Speaker 1: Hello, this is Tony Keith Junior. I'm looking for Arrow.
Speaker 2: Tony, you found him. I am looking forward to sharing
a conversation with you again, sir.
Speaker 1: How are you? I am fantastic. When Anna said that
I was gonna be speaking to you again, I was like,
great energy, how are you fantastic?
Speaker 2: And I'm so excited that you've released another book of
verses because I brag about you so much, because I'll
tell people, especially with the younger adults, I go, you
need to go read what he's got here and understand
that you can do it too. Just be open with
your emotions.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, that's what it's about. That's what it's about.
It is the very vulnerable.
Speaker 2: But you know what's really interesting, though, Tony, this time
aroud because when I saw the title of the book,
instantly I was shot back to my childhood because when
my dad called me a knucklehead, I knew I did
something kind of stupid.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I really really thought about that when
it came to the title of this book, Arrow, Seriously
I thought about I thought about a couple of things,
but one is I.
Speaker 4: Immediately just started thinking so much about the kind of
poems that were going to be in this collection, and
so many of them were just about me, just sort
of being a black gay man in America and sort
of writing reflections on that and poems connected to that.
But I just kept thinking so much about when I
was a kid, I also was called a knucklehead. But
it was never in like a negative sense. It was
always sort of this like, you, lovable, little black boy.
You might be a little you know, you might be
a little silly, you know, maybe a little hard headed,
you know what I mean, but you are you know.
I just always received it as like something really positive.
And so I thought about, Yo, what would be a
cool title for this book, And I was like, Oh,
this is all the little knuckleheads out there, and all
the little all the little not just black boys. It
could be any person who's misunderstood, or a person who
might feel like they might not have a voice, or
someone who understands what it's like to maybe be bullied
or to be shunned right, or to be oppressed right.
And so when I wrote Knucklehead, it was like, nah,
we're going to throw some positive affirmations in here. So
there are poems about joy and purpose and falling in
love and you know freedom, which are exactly the kinds
of things that we need to be hearing right now.
Speaker 1: Yes we do, Yes, we do.
Speaker 2: You say that when you set out to write this book,
were these poems already in motion or is it there?
You said, Okay, I'm going to write a book and
then I'm going to create the poetry.
Speaker 1: This is super great.
Speaker 4: So the truth is the poems already existed even before
how the Boogieman became a poet did so, just like
in Boogieman became a poet, I share that I used
to write poetry to.
Speaker 1: Myself as a kid. I still do that to this day.
Speaker 4: Arrow, And so the poems that are in Knucklehead are
poems that I've been writing to myself over the last
thirty years. There's a poem in Knucklehead that I wrote
when I was probably like.
Speaker 1: Fifteen or sixteen. I still love that poem.
Speaker 4: And then there's some that I wrote in like two
thousand and five, some in twenty ten, some a couple
of years ago. But they're a collection of that. So, yeah,
I still I still believe in that practice of poetry,
to discover poetry, to liberate poetry, to find freedom. Yeah,
it's still a jam. So those poems are already done.
It's just that when I wrote How the Boogeyman Became
a Poet, and I learned so much about my readers
and my audience, I was like, oh, I think I
now know how I want to adjust Knucklehead so that
it looks different. So which is why it structured in
a series of love letters. So they're like five love
letters inside of Knucklehead that encapsulate the poetry collection. But
I write two little knucklehead. You know, when I sat
down thinking about this poetry collection, I was like, I
gotta put together piece of the I gotta do I
can do this, I can do this. The last thing
I say about that is the cover. It says knucklehead,
but there's the letter E and has like a little ye.
So's here's the thing with the E. People should know.
This is a couple of years ago. I was doing
workshops with around masculinity and hip hop with a group
of high school black boys from washing DC. It was
a summer program there in at Howard University, and I
told him I wrote this book called How the Bully
Man Became a Poet. But then the next year I
got this book coming up on knucklehead, right, So I
write knucklehead on the board, but I misspell it. I
forget the letter E and go back to the whiteboard
to go in there.
Speaker 1: I know.
Speaker 4: The fella's like, nah, man, keep it like that, Keep
it like that. And I thought to myself, like, this
would be a great tribute, a great shot to love.
So the E that's on the cover is messed up
on purpose, and it's because it's a little knucklehead.
Speaker 1: It told me to keep it back.
Speaker 2: That explains the symbol beneath it that you need to
put this in here.
Speaker 1: Yep. Yeah. The means is the means something deep in
the book. I'm like, well, it's not that. No, it's not.
Speaker 4: You won't find the E like the book, but the cover,
you know. So I think for me, that's what it
was about representation. It was like, Yo, I hear you,
I see you. I see you so much that I'm
willing to even keep mistakes I made, you.
Speaker 1: Know, on my book cover, you know.
Speaker 2: So, yeah, the book that I want to read from
you one day. It goes along with what my first
book was. And because I set out to write a
thousand pieces of poetry, and call it one man's twenty
one thoughts. My problem was when I went back in
there to get the poetry, it was the stuff around
the poetry where I was explaining it that became the storyline.
So I would love to read a book that you
explain to us what this poetry is about, because I'll
bet you go deep, dude.
Speaker 1: I do.
Speaker 4: I don't because my shout outs to my agent, Anny Waying,
and I should hand and he's amazing. She told me,
She says, told me, you know, it's almost like Boogieyman
is like the flesh, and Knucklehead is the bones, right,
and so if you were to read Boogeyman, you'll see.
So these two books they work in conversation. I should
have mentioned that these two go together. So there are
there are stories and how the Boogeyman became a poet
about be being bullied, about me dealing with love, about
my father, about you know, relationships, those there are poems
that show up in Knucklehead that directly connected some of
those moments. So you know, I talk about being bullied
in playgrounds in Boogieman, there's poems and Knucklehead about being
bullied on playgrounds. So Essentially you kind of get that
with Boogieman. If you read Boogieman, you'll see the context
for all of the poems with the Knucklehead, not all
of them, but most of them. Some of the ones
in Knucklehead also now deal with the fact that I'm
now married gay black man in America. So I have
love poems about me and my husband and there. So
that's probably a story to write at some point too.
But yeah, you know, I think explaining the poetry for me,
it's just a matter of I just need readers to
know that these poems were not written honestly for the
sake of public hed. I wasn't trying to publish a
book with these poems. These poems were how I was
just dealing with my world, how I was trying to
understand what's happening, how I feel. You know, when people
say the word sagged and get like just like how
it affects me.
Speaker 2: You know, you know one of the things that that
I love about your writing, and kudos to your editor.
Mark Twain wrote in his one hundredth anniversary of the
of his autobiography, We've got to get to our original
and authentic accent as writers and you are authentic in
this book.
Speaker 4: Thank you, Thank you that I appreciate that I'm there,
because that was a bit of a challenge. It's something
that I've often wrestled with, especially as an academic, you know,
dear world. Yes, I have a PhD, so I can
do all the academic peer of writing.
Speaker 1: Things, but I don't. I don't speak like that existly.
Speaker 4: So it's like, yeah, So it's like it's a matter
of like, how do I write something that is palatable
to a bunch of different kinds of readers, but also
that affirms the variations of black speech. And you know,
I write a knucklehead. I mean, I write a bookyman,
about how teachers would you know, get White teachers mostly
would get on.
Speaker 1: Me and say to you need to learn to speak,
speak better, enunciate, write better.
Speaker 4: And I was like, you know, for knucklehead, Nah, I'm
gona Nope, I'm gonna.
Speaker 1: Write this exactly how I speak.
Speaker 2: You know, Like that's wow, Oh my god, Tony, you
gotta come back to this show anytime in the future.
Speaker 1: You know that door is going to be opening arrow seriously, anytime,
please do man. You know I love you, dude, I
do love you back, I really do.
Speaker 2: Will you be brilliant today?
Speaker 1: Okay sir? All right you too. You take Carol. Thanks peace,