a celebrated career,
Speaker 1: but you kind of think about your life kind of
Speaker 1: plays out like a beautiful novel too, going back to
Speaker 1: your hometown then become a poet Laurette.
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, I kind of want to hit
Speaker 3: on that a little bit.
Speaker 1: You know, I think everyone they always want to leave
Speaker 1: their hometown and then you know, some people find their
Speaker 1: way back.
Speaker 3: How do you how do you kind of do you feel?
Speaker 3: How do you feel about that?
Speaker 1: You know, some people, I know, I know my experience,
Speaker 1: some people that it's their biggest fear to go back
Speaker 1: to where they start from.
Speaker 3: Other people they love the idea of going back. How
Speaker 3: have you kind of.
Speaker 1: Reckoned, Like you said, home is an interesting place. How
Speaker 1: do you reckoned with that idea of home?
Speaker 2: Well? I feel so lucky that I have a place
Speaker 2: that's this lovely that I could go back to. I mean,
Speaker 2: a lot of our lives, a lot of the stories
Speaker 2: of this century are about exile and about plate people
Speaker 2: being far from places, you know, and we all have
Speaker 2: different homelands that you know, are further away from us.
Speaker 2: And just even in a funny way, my father's family
Speaker 2: was very deeply in Virginia for so long, and my
Speaker 2: mother's family was very deeply in New England, and in some
Speaker 2: ways I almost felt like our generation, their generation of
Speaker 2: coming to California that even that was like a funny
Speaker 2: diaspora from like these settled places where even in that
Speaker 2: way they had been kind of like ingrained in a place,
Speaker 2: in a culture. And you know, my parents, both of
Speaker 2: them had kind of distinct ways of being that were
Speaker 2: a little bit incompatible, almost like this northern New Englander
Speaker 2: with who was like salty and stony and like she
Speaker 2: was a little flinty, and she had all of these
Speaker 2: like makerly cottagy ways, and my dad was from this
Speaker 2: Virginia family that had other ways. And and I thought
Speaker 2: a lot about the fact that we have these trade
Speaker 2: routes in our bodies that are like the stories of
Speaker 2: where we come from and the stories of the funny
Speaker 2: expressions our parents use. And it was always really interested
Speaker 2: in dialect towards and you know, the sort of the
Speaker 2: histories that we carry with us. And I think that's
Speaker 2: what I love in literature too, like I love I
Speaker 2: love those stories that make me aware of, like just
Speaker 2: the compassion that we have for one another's, like long
Speaker 2: trade routes that are inside each other's bodies, or like
Speaker 2: the unexpected convergences of stories that we feel. That's not
Speaker 2: the answer of how I come back to Sorto, though.
Speaker 2: The truth is I did not want to come back here.
Speaker 2: I was just too old to school and I just
Speaker 2: didn't I thought I was up and out. I was
Speaker 2: in Boston and Brooklyn, and I thought I was going
Speaker 2: to live on the Eastern Seaboard, and you know, it
Speaker 2: was really getting to be just a little older, getting partnered,
Speaker 2: expecting my first child. And I remember this day where
Speaker 2: I drank too much coffee running around New York on
Speaker 2: an empty stem, and I really agitated my pregnancy. And
Speaker 2: I was walking up like a fifth floor walk up,
Speaker 2: and I was just exhausted, and I thought, I don't
Speaker 2: want to do this. I like, I could if I
Speaker 2: had to, but I don't want to. And I suddenly
Speaker 2: just thought about like these bungalows and these lemon trees.
Speaker 2: I thought about I thought about this neighborhood that was
Speaker 2: this kind of homely, scrap working class neighborhood that I'd
Speaker 2: grown up in. And you know, I came back here
Speaker 2: and it's the Bay and it's changed.
Speaker 3: It's like.
Speaker 2: So expensive to live here. Really, the Internet economy really
Speaker 2: transformed a lot of the things that I loved. When
Speaker 2: I grew up here, there wasn't an Internet, so it
Speaker 2: was really like you were there was the distinctness to
Speaker 2: this place, this Berkeley place, as opposed to other places
Speaker 2: you weren't able to get, you know, to community as
Speaker 2: quickly across all these boundaries and borders. And in one
Speaker 2: of my poems, I said that California felt like a
Speaker 2: crumbling outpost and like we were just like the furthest
Speaker 2: edge of the edge of something like of the imagination
Speaker 2: of America, that we were like this kind of sun baked, crumbling,
Speaker 2: scrappy place that was tacked on to America at the
Speaker 2: last minute, you know, for gold. But now the Internet
Speaker 2: is here and We're this engine of this crazy economy
Speaker 2: and this crazy like projection of images, and people were
Speaker 2: you know, selling ads for Facebook and they work selling
Speaker 2: ads for Twitter, and the whole kind of idea that
Speaker 2: this is now the center of selling images is like,
Speaker 2: so it's really different in some ways. Another thing about
Speaker 2: coming back is I think actually some of the stuff
Speaker 2: that I write about and thought about a lot, about
Speaker 2: the fractures I felt in the public school system, about
Speaker 2: this like earthquake zone that we live on, about like precariousness,
Speaker 2: California feels only more precarious to me. It feels gosh,
Speaker 2: the problems around income inequality and housing shortages and climate
Speaker 2: catastrophe are all just they feel so intensified, even from
Speaker 2: things that were here decades ago when I was growing up,
Speaker 2: and you know, going back into the public schools that
Speaker 2: I grew up attending, I'm aware that some of the
Speaker 2: issues have maybe resolved themselves and some of them haven't,
Speaker 2: And it's just fascinating to see the movement of a
Speaker 2: life like that.
Speaker 1: No, I think that's such an interesting place. That's an
Speaker 1: interesting perspective to have, and it really touches on like
Speaker 1: I read in your you know, reading your bile. A
Speaker 1: lot of your work, you say, deals with memory and
Speaker 1: cultural reckoning, you know, especially kind of your your explanation
Speaker 1: of California from what it was to what it is now.
Speaker 1: That's a very that's a very fascinating perspective. I'm kind
Speaker 1: of curious though, for you. I mean, you've had a
Speaker 1: very very successful career in poetry and writing. I mean,
Speaker 1: what is the kind of what is what is the
Speaker 1: you know? I think the word memory that's such a
Speaker 1: that's very specific to each person, but it's also a
Speaker 1: very vague term word. When you think about the word memory,
Speaker 1: what does that mean to you from when you started
Speaker 1: your career writing to now? And then also tell us
Speaker 1: where did this Well? First off, let me say this,
Speaker 1: tell us where did poetry find you?
Speaker 3: Just talking to you alone right now.
Speaker 1: You're a very You're a very deep sinker. I can
Speaker 1: tell you're very introspective even before we even.
Speaker 3: Start the interview.
Speaker 1: I can just tell by the way you're forming your thoughts,
Speaker 1: your sentences, you're very introspective. When did writing even find you?
Speaker 1: Was it in was it in California as a little
Speaker 1: girl growing up? Or did it find you somewhere along
Speaker 1: your path? As you moved across places, across the states,
Speaker 1: where did poetry first and foremost find you? I love
Speaker 1: that you asked that question.
Speaker 2: I have an uncle that's a blues musician, and when
Speaker 2: you ask him why he's a blues musician, he said,
Speaker 2: I didn't choose the blues. The blues chose me, which
Speaker 2: I think is good. You know, it's a good answer.
Speaker 2: And I mean, one of the stories that I tell
Speaker 2: is that I was in college and I had auditioned
Speaker 2: for the lead and a play from the visiting playwright
Speaker 2: who is also the visiting poet, and the play was
Speaker 2: in verse, and I delivered the lead and the visiting
Speaker 2: playwright poet said why don't you show up for my class?
Speaker 2: And so I did, and my heart was kind of
Speaker 2: a flutter. And then the poet, his name was Lynn Maxwell.
Speaker 2: He said, you know, some of you are going to
Speaker 2: be using these skills to write advertising copy, or maybe
Speaker 2: you'll become a lawyer and that's a really good way
Speaker 2: to use language. But maybe some of you will become poets.
Speaker 2: And I remember feeling incredibly stubborn that the person who
Speaker 2: should become a poet would be me. The funny thing
Speaker 2: is he was a great teacher, and in fact, a
Speaker 2: number of us have become poets from that class, like working,
Speaker 2: working writers, And there was something sort of magical about
Speaker 2: the early moments of this training that we started to
Speaker 2: get together. I trained a lot to be a musician.
Speaker 2: As a young person, I sang. I was in a
Speaker 2: choir that was allowed to sing children's parts in the
Speaker 2: San Francisco opera.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: So I was doing like a high level training. I
Speaker 2: don't know, oh, if I exactly wanted to be an
Speaker 2: opera singer. I knew that I loved like this intense
Speaker 2: level of practice, and I loved like tinkering, and I
Speaker 2: loved all the possibilities of art making like the I
Speaker 2: loved I loved practice.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: That was kind of magical to me. But at a
Speaker 2: certain point, somehow I didn't see the path forward. I mean,
Speaker 2: this wasn't like nobody said, don't be a singer. It
Speaker 2: wasn't like that. It was just like one day I
Speaker 2: was tired of that, and I took up smoking and
Speaker 2: singing jazz, and then I started writing poems. And early
Speaker 2: on one of the best important sensations to me was
Speaker 2: that poems could be musical, that they had the quality
Speaker 2: of language distilled into music. So one of the examples
Speaker 2: I like to give of that is, if you say
Speaker 2: the woods are lovely dark and deep, but I have
Speaker 2: promises to keep and miles miles to go before I sleep,
Speaker 2: you've basically said a logistical sentence. It rhymes a little bit,
Speaker 2: but it's like I've got to go home. But if
Speaker 2: you say the woods are lovely dark and deep, but
Speaker 2: I have promises to keep and miles to go before
Speaker 2: I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep, that
Speaker 2: repetition right there gets you in the presence of something
Speaker 2: else and you're in the presence of dealing with death. Really,
Speaker 2: it feels like death has showed up in the poem,
Speaker 2: and it's really in the magic of the echo that
Speaker 2: something at some other meaning is being transacted, and the
Speaker 2: idea that you're doing some music with your words that
Speaker 2: is pulling against with the surface of meaning, that the
Speaker 2: music of language is working with the surface of language
Speaker 2: to create this sensation of being inside something like that reverberates.
Speaker 2: I just that I think was the first of the magics,
Speaker 2: and that was like the first kind of spell casting
Speaker 2: part of the poem making. Who was kind of like
Speaker 2: getting to be a magical musical composer for the breath,
Speaker 2: you know, and that was that was like one of
Speaker 2: the gateway drugs. And then ever since then there have
Speaker 2: been so many more gateway drugs. I'm like twenty five
Speaker 2: years in keep going.
Speaker 1: Absolutely tell me a bit about like that, Like you
Speaker 1: said that magic making.
Speaker 3: How was that magic making from the start of your
Speaker 3: career to where it is now? I mean, what is that?
Speaker 1: What is that kind of trajectory for you felt and
Speaker 1: look like like when you began, did you ever see
Speaker 1: that you would have? You know New York Times Best
Speaker 1: Poetry Book at twenty sixteen from the poet Lurie of
Speaker 1: your Hometown. I mean, all these celebrated works, What has
Speaker 1: really changed from.
Speaker 3: Beginning till now for you?
Speaker 1: And in terms of maybe your growth, Like you said,
Speaker 1: memory and cultural reckoning is something you really take note of.
Speaker 1: What has been your own cultural reckoning and your own
Speaker 1: lineage path of life?
Speaker 4: Oh wow, Yeah, you asked a great question earlier about memory.
Speaker 1: So memory, like I said, memory making, that is such
Speaker 1: a vague term, but it's very specific to each person
Speaker 1: at the same time, right, memory, what does memory mean
Speaker 1: to you? From the beginning of when you started twenty
Speaker 1: five years ago, as you said to now in.
Speaker 2: Your career, what does the kind of cultural.
Speaker 1: Reckoning and what does memory mean in terms of your
Speaker 1: writing and your poetry from now until today?
Speaker 3: What does that term even mean for you?
Speaker 2: Now?
Speaker 4: You know, it's funny when you say the word memory
Speaker 4: and you ask me to talk about memory, I immediately
Speaker 4: think of that Louse Sille Clifton poem that says why
Speaker 4: some people be mad at me sometimes, and it's a
Speaker 4: very short poem, Why some.
Speaker 2: People be mad at me sometimes? They ask me to remember,
Speaker 2: but they want me to remember their memories, and I
Speaker 2: keep on remembering mine. And I just love about each
Speaker 2: of us that we all carry within us something that's
Speaker 2: defiant to received history. I'm sure that we do. I'm
Speaker 2: sure that each of us has this moment when we're
Speaker 2: told it's a certain way and we discover that's not so. Yes,
Speaker 2: we discover that there's something else we need to know.
Speaker 2: And I think that's the moment when we confront the
Speaker 2: ghosts of our family, the ghosts of our culture, the
Speaker 2: ghost of our country. Really, and what's really interesting and
Speaker 2: important about poetry is that poetry, especially the lyric, is
Speaker 2: a place to have conversations that cannot really be transacted
Speaker 2: by other medium. Absolutely, I could tell you did you
Speaker 2: send the letter on Tuesday, and you could say yes,
Speaker 2: we would not be speaking in a poem. But if
Speaker 2: it is at the level where we have to address
Speaker 2: the ghosts of our family, the ghosts of our culture,
Speaker 2: or the ghosts of our country, we begin to be
Speaker 2: transacting speech that needs to take place at the level
Speaker 2: of poetry. And that speech might take place in a play,
Speaker 2: but the play would be delivering monologues that would essentially
Speaker 2: be poems. You know, when you are addressing an inanimate
Speaker 2: or something that can't speak back, but you need to
Speaker 2: reckon with it, that is like an essentially poetic form
Speaker 2: of address right there. And so when I realized that
Speaker 2: poetry was a vessel for having these arguments, which are
Speaker 2: essentially about trying to get right with the broken places
Speaker 2: in our history and ourselves and our families and our country,
Speaker 2: that was something that woke me up a great deal.
Speaker 2: And so that's one thing. It's a place for recovering
Speaker 2: things that have been left out or to the side.
Speaker 2: And I think all of my books so far have
Speaker 2: a way of doing some kind of digging or excavation
Speaker 2: with things that had been left out or left to
Speaker 2: the side or don't sit right. And you know, I
Speaker 2: was talking about all of this kind of feeling of
Speaker 2: returning to California, and I'll just say it like the
Speaker 2: most gracious way I can. You know, I attended a
Speaker 2: very imperfectly desegregated school district. The I mean that is
Speaker 2: a gracious way of saying like, I grew up in
Speaker 2: the presence of like gross inequities and violences that were
Speaker 2: happening around me, and I didn't have the language to
Speaker 2: understand what they were or what was happening, or exactly
Speaker 2: why or how. And I'm not even sure we ever do.
Speaker 2: But I think that sense that we need to explain
Speaker 2: the places from which we came, or that we want
Speaker 2: to reach out and look into the things that we
Speaker 2: didn't understand before and that we need to understand. And
Speaker 2: poetry is just such a powerful way of having tools
Speaker 2: for giving voice. So I think that's kind of what
Speaker 2: I mean by memory and reckoning.
Speaker 3: For sure.
Speaker 1: For sure, there's something that you said that I really loved.
Speaker 1: It was this idea that memory is What did you say?
Speaker 1: It said you basically may note that memory is. People
Speaker 1: want you to remember things the way they remembered it, right, Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: This idea that we are, you know, our own perspective
Speaker 1: on the world and our own history and our own
Speaker 1: culture is what really uh ingrains itself in us to
Speaker 1: create those memories.
Speaker 2: No, I love that.
Speaker 1: I love that. So let's move on a bit right now,
Speaker 1: let's talk about one of your widely knowmeworks, work in Days,
Speaker 1: which was one of New York Times Best Poetry Books
Speaker 1: of twenty sixteen. Tell me a little bit about, you know,
Speaker 1: to receive an honor like that, I mean, tell me.
Speaker 3: Kind of what you know.
Speaker 1: A lot of people that listen to this show always ask,
Speaker 1: you know, ask the person, ask the poet how they.
Speaker 3: How they even began a career in writing.
Speaker 1: I think so many people want to write poetry, So
Speaker 1: many people write poetry. A lot of people don't see
Speaker 1: it as a career, right for a numerous myriad of reasons,
Speaker 1: money making, economic, cultural, right.
Speaker 3: You know, being an artist is not an easy life.
Speaker 1: Tell us, like a little bit about, I mean, to
Speaker 1: receive such an honor for was a very special piece,
Speaker 1: I'm sure to you. What does that you know, looking
Speaker 1: back in twenty sixteens. Even now, what is that now?
Speaker 1: Kind of when you look back on I'm sure, what
Speaker 1: was a wild ride for that release?
Speaker 3: What does it mean now?
Speaker 1: And what does it what does it feel like?
Speaker 3: Still?
Speaker 2: Well, that book, Work in Days was a really special book.
Speaker 2: It came out of a really special time. I mentioned
Speaker 2: that I'd been kind of scrapping it together. In Brooklyn,
Speaker 2: I worked, you know, I worked as a waitress in
Speaker 2: a funeral parlor that I worked as a waitress in
Speaker 2: a restaurant that had been a funeral parlor. I wrote
Speaker 2: pr on the side, I wrote jacket copy for books.
Speaker 2: I taught a little bit, and I was hustling the
Speaker 2: hustle and a lot of us do in this crazy
Speaker 2: gig economy, this kind of thankless crazy gig economy that
Speaker 2: is super late capitalism or whatever we're going to call
Speaker 2: it right now. And I received for the first time,
Speaker 2: you know, a major fellowship, which was this fellowship to
Speaker 2: go live at the Amy Clampett House in Western Massachusetts.
Speaker 2: It's way out in Lenox, It's right by where Tanglewood
Speaker 2: is and they usually give six months fellowships. And for
Speaker 2: some reason it was a complicated year. I just they
Speaker 2: gave me the whole year to sit in this house
Speaker 2: of this poet who also had a hard life, but
Speaker 2: she had left she'd you know, want a MacArthur and
Speaker 2: left her house for other poets to write in. And
Speaker 2: this is a gift, right, this little oasis that happen.
Speaker 2: So for an entire year I had housing and a
Speaker 2: really good stipend, and in fact, I knew I'd have
Speaker 2: more time on my hands than I could really productively
Speaker 2: use because I've always been a gardener, and gardening is
Speaker 2: one of the things that I do as a kind
Speaker 2: of like practice. I called them to see if there'd
Speaker 2: be any community gardens up there, and they were like, well,
Speaker 2: it's nice that you want to come to this rural area,
Speaker 2: but we don't have community gardens. We have farms. Would
Speaker 2: you like to work on a farm? And so I
Speaker 2: said okay, And I found a three acre community supported
Speaker 2: agriculture farm that was irrigated by the Green River that
Speaker 2: served a bunch of restaurants and eighty eight families vegetables
Speaker 2: this summer. And I called them and they were like, well,
Speaker 2: it's January. You can show up in like March, sure, April.
Speaker 2: As soon as the earth melts and then they'll be
Speaker 2: work to do. And I signed on and it was
Speaker 2: crazy because you know, at first there wasn't any work
Speaker 2: to do because it was frozen. And then the very
Speaker 2: first work was literally bending down, you know, old school
Speaker 2: style and pulling stones out of the field. And then
Speaker 2: you know, the next work was coddling these little starts
Speaker 2: inside this greenhouse and they literally sat on electric blankets.
Speaker 2: They were in a greenhouse with electric plugged in electric
Speaker 2: blankets to warm them up, to get them ready to go.
Speaker 2: And then just as the leaves started coming out, that
Speaker 2: same week that the leaves come out, you put the
Speaker 2: first lettuces in the ground, and there was such this
Speaker 2: intense worry. Then you know, what if there's one more storm,
Speaker 2: or what if it's suddenly too hot? Like I I
Speaker 2: felt so intensely aware of the fragility of the enterprise
Speaker 2: of farming, which is the enterprise of getting us food.
Speaker 2: And so it was this year that I had off
Speaker 2: of normal hustle and to do like deep thinking and
Speaker 2: deep work.
Speaker 3: And I just.
Speaker 2: I want to say that I really, you know, you
Speaker 2: feel sort of guilty or something like everybody else is
Speaker 2: out doing their hustle, and I had this gift of
Speaker 2: a year. But it was a year where I could
Speaker 2: be really watchful sort of on behalf of big questions,
Speaker 2: on behalf of the culture. And I still love that
Speaker 2: book and I've never I haven't had that kind of
Speaker 2: time since. Then by the end of the year, I
Speaker 2: was becoming a parent, and you know, then I went
Speaker 2: back to like again, the juggling the gig economies of
Speaker 2: late capitalism and childcare and you know so, but I
Speaker 2: would just say the fact that I was given that
Speaker 2: time and that it was honored was a huge deal,
Speaker 2: and it made me really understand the need for deep
Speaker 2: space that like if where there can be spaces for
Speaker 2: artists to have that time to go deep, like I sow.
Speaker 2: I would love for every I would love for every
Speaker 2: maker in America to be able to apply for like
Speaker 2: long fellowships, to be able to just really go think,
Speaker 2: think more unconstrainedly.
Speaker 1: You know, you make such a great point test that
Speaker 1: idea of I was just I was doing a panel
Speaker 1: the other day for a mental health show and we
Speaker 1: had talked about this idea of just being able to.
Speaker 3: Not create, not you know, create produce.
Speaker 1: A lot of us feel a genuine guilt when you
Speaker 1: just sit back and maybe not do and produce right
Speaker 1: because of like you had mentioned capitalism right though day
Speaker 1: to day grin, it's one of those things, yeah, that
Speaker 1: that kind of idea to give yourself that sacred time
Speaker 1: to really just.
Speaker 3: Just be right.
Speaker 1: Like I know, even people, let's say, even they pay
Speaker 1: for a holiday and vacation, they feel guilty about just
Speaker 1: sleeping all day. Can you imagine that you feel guilty
Speaker 1: after you just paid for flights and hotels.
Speaker 3: To go all the way across the world, right, And
Speaker 3: it's this kind of idea.
Speaker 1: We feel, this kind of a nested me to just
Speaker 1: kind of create, create and produce, produce. And it's one
Speaker 1: of those things, like you said, Yeah, if we could
Speaker 1: just really give that to every single human being, every
Speaker 1: soul on this earth, the opportunity to just just be right.
Speaker 1: Talk a little bit about how how how important do
Speaker 1: you think that that concept is though to especially to
Speaker 1: someone that's an artist, or even just for just all
Speaker 1: of people, how important is it to just kind of
Speaker 1: just be like you said, that space, that's something you
Speaker 1: clearly look back on fondly, that time that you were
Speaker 1: given to just create or just really just stand still
Speaker 1: and just be a part.
Speaker 2: You bring up such a great point about how are
Speaker 2: we supposed to value rest in this culture? And I
Speaker 2: actually have this project right now about reading books about rest.
Speaker 2: And one of the people who's writing about rest is
Speaker 2: this woman Jenny O'Dell who has a book about how
Speaker 2: to Do Nothing. There's another book woman named Tricia Hersey
Speaker 2: who she's written this book about the ministry of napping.
Speaker 2: And she realized that she felt like she had to
Speaker 2: produce every moment and that she was sort of like
Speaker 2: working herself into sort of a deep exhaustion, and that
Speaker 2: she would find that rest five minutes, ten minutes, twenty
Speaker 2: minutes was this way of actually like honoring herself, her ancestors,
Speaker 2: her spiritual wellbeing, and a way of like fighting back
Speaker 2: against this notion that we have to like monetize every minute.
Speaker 2: Another book is called Rest by Alex Sujung Kim Peng,
Speaker 2: and a thing that's amazing in it is that he
Speaker 2: actually kind of quantifies that some of the people who
Speaker 2: are able to be the most creative and productive, we
Speaker 2: focus on their productivity, but if you look at their lives,
Speaker 2: they also have patterns that allow more rest. And I
Speaker 2: talked to him recently, and he was like, all work
Speaker 2: is creative work. You know, nursing is creative work, Teaching
Speaker 2: is creative work. Anything that requires firefighting is creative work.
Speaker 2: And that anything that requires human discernment is something that
Speaker 2: should be done with a balance of resting. And what
Speaker 2: would it be like if we really took it seriously
Speaker 2: that we were going to be better off all of us, healthier, happier,
Speaker 2: living longer, but also more in touch with our creative
Speaker 2: beings if we just gave ourselves more rest. And he's
Speaker 2: the kind of guy. This is a guy who gets
Speaker 2: up at five in the morning to write. But but
Speaker 2: but but he he takes twenty minute naps after lunch
Speaker 2: every day, which I just thought, what is it, What
Speaker 2: is it that I could give myself? You know, what
Speaker 2: is it that each of us could give ourselves in
Speaker 2: the middle of this crazy life that we're all doing
Speaker 2: with this all of this hustle.
Speaker 3: Is there a.
Speaker 2: Way to create boundaries where there's space for reverie, there's
Speaker 2: space for dreaming, and honestly, there's space for naps.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, you know I love that.
Speaker 1: I love that phrase though. I love that all work
Speaker 1: is some sort of creative work. I really I liken
Speaker 1: myself to that phrase. Even just I would say, I mean,
Speaker 1: even just the arrangement of how you you know, arrange
Speaker 1: your toothpaste with your toothbrush in the morning, or how
Speaker 1: you even decide to wash your body in the morning.
Speaker 1: I mean, those are all just creative works of the
Speaker 1: spirit and soul. I do believe, at least now you
Speaker 1: arrange your dinner plate.
Speaker 3: No, I love that.
Speaker 5: I'm gonna go ahead taking flight in those things, right,
Speaker 5: like take having time to have pleasure in your body,
Speaker 5: having making the space for the joy that is available
Speaker 5: to you is I mean, ross Que calls it a
Speaker 5: defiant act, right, it is.
Speaker 2: It is so important, and that that's like this place
Speaker 2: where we renew ourselves and we get ready to look
Speaker 2: at all of the difficult things, you know, and to
Speaker 2: live into some of these these you know, really painful
Speaker 2: challenges come our way every day.
Speaker 3: One thousand percent.
Speaker 1: Absolutely finding the pleasure in the in the docile and
Speaker 1: the mundane.
Speaker 3: Absolutely. I love that.
Speaker 1: Moving on a bit, I mean, test has been such
Speaker 1: a great interview thus far.
Speaker 3: I want to talk about this is.
Speaker 1: A very interesting uh spick I found. So you're developing
Speaker 1: the stage play of American photographer Dorothea Lang tell us
Speaker 1: a little bit about what that project will be looking
Speaker 1: like and what are you looking forward to it?
Speaker 3: Then how did this even kind of conceive together?
Speaker 1: So?
Speaker 2: Oh, so we talked about Alsto. We talked about how
Speaker 2: I didn't think I could live here. Again, I didn't.
Speaker 2: I thought I thought I was too cool for this place,
Speaker 2: and I wanted to be gone. Yeah, and when I
Speaker 2: came back, I had a small child, and the thing
Speaker 2: that you can do with a small child is you
Speaker 2: can walk around the block with the child on your
Speaker 2: chest or in the st again and again, hoping that
Speaker 2: they will go to sleep, or just soothing them down.
Speaker 2: So I'm walking by the bungalows of my childhood that
Speaker 2: I had left a long time before, and thinking, in
Speaker 2: what way can I make something of this experience? And
Speaker 2: then I realized through a little bit of research, that
Speaker 2: Dorothea Lang had photographed this town of bungalows in the
Speaker 2: you know, in the late thirties and early forties. And
Speaker 2: I got really intrigued, like what did she see here?
Speaker 2: And at the same time, you're a Californian, you know
Speaker 2: that the kind of visual stuff that she documented in
Speaker 2: the thirties and forties of people living intense and extremely
Speaker 2: fragile and precarious housing. That is something that is part
Speaker 2: of our visual landscape everywhere in California, and that the
Speaker 2: feeling of living in the presence of unsheltered people or
Speaker 2: people with marginal shelter has become endemic in these cities.
Speaker 2: And I just kept thinking, was it Dorothea Lane just
Speaker 2: here photographing this very problem, and didn't it seem to
Speaker 2: go away or change? And why are we living in
Speaker 2: the presence of She's the person who's taught me something
Speaker 2: about what it is to look at this situation with
Speaker 2: care and with dignity, And I got fascinated. I went
Speaker 2: and looked at her notebooks. I ended up driving all
Speaker 2: the places she'd driven in California in the thirties and forties.
Speaker 2: I ended up writing her letters from the present. And
Speaker 2: her notebooks have these cool, staccato, interesting, fabulous like pop
Speaker 2: pop things that she gathered alongside of the road, like
Speaker 2: how much gas cost, how much beans cost? All that
Speaker 2: stuff about getting by. She was a documentarian of the
Speaker 2: art of getting by. And she also had these haunting phrases,
Speaker 2: like people would say things to her like, this country's
Speaker 2: a hard country. When you die, you're dead, that's all
Speaker 2: m And I just thought, yeah, this country is a
Speaker 2: hard country, you know. And it ended up being this
Speaker 2: collage poem of all these voices, voices, my voice to
Speaker 2: Dorothea Lang, Dorothea Lang's notebook voice, all the voices on
Speaker 2: the side of the road, and less like an exact
Speaker 2: theater play and more like this kind of symphony of voices,
Speaker 2: and the poem is like a collage of voices that
Speaker 2: all talk almost past each other in this You have
Speaker 2: to believe me. I think it builds. I mean, I
Speaker 2: think it's more it's kind of musical. And somebody said,
Speaker 2: what would it be like if you actually had the
Speaker 2: voices speaking, like if you made it into a play,
Speaker 2: And this idea grew. A wonderful director approached me and
Speaker 2: working with a projectionist who is creating this back this
Speaker 2: kind of moving interactive backdrop of projected Lang images. So
Speaker 2: it's a little bit like a surrounding immersive experience and
Speaker 2: you'll sit there and it will be like Lang and
Speaker 2: the poet and the people on the side of the
Speaker 2: road are calling out to you, and meanwhile her images
Speaker 2: are going by and you know, it's going to be
Speaker 2: the ninetieth anniversary of the Works Progress Administration, which was
Speaker 2: the government organization that funded her work, in the one
Speaker 2: hundred and thirtieth anniversary of her birth. And my hope
Speaker 2: is that a consortium of California museums is going to
Speaker 2: come together and do this sort of re engagement of Lang.
Speaker 2: And I guess the question is, here's a woman that
Speaker 2: photographed shelterlessness, climate change, climate migration, and all of those
Speaker 2: issues are with us today. Yeah, what can she teach us?
Speaker 3: What can we.
Speaker 2: Learn about ourselves by re engaging her? And also I
Speaker 2: guess the bigger, biggest question is like what could art
Speaker 2: do to be part of the repair? She was on
Speaker 2: a government sponsored journey that had to do with all
Speaker 2: kinds of gestures to buttress America, to build bridges, to
Speaker 2: build high schools, to build oral histories, to let zorniil
Speaker 2: Hirshston and Ralph Ellison have a paycheck while they did
Speaker 2: amazing work on behalf of our country. And she was
Speaker 2: part of that. And is are we at a different
Speaker 2: moment where we need to talk about how can art
Speaker 2: be part of the conversations towards repair that we need
Speaker 2: to be having like yesterday now tomorrow, and so to me,
Speaker 2: I think part of getting her voice out there and
Speaker 2: her images out there is to help us ask ourselves
Speaker 2: now what should we do?
Speaker 3: Absolutely?
Speaker 1: Yeah, now it's very that sounds like a very passion project.
Speaker 1: And not wishing you all the best. You have a
Speaker 1: potentative year in which you hope to see that.
Speaker 2: Come to life fall of twenty twenty five.
Speaker 1: Awesome, all right, we'll definitely be looking forward to that
Speaker 1: amazing legacy of laying all right, well tests. This has
Speaker 1: been such a great, great, great conversation and for folks
Speaker 1: that are wondering, you know again, check out all tests
Speaker 1: is amazing work.
Speaker 3: I'll test before we go.
Speaker 1: We have one final question for you on the poll
Speaker 1: Speaks podcast.
Speaker 3: Tell me why do you need to get your words out?
Speaker 2: Because they feel itchy. If I don't, they actually like
Speaker 2: hurt on the inside of my brain, I will wake
Speaker 2: up and I'll be like that is like it feels
Speaker 2: like having like a little do you know when you
Speaker 2: listen to like get like an earworm, you know, like
Speaker 2: a little bit of song and it's just stuck in
Speaker 2: your head. That's kind of how it starts for me,
Speaker 2: and you know, in a way nobody cares if you
Speaker 2: write a poem or not, like you could just take
Speaker 2: a break from a poem. But I don't know. I
Speaker 2: think there you are suddenly in the presence of this
Speaker 2: thing inside you that wants to be heard, and then
Speaker 2: you start to say yes and you give it space
Speaker 2: and literally though like I will feel like I have
Speaker 2: something knocking around and I just have to get it
Speaker 2: down and get it out, and that in that first
Speaker 2: moment when I get it out onto paper, I really
Speaker 2: don't care if it becomes a great poem or not.
Speaker 2: I just had an itchy feeling of lots of language
Speaker 2: in the in the you know, on the side underneath
Speaker 2: my eyebrow or something, and it's like I gotta drain that,
Speaker 2: all right, all.
Speaker 3: Right, I'll set her itch. That's what it is. That's
Speaker 3: why she must get her words up, all right. Thank
Speaker 3: you so much.
Speaker 1: Tests Now before we end and do tell us where
Speaker 1: can folks check out.
Speaker 3: Off your amazing work.
Speaker 1: Any links for websites, social media, and just tell us
Speaker 1: what is coming up next for you for folks to
Speaker 1: look into for twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2: Okay, well, I'm at Tessathon on Instagram. I would love
Speaker 2: to connect with you there. I'm a little bit on Facebook.
Speaker 2: I am no longer much into X and I haven't
Speaker 2: dabbled in the other things yet, so I like to
Speaker 2: keep it like a little rosy and positive on Instagram.
Speaker 2: It does not you know. That is like the place
Speaker 2: that I probably hang out the most. I just edited
Speaker 2: a book of contemporary gardening poems or an Era of
Speaker 2: Climate Change. It's called Leaning Toward Light Poems for Gardens
Speaker 2: and the hands that tend them. If you are a gardener,
Speaker 2: if you love the way microbes and pollinators and flowers
Speaker 2: conspire to make our lives more beautiful, if you believe
Speaker 2: in the radical abundance the plants can give, this might
Speaker 2: be a book for you. If your mama is that person,
Speaker 2: and it might be a good book for her. And
Speaker 2: I just finished up a big tour, so this summer
Speaker 2: I'm laying low working on new poems. But I'll be
Speaker 2: out again in the world in the fall. And I
Speaker 2: would love to meet you. And I'm really happy to
Speaker 2: be able to talk to fellow writers over this podcast medium.
Speaker 1: Absolutely l Tests would love to meet you as well,
Speaker 1: and everyone check out All Tests is amazing work.
Speaker 3: We'll have her links in the description.
Speaker 1: No matter what platform you're listening to this amazing podcast,
Speaker 1: her links will be in the description box down below.
Speaker 1: Our tests were so honored, Prilegion, thankful that you were
Speaker 1: able to embrace us your amazing presence and words and
Speaker 1: have this amazing conversation.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for being a guest on the
Speaker 3: Post Speaks podcast.
Speaker 2: Test Amanda, it was totally the joy was mine. Thank
Speaker 2: you so much for this afternoon.
Speaker 1: Absolutely all right everyone again, check out all Tests is
Speaker 1: amazing work, and check out the Pole Speaks podcast wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to podcast all right, the live one