January 5, 2024 • 42 mins
I talk with Diné poet Kinsale Drake about Natalie Diaz's poem "They Don't Love You Like I Love You," when about Kinsale's poem "(Re)location." We talk about platonic love, Indigenous writing, line breaks, and scale. Afterward, Kinsale has the most positive response yet to learning what the game is. This episode is sponsored by an old man trying to sound young.
Also mentioned:
- Simon Ortiz
- Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”
- Yeah Yeah Yeahs's "Maps"
- Beyoncé, "Hold Up"
- Father Knows Best
- A great tweet
- Natalie Diaz, “My Brother at 3 A.M.”
- Layli Long Soldier, “38” & Whereas
- Livvy Rizzed Up Baby Gronk, explained
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to the Talking Poem Podcast.
(00:07):
I'm your host, Charlie Green.
On each episode, I invite a guest to bring in any poem they'd like to talk about for
any reason.
We'll talk about what delights us, what excites us, maybe what frustrates us, and we'll follow
the poem and the conversation wherever they turn.
Today we'll also talk about a poem by our guest, and afterward we'll have a little bit
of silliness and a poetry game.
Today I am absolutely delighted to have as my guest, Kinsale Drake, who has brought in
(00:30):
Natalie Diaz's poem, They Don't Love You Like I Love You.
Kinsale is a 23-year-old Dinae poet, editor, playwright.
There are a lot of slashes there, and I imagine there will be many more as she continues,
whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in poetry, best new poets, poets.org, Poetry
Northwest, The Slowdown, and elsewhere.
Her first book, The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket, won the 2023 National Poetry Series, and will
(00:56):
be published by the University of Georgia Press in 2024.
Congratulations.
She also teaches mental health and storytelling programming for Native youth and is the founder
of the NDN Girls Book Club.
She graduated from Yale just about a year ago in fall 2022.
I could go on listing your accomplishments, but I'd like you to be able to get a word
in edgewise.
(01:16):
Kinsale, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for being here.
Thank you for having me, and thank you for the lovely introduction.
Yeah, my pleasure.
So I have a couple of different questions I want to ask.
I'm actually curious to hear you talk a little about the NDN Girls Book Club.
Yeah.
So NDN Girls Book Club is, I've been doing workshops, and specifically poetry workshops
(01:38):
for the past seven years since I served as a national student poet.
And it was combining my love of teaching with my love of indigenous literatures, and basically
how like strategizing how we could get free books out to Native youth across the nation.
So we work with tribal libraries and indigenous booksellers to financially support them.
(02:00):
And then it started off just like very grassroots.
I was quite literally mailing care packages from my parents' place.
Wow.
Yeah, like a year ago, and it just kind of caught fire and had a lot of support turn
up.
Now we have three team members, and we have been to a couple different tribal nations,
(02:22):
but I'm very happy with the work that we do.
Yeah, it's exciting to see so much love for Native literature.
Oh, that's really fantastic.
I always love when something like that just starts out of someone's house and gets that
kind of momentum.
That's really fantastic.
I also kind of want to ask, and part of this, I guess, is professional curiosity, but you
(02:43):
got a degree in English, one of your two degrees from Yale is in English.
I'm just kind of curious what the study of poetry was like there for you.
Oh yeah, it was, I mean, very traditional.
I think if you think of an Ivy League school as you teach at Cornell, like, and you think
of poetry, it's very much learning Anglo poets.
(03:04):
It's very Europe-centric.
And my field of study, I think, was definitely a labor of love.
We didn't have any Native faculty in the English department.
We actually didn't, I don't think we had any tenured professors of color in the English
department at the time.
So it was kind of funny because my dean actually, I was just going to be an ethnic studies major.
(03:26):
I thought about going to law school or majoring in and studying indigenous law and policy.
And then my dean pulled me aside and showed me my transcript.
Like I think this was junior year and she was like, hey, like you're almost done with
the English major.
Like she's just double major.
And I was like, dang, like even though I thought that I didn't have a place for myself in this
(03:51):
scene at Yale, it was pretty obvious that it was something that I loved to do and talk
about even if I necessarily wasn't reflected in the coursework or the readings.
And so I just, I love poetry and I love books and I love writing essays about literature.
So I think it kind of just happened naturally.
I think that's a frustrating experience for a lot of students.
(04:14):
It's not as stark as that having no non-white tenured faculty at Cornell.
But I think what ends up happening is that there's this tendency to, for a lot of people,
teach only what they have learned.
And even with canons shifting since the 90s and even a little earlier, there's just not
a lot of effort to get started for a lot of people reading outside of basically an all
(04:41):
white or mostly white canon.
I know it was certainly the case for me and it's something I'm still trying to work on
in my own teaching is thinking about who am I teaching to and what am I teaching from?
And one of the reasons I wanted to have you on is because one, I really, really like your
poems and two, for the podcast as well to branch out a little bit.
I think there's, so far I'm very happy with how it's going, but it's a little wider that
(05:05):
I want it to be, which is how I think of myself as well.
Well, let's go ahead and turn to the Natalie Diaz poem.
Any preface you want to give before you read the poem?
Natalie Diaz is one of my favorite poets.
She's a Mojave poet and she's enrolled in the Hilo River tribe, I believe.
(05:29):
And she is just amazing.
She won the Pulitzer recently, just a phenomenal poet and a big influence for my book, especially.
I think you can hear that in the piece that I wanted to share.
So Natalie is a rock star and that's all I really want to say.
So if you're not familiar with her work, definitely pick up one of her books.
(05:50):
I totally agree.
I believe Anti-Colonial Love Poem is her most, or Post-Colonial Love Poem.
Yeah, Post-Colonial Love Poem won the Pulitzer.
Well go ahead and take it away whenever you're ready.
Sure.
They Don't Love You Like I Love You by Natalie Diaz.
My mother said this to me long before Beyonce lifted the lyrics from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
(06:13):
And what my mother meant by Don't Stray was that she knew all about it.
The way it feels to need someone to love you.
Someone not your kind.
Someone white.
Someone, some many who live because so many of mine have not.
And further, live on top of those of ours who don't.
(06:35):
I'll say, say, say.
I'll say, say, say.
What is the United States if not a clot of clouds?
If not spilled milk or blood?
If not the place we once were in the millions?
America is maps.
Maps are ghosts.
White and layered with people and places I see through.
(06:58):
My mother has always known best.
Knew that I'd been begging for them to lay my face against their white laps to be held
in something more than the loud light of their projectors of themselves they flicker.
Sepia or blue all over my body.
All this time I thought my mother said, wait, as in, give them a little more time to know
(07:23):
your worth.
And really she said, wait, meaning heft, preparing me for the yoke of myself.
The beast of my country's burdens, which is less worse than my country's plow.
Yes, when my mother said they don't love you like I love you, she meant, Natalie, that
(07:45):
doesn't mean you aren't good.
Oh, thank you so much.
I'm so glad you brought this poem in.
Why did you, why did you choose this poem?
I adore this poem for a number of reasons.
I think because my collection pulled a lot from music.
This was a really great example.
I think when I was learning how to lace in lyrics and find different meanings and also
(08:11):
acknowledging different iterations of songs and how they mean different things to people
through generations.
I think generational love was also a really, I mean, poignant part of this poem.
I teach this poem when I teach the poetics of platonic love to students.
And so it's looking beyond romantic, heterosexual love, like what kinds of love are really healthy
(08:35):
for us and as native people specifically or native young people, what do we see in poetry
that we can write about or honor?
And so this is a really interesting poem because it loops in history and it has this grand
scale of talking about maps and ghosts and genocide, but at the same time it is a love
(08:56):
poem, which I think is so fantastic.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Not only do I love that it gets the Yeah Yeah Yeahs song stuck in my head, but also the
fact that it has that scale, that it moves from something very, very intimate like this
platonic love.
And I'll be curious, I'm curious to hear more about the poetics of platonic love, but also
(09:16):
the fact that the individual experience and the sense of love is rooted in place and is
rooted in all these horrible histories and that self-image and desire kind of comes out
of these histories.
And so there is desire and the platonic love here, the idea of the way it feels to need
(09:37):
someone to love you, someone not your kind.
And I love the way those lines move, the way it feels to need.
And I listened to a recording of her reading it last night and she hits that the way it
feels to need really hard.
And it's this mix of that just interpersonal desire for platonic love and then a desire
(09:57):
that she's talking about, the desire to be loved by someone not your kind.
I'm curious just to hear about a little bit about the poetics of platonic love.
It may take us away from the poem a bit, but I want to know more about it.
Yeah, it's a really fun workshop.
I just did it at the University of Utah with some native students and faculty, but it's
(10:17):
really cool to talk about love.
It always seems like it's something so universal.
It's so poetic.
I mean, so many poems are about love.
But in terms of indigenous poetics, there's a lot of love poems we had and we have, and
I think Natalie Diaz is a great example of this, her entire collection, that extended
(10:39):
things beyond romantic or traditional conceptions of love.
So that could be writing a poem to one partner who is of the opposite sex and it just being
romantic and also I think impacted by gender roles, of course, how you write about the
person.
And so with this poem, for example, we see so many different forms of love.
(11:01):
We talk about generational love as a form of non-romantic love.
There's love between a person and the land.
There's love between non-human beings and human beings.
There's love between our creators or those that we honor and our ancestors.
We have ancestral love.
There's things that are so important to us, just as important to us as romantic partnerships.
(11:24):
And so it's kind of a re-centering of those things when we write poems.
And in a way, it's they like my students usually say, it's like a cool way of decolonizing
the love poem by re-centering relationships that have always been important to us.
So that's kind of the focus of the workshop.
And we talk about Simon Ortiz usually.
We talk about Natalie Diaz and we have all these great examples of love.
(11:48):
And then we challenge each other to write sort of like a letter to a thing, a place,
a person that matters to us that is not necessarily a partner, a romantic partner.
So that's basically how we do that workshop, but it's always really fun.
And it's really cool to see how the poets realize like there is a place for those relationships
(12:11):
in poetry and there's ways of writing about them that demonstrate this intimacy beyond,
you know, again, traditional conceptions of love.
That's really fantastic.
And bringing it back to the poem, it's not just the complexities of those loves or the
different kinds of loves, but even within those loves, there's something complex.
(12:32):
As a mother daughter relationship, I love the last sentence.
She meant Natalie, that doesn't mean you aren't good.
Double negative ends up having that kind of, there's something, it's not cutting, but the
negatives emphasize themselves a lot.
And it's not a simple relationship, that kind of platonic mother daughter love.
(12:55):
And then the rest of them are as well preparing me for the yoke of myself, the beasts of my
country's burdens.
And so there's this, for me, there's this sense in which it's that love and that there's
a complicated dynamic even within each of those kinds of love.
Yeah, there's a heavy love.
And also at the end, it reminds me of, I want to say that poem is by Maggie Nelson, but
(13:18):
the poem that goes, you don't have to crawl on your knees.
I'm going to totally butcher it, but you know what, you might know which one I'm talking
about.
You don't have to be good is basically part of that poem.
And it reminds me a lot of this poem, this kind of Natalie, that doesn't mean you aren't
good.
Like you are also good and you don't have to conform to anything or alter yourself or
(13:42):
bend down.
I think that's the lap image is really poignant for that.
The folding of the body to be accepted and loved is really interesting.
And so I think it just has this lovely expansiveness towards the end, but also a really specific
image of like a mother reassuring the daughter of this kind of, you know, this is the right
(14:05):
way to love you and yourself.
And I don't know, I just love this poem.
So I think a lot of it really speaks for itself, which I think is fantastic about Natalie's
work.
It's just, it's like a beautiful, some so expansive and gorgeous affirmation of, you
know, you are worthy of love that is not devastating to you.
(14:31):
One, I really like what you say about the kind of straightforwardness, because I think
that's important for a poem that has this kind of scale.
And that I want to spend a second on that lapse image because it is so fantastic in
part because it embeds the intensity of that kind of desire for that kind of love.
(14:53):
And it's a moment that reinforces or creates that sense of the generational love that my
mother has always known best, which is a kind of, you know, familiar way of talking about
one's parents.
There's a terrible 1950s sitcom called Father Knows Best.
So this idea of my mother has always known best.
But then the way that she knows them, there's the great turn, knew that I'd been begging
(15:17):
for them, I feel like tells us something about the depth of the mother's knowledge and even
maybe hints at the fact that she herself had this kind of desire and knows the intensity
of this kind of desire.
You know, being a kid growing up and rebelling against your parents or thinking you know
more than your parents, I think it's always really funny when you get to a certain age.
(15:39):
For me, it was probably like 21 or 20, you know, and you realize like, oh, shit, like
they were right the whole time, you know, like, and they got to let you make your mistakes.
They got to let you, you know, do what you need to do to grow up and learn those things.
But it is really, you know, especially when they've had those kinds of, you know, experiences
of not being accepted or, you know, racist experiences, especially the pitfalls of trying
(16:05):
to appeal to whiteness, things like that, that appear in this poem.
You learn that it's the same story that they experienced, maybe different, maybe manifested
differently, but they lived through it too.
And yeah, they usually do know better.
They do know what happens eventually.
And so that's another sweet thing.
I think that is so normal between parents and children, which is that, you know, the
(16:30):
parents are ultimately right.
Or, you know, the parents are kind of like, you know, that's okay, I told you so, but
I still love you, that kind of thing.
Yeah.
My brother, one of my brothers and I, I think we're still convinced our parents don't know
best, but that's just us holding on to our childhoods a little too long.
(16:52):
I also like the something in thinking of it, I like the way you explain it in terms of
this is a common experience, and I also like the way that the poem, thinking about generational
knowledge and the way that indigenous lit and indigenous experience is talking about
a kind of communal shared knowledge a lot more than a lot of Anglo poetry, that one
(17:15):
of the things that is essential is the way in which knowledge is passed down and knowledge
is shared.
And I'm just, I like the way that gets instantiated here through thinking about America, thinking
about interpersonal relationships.
And I love that the loud light of their projectors of themselves.
I love that break on projectors.
I feel like the main way I think of the US these days is in terms of projection, like
(17:40):
anytime, anytime we voice a concern, it's because it's something we've done.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There are many examples of this.
The one that's been in my head because Henry Kissinger died not too long ago was that in
Indonesia, the US helped support a genocide because they said, well, the Soviets are going
to go around isolating and killing people.
(18:01):
And it turns out the Soviets had no interest in doing that.
That's what the US ended up doing.
But that idea of projecting themselves that they flicker, sepia or blue all over my body.
And it's such a contrast to the idea of something shared and communal.
It's about something directed to be accepted by other people.
(18:23):
And it is really, it's so those images with the US are so physical, which I think, you
know, it says something about, oh God, there's so much in this poem.
But it says something about, I mean, it is a native woman reading this poem and it's,
you know, the objectification and fetishization of the body is something that you can't separate
(18:43):
from this poem.
And ownership, I think, is that projection over the body, I can't help but think of individual
ownership, which is such a settler way of thinking about people and things and communities
and history and stories.
And you know, that one, the United States, like the white lover, like that is so singular
and individual in these poems, wanting to be accepted by someone versus, you know, the
(19:08):
chorus of the mother and the daughter that are kind of reassuring each other in a way
or affirming each other.
Yeah, absolutely.
Little things I just want to say.
So I think I said a couple episodes ago, talking about Louise Gluck, that she's one of my favorite
line breakers, I guess.
I love her line breaks.
(19:28):
And one of the things about this poem is how gutting so many of them are.
I already mentioned the way it feels to need and because those who live in that break,
someone, so many who live because so many of mine have not.
And there's that if not the place we once were, which is gutting enough in itself and
(19:51):
then in the millions, America is maps.
I just I just I'm blown away by this poem.
Yeah, I'm also a sucker for line breaks.
So that's definitely I think that's definitely why I chose it as well.
The way to the line breaks on the two weights.
So you don't exactly know what she she means until you go into that next line.
(20:11):
I love those.
And they kind of they kind of weigh the end of the line to that with that kind of pause.
They have a heaviness to them as well.
Yeah, I really like it's just so cool.
There's the weight like W.A.I.T.
And you do have to wait to begin the next line because you have to move your eyes over.
And then there's weight W.E.I.G.H.T., which is heavy on that end of the line.
(20:36):
And then you see that they mean heft.
And there is that I just love how he sounds to the poem.
It's a very hearty word.
Yeah.
And we get those italics to wait, meaning heft preparing me.
Yeah, this is great.
I also just I'm kind of amazed.
(20:57):
It's not a word bank exactly.
But I like the idea of taking the lyrics of a song like maps that doesn't actually have
that many distinct lines.
You know, it's the lyrics of it are very short compared to most songs of its length.
And yet she's still mining that for the kind of the structure of the poem or what feels
(21:17):
like the way the poem starts and what it builds out from.
So any other things you want to say or mention about this poem before we turn to yours?
I think if you haven't read it, please read it and look at all the italics.
And also, I think give a little credit to poets who are putting song lyrics in their
poems and engaging with songs.
(21:39):
I think I think it's interesting how that's sometimes discouraged.
And I think, you know, people like Natalie Diaz bring a really cool spin to something
that I think some professors don't really like as much to put it nicely.
I don't think any of us were really encouraged to use song lyrics in our poems in college.
(22:02):
So that's definitely something fun about this.
Well, I'll have a little more to say about this in a while.
But I also feel like there's and I think about this a lot in my students writing and my own
writing is how long is something going to last?
Like when do when you have some sign some sort of cultural reference or some sort of
reference to a song, you know, maps feels like it's going to last because it's lasted
(22:26):
as long as it is.
It's an incredible song.
But I think there's always I always feel like there's a risk that is a reader going to get
this and they this semester I experienced it time and again where I'm just like, what
is this thing that you're referring to?
And they all know what it is.
And they're all like, oh, this is this is common knowledge.
And I'm like, I'm 20 years older than you.
And that's both a lot older than you and not much older.
(22:50):
And so it's this question always comes this question of who are you writing for?
What can you expect a reader to know?
And I don't think there are easy answers to that for this poem.
I don't have any of that hesitation of like, oh, is this something that's going to be known?
I think in one of your poems, you referred to Baja Blast.
I think Mountain Dew Baja Blast will last just because it's radioactive.
(23:13):
I agree.
I think hopefully that's I think Baja Blast are eternal and holy.
So
you just start filling holy water with Baja Blast instead.
Baja Blast.
Yeah, there's this tweet that's like our father who gosh, what is it?
(23:34):
It's so funny.
Our father.
Oh, my gosh.
It's like it's like a it's going to haunt me until I remember it.
But it's like, holy be thy Baja Blast or something.
It's so funny.
And I actually that was what I think made me write that poem that does have Baja Blast
today because it starts off I feel God in this Taco Bell tonight.
(23:54):
Like, I just think that's I just love those.
I think Twitter plays a weird part in my poems.
So shout out to Twitter.
Yeah.
There are some Twitter jokes that are immortal and tweets that it's such a terrible website,
especially now.
But but God bless the people who do it well.
Yeah, God bless Twitter.
(24:16):
All right.
Just popping in to clarify something.
The tweet that she was referring to is by Kyle Plant emoji and it is our father who
art in heaven Baja be thy blast.
Just thought you should know.
Let's turn to your poem, Relocation, and I'll ask you to read it whenever you're ready.
(24:41):
Here, Relocation.
Salt Lake City boasts white tabernacles, half filled parks, a mineral highway, an archive
so vast they fill mountainsides.
One summer we researched our family genealogy there, surrounded by giddy Mormons.
(25:02):
Their screens flickered with famous relatives.
A Custer, Jackson, Theodore, Kit.
Everything came up on ours, so we went and got burgers at a place that sold no liquor.
The burgers were okay, but we shared our shakes and secret smiles and imagined ourselves renegades
(25:24):
in that room.
Old West portrait, an Indian girl on the run with no records and no documents.
Her wind whipped father clutching his sarsaparilla.
We had infiltrated the saloon and city hall.
I locked eyes in the burger joint with the confidence of a pistol whipper.
(25:46):
The room stirred.
It smelled of grass and gun smoke.
I would not be moved again.
Oh, thank you so much.
I love this one too.
Thank you.
I mean, I'm curious.
I have things to say about it in terms of the Diaz poem, but I'm just curious.
You said that she was such an influence on you and I'm curious if at all there's any
(26:10):
sense of her influence here.
Sometimes that's hard to tell with an individual poem, but I'm curious where you see it maybe
now in retrospect or even felt it at some point.
Yeah.
I think some of that beautiful imagination she has when talking about really heavy subjects
like the speaker's brother's drug use, for example, and her first collection.
(26:34):
I think it is her first collection, but if I'm mistaken, I'm sorry.
But in When My Brother Was an Aztec, there's this whole through line of imagining the speaker's
brother as an Aztec and sacrificing themselves, sacrificing his parents by hurting them and
harming them through his own drug use and violence and things like that.
(26:59):
I think that definitely was an influence on this Old West portrait.
I have this imagining of something that both dips its toe into stereotype, but also expands
beyond that.
I think that was probably the most central image of this poem that she captures in her
(27:20):
first collection.
I think it's this lush imagination that we do have when it comes to our pasts and our
histories that we can be so dynamic with how we describe them and how we bring them to
life and reanimate them through poetry.
Yeah.
(27:41):
I think that that is part of the core of the poem that I really love.
I'm glad you mentioned her first book.
I'm going to link in the show notes to her poem My Brother at 3 a.m., which gets at a
lot of the same things we talked about with They Don't Love You Like I Love You, but through
a very different kind of story, the story about her brother.
(28:01):
I like what you say about the way people imagine their past.
There's this irony to having these archives that fill mountainsides for a history that
is so brief in a way.
Of course, I like their screens flickered and the idea that these things are...
I can't help but think of TV and movies and that these kinds of links are fantastical
(28:23):
in a way.
I remember my brother...
My mom has done a ton of genealogy research and then my brother picked it up and discovered
that we are somehow related to Thomas Jefferson.
For a split second, I was like, oh, that's interesting.
Then I thought, well, it's just a complete accident and there's nothing in my family
that holds onto that in any way.
(28:45):
This idea of the history making them giddy in this way and then also the irony of a longer
history that has been painted over.
That's one of the things I love about this poem as well is that there is that sense of
scale that the names evoke certain things and then the poem itself evokes both the idea
(29:08):
of the Old West portrait and brings it into this present moment.
There's a connection there that's richer than the connection I feel like for the giddy Mormons
in a way.
Yeah.
I think the temporal words there flickered.
It's interesting seeing...
Well, yeah, it's always interesting talking about my old homes, first of all, but being
(29:29):
in that space, literally, this was a literal experience I had going to the archives and
being with my father, laughing our asses off, being like, oh my God, of course we don't
have any famous relatives.
Why would people care about natives?
My dad is from potato farmers from Ireland, of course.
(29:49):
We know all of his family and where they come from.
There's no way that any of them are famous.
The feeling that by being related to these great, I mean, to put it very frankly, these
great colonizers, because I put those names in there for a reason, you have a kind of
legitimacy to be there or to be proud of something, of a country, of a history.
(30:14):
It's interesting seeing what people who aren't like me or my family cling onto or hold up.
I think it's really interesting.
It reminds me of the daughters of the American Revolution and stuff, and the people who trace
their ancestry to the people on the Mayflower and things like that.
When you really think about it, it's like, well, what are you really celebrating?
(30:35):
That's kind of messed up.
I don't know.
Well, it's strange.
I feel like a lot of times people don't really know what they're celebrating.
What they're celebrating is the poem gets at this.
It's an image that's been given to them or that they're fantasizing about or imagining.
And granted, I think we do that with, it's easy to do that with history.
(30:59):
And the way that history is taught in this country, in most places, people don't really
know what that history is.
And so there's something in a way very sad about that kind of celebration, not just because
it doesn't know the history or it erases the history of other people, but also because
often that celebration is people don't know what they're leaving out.
(31:23):
I love the last line, I would not be moved again.
It's such a hard thing for a poem to have that kind of strong statement at the end and
to pull it off.
I think part of it is the double meaning of move, that there's the emotional movement
as well and that that's a thing no one can guarantee.
(31:44):
I feel like there's, at least the way I'm reading it, there is the firmness of I would
not be moved again in the sense of being the pistol whipper, but also the sense that there's
no way to avoid this kind of difficult emotional response.
At least that's the way I'm reading it.
All right.
Is there anything else you wanted to mention about the poem?
(32:05):
I know it feels very weird to talk about one's own poems.
Yeah, it is funny talking about your own poetry.
I think, well, one influence on this poem was Lele Long Soldier.
I think anytime I write about grass, I'm basically calling Lele Long Soldier by name.
I'm evoking her spirit.
(32:27):
And that's what good poetry does.
It's impossible for me to write about grasses now and not think of Lele Long Soldier.
So if you haven't read her collection as well, whereas you definitely should.
And I think that kind of haunting and that whisper of grasses, the sound of it, the way
that it gets kind of reanimated in poems and just the symbolism of that.
(32:53):
I mean, grasses were something that were wiped out from the prairies here.
It's something that are themselves a ghost.
It sounds like a ghost.
Grasses, that S sound.
It's so haunting and so beautiful.
So I don't know, if you don't have that kind of feeling, like I do freak mode, like thinking
of Lele Long Soldier every time you think of grass, I think you should definitely read
(33:14):
that collection.
And it might add something to your reading.
Yeah, I will have a link to it.
And I think the poem is called 38.
Yes.
Yeah, there's quite a few.
Yeah.
And I think that's the one where there's that part of the poem where the poem swings out
from the platform.
And it's just an incredible poem.
(33:37):
So definitely read that.
Thank you so much.
Are you ready to turn to the silliness part of the show?
Yes.
All right.
Before we get to the game, today's episode has an ad as always that is brought to you
by the revised rhyming dictionary of contemporary slang 22nd edition.
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(33:59):
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And look out next month for the 23rd edition.
(34:42):
All right.
So those ads are basically my place to get off really dumb jokes.
I was like, wow, holy, I was like, there's no way that's real.
That sounds like my dad after we taught him the word yosification.
That's so funny.
I was like, well, that's impressive if it is real.
I would believe that, to be honest.
(35:02):
Yeah.
Maybe, you know, I could probably make a little money with that.
But the funny thing is, like, coming out of my mouth, it all sounds fake and ridiculous.
I love how cynical it is.
Yeah.
I had a student at the end of class.
This is my brag.
I had a student at the end of class right after I said something this semester, he said, wow,
(35:22):
Dr. Green is spittin today.
And I just, that's, I want that on my tombstone.
That's so funny.
That's so funny.
And it's, yeah, I'm 23.
I have to teach like high school students, like when they start talking like that in
my workshop, I don't know how to react.
I'm like, well, I'm not old, old.
Like I'm not like, you know, I know what you guys mean, but like, I don't, and I don't
(35:46):
want to seem like I don't understand it.
But also I don't know how to react right now.
Like when they talk about things like that, they're like talking about, yeah, I know exactly
what you mean.
Riz in the classroom, I'm like, oh, well, channel that into your poetry or something
like that.
It's just, you just got to roll with it.
Yeah.
I learned of Riz through that headline that kind of went viral.
(36:09):
Something like baby Gronk, Riz, something like baby Gronk, Riz, is Livy.
And it's just like, these aren't even words.
No, that's not, that's not, that's crazy.
I remember that.
I remember people, actually, I remember people's reaction to that headline.
I didn't actually even see the headline.
It was just people, I think getting mad about how it sounded, which I think is really funny.
(36:33):
There's, I got a, I'll, I'll link to that so people can, or to an article about that
so people can take it in its glory.
So today we're going to play a quick game that I am calling, you got a reputation for
yourself now.
It's always important to know your namesakes.
And so as far as Charlie Greens go, I'm outranked by a singer who appeared on Britain's Got
(36:54):
Talent, a makeup artist and a jazz trombonist who worked primarily in the 1920s.
In fact, I get these emails from academia.edu asking me if I'm the author of songs he performed
on.
Oh my God.
I'm not even the best known Charles Green at Cornell.
There's a guy who teaches in oceanography and people love his class.
(37:15):
So my job here is to help you know your namesakes better.
I'm going to give you a biographical detail or a polymer song title.
And I want you to tell me if it's about or by Drake, Nick Drake, or Sir Francis Drake.
Oh my God.
This is the best game ever.
Do you know who Nick Drake is?
Yes, I do.
Pinkwood, baby.
(37:36):
Okay, good.
Good.
I was, you're 23.
I didn't know.
I'm wise beyond my years.
All right.
I'm taking a point off for you saying that.
I take it back.
I take it back.
All right.
Kinsale Drake, are you ready to play?
You got a reputation for yourself now.
(37:57):
God, yeah.
I'm nervous.
Okay.
The first one is a title.
Northern Sky, is that Drake, Nick Drake, or Sir Francis Drake?
I'm going to say that that is Nick Drake.
Well done.
That is Nick Drake.
One for one so far.
Let's go.
Number two, title.
(38:18):
Disturb Us, Lord.
Is that Drake, Nick Drake, or Sir Francis Drake?
I'm going to say Sir Francis Drake, but honestly I wouldn't be surprised if that was Drake.
That is Sir Francis Drake.
That's actually why I chose Northern Sky because I thought, well, he's from Canada maybe.
No.
But yeah, that's Sir Francis Drake.
The poem is attributed to him, so that's a little loose.
(38:38):
He was not known for writing poetry.
He was known... Well, we'll get there in a minute.
He was known for other things.
Yes.
Number three, title.
Forever.
Is that Drake, Nick Drake, or Sir Francis Drake?
Bruh.
I'm going to say Drake.
That is Drake.
That is Drake.
That is him and Lil Wayne and Kanye and someone else.
(39:03):
Maybe Jay-Z.
I can't remember now.
That was 10 years ago.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Number four, and this is biography.
His father is a drummer who played with Jerry Lee Lewis.
Do you know who Jerry Lee Lewis is?
I believe I do.
Oh my God.
Well he's just as a refresher.
(39:24):
He's most noted for the song Great Balls of Fire and for marrying his 13-year-old cousin.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
Well, is that Drake's dad?
No.
Oh yes, that is Drake's dad.
That is Drake's dad.
Thank you.
I was like, holy, if I get this wrong.
I was hoping you would think, well, Jerry Lee Lewis, a little older, maybe Nick Drake,
but no, that is Drake.
No, no.
(39:45):
I don't think... I mean, knowing Nick Drake's music, I'm like, I don't think.
Dang.
All right.
Number five.
Four for four so far.
That's good.
I like the mood.
Yes.
Okay, biographical detail.
He is known for participating in the early English slaving voyages of his cousins Sir
John Hawkins and John Lovell.
(40:05):
Is that Drake, Nick Drake, or Sir... It's a Strake.
Oh my God.
Sir Francis Drake.
That is Sir Francis Drake.
If it was any of the others, I'd be gagged.
Time traveling Drake before Degrassi participated in early English slaving voyages.
That is Sir Francis Drake.
And number six, this will be the last one.
His father is known for working as an engineer in Burma.
(40:27):
Is that Drake, Nick Drake, or Sir Francis Drake?
I know that's Nick Drake.
I know that's Nick Drake.
That is Nick Drake.
How do you know that?
Yeah, because I know a lot of weird and obscure facts about musicians, and I weirdly remember
that for some reason.
Well, there you go.
You nailed it.
Six for six in the game.
You got a reputation for yourself now.
And Kinsale Drake, you have a reputation for yourself now.
(40:50):
Thank you so, so much for being here.
Is there anything you'd like to say or plug before we go?
I'd like to give a shout out to my cat who tried to walk on my computer like 20 times
during this podcast episode.
If you're a big fan of Siamese cats, she's the best.
She has no tail.
And her name is Ahsoka Malibu Barbie.
(41:11):
Oh, that's great.
That's great.
A little scene setting for listeners.
I'm recording in our basement because it's the only room our cats can't go into.
Our Siamese is Lavender, and then we have a few others.
So Lavender.
Siamese is the best.
Yeah.
She's wonderful, except when she's waking me up at three in the morning.
(41:34):
Oh, yeah.
My girly likes to eat my hair.
It's a good wake up.
Nice and long.
The hair licking and hair eating.
Yeah, that's a fun feature of cats.
No one tells you about that before you get it.
Well, I didn't get a cat.
I married a crazy cat lady.
Oh, I didn't get a cat either.
Yeah, I was part of the distribution system.
(41:57):
She just appeared on the rez.
I'm not even kidding.
She appeared no tail on the rez.
And I was like, well, I guess you're mine now.
Yeah.
You don't even have a good story about how she lost her tail.
You'll have to invent that.
Yeah.
So as always, thanks for listening.
If you enjoy the show, please leave a five star rating and a review.
And as always, go have a great day.
(42:17):
Read some poems, pet some dogs and support striking workers wherever you find them.
Bye.
Welcome to the Talking Poem Podcast.
(00:07):
I'm your host, Charlie Green.
On each episode, I invite a guest to bring in any poem they'd like to talk about for
any reason.
We'll talk about what delights us, what excites us, maybe what frustrates us, and we'll follow
the poem and the conversation wherever they turn.
Today we'll also talk about a poem by our guest, and afterward we'll have a little bit
of silliness and a poetry game.
Today I am absolutely delighted to have as my guest, Kinsale Drake, who has brought in
(00:30):
Natalie Diaz's poem, They Don't Love You Like I Love You.
Kinsale is a 23-year-old Dinae poet, editor, playwright.
There are a lot of slashes there, and I imagine there will be many more as she continues,
whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in poetry, best new poets, poets.org, Poetry
Northwest, The Slowdown, and elsewhere.
Her first book, The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket, won the 2023 National Poetry Series, and will
(00:56):
be published by the University of Georgia Press in 2024.
Congratulations.
She also teaches mental health and storytelling programming for Native youth and is the founder
of the NDN Girls Book Club.
She graduated from Yale just about a year ago in fall 2022.
I could go on listing your accomplishments, but I'd like you to be able to get a word
in edgewise.
(01:16):
Kinsale, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for being here.
Thank you for having me, and thank you for the lovely introduction.
Yeah, my pleasure.
So I have a couple of different questions I want to ask.
I'm actually curious to hear you talk a little about the NDN Girls Book Club.
Yeah.
So NDN Girls Book Club is, I've been doing workshops, and specifically poetry workshops
(01:38):
for the past seven years since I served as a national student poet.
And it was combining my love of teaching with my love of indigenous literatures, and basically
how like strategizing how we could get free books out to Native youth across the nation.
So we work with tribal libraries and indigenous booksellers to financially support them.
(02:00):
And then it started off just like very grassroots.
I was quite literally mailing care packages from my parents' place.
Wow.
Yeah, like a year ago, and it just kind of caught fire and had a lot of support turn
up.
Now we have three team members, and we have been to a couple different tribal nations,
(02:22):
but I'm very happy with the work that we do.
Yeah, it's exciting to see so much love for Native literature.
Oh, that's really fantastic.
I always love when something like that just starts out of someone's house and gets that
kind of momentum.
That's really fantastic.
I also kind of want to ask, and part of this, I guess, is professional curiosity, but you
(02:43):
got a degree in English, one of your two degrees from Yale is in English.
I'm just kind of curious what the study of poetry was like there for you.
Oh yeah, it was, I mean, very traditional.
I think if you think of an Ivy League school as you teach at Cornell, like, and you think
of poetry, it's very much learning Anglo poets.
(03:04):
It's very Europe-centric.
And my field of study, I think, was definitely a labor of love.
We didn't have any Native faculty in the English department.
We actually didn't, I don't think we had any tenured professors of color in the English
department at the time.
So it was kind of funny because my dean actually, I was just going to be an ethnic studies major.
(03:26):
I thought about going to law school or majoring in and studying indigenous law and policy.
And then my dean pulled me aside and showed me my transcript.
Like I think this was junior year and she was like, hey, like you're almost done with
the English major.
Like she's just double major.
And I was like, dang, like even though I thought that I didn't have a place for myself in this
(03:51):
scene at Yale, it was pretty obvious that it was something that I loved to do and talk
about even if I necessarily wasn't reflected in the coursework or the readings.
And so I just, I love poetry and I love books and I love writing essays about literature.
So I think it kind of just happened naturally.
I think that's a frustrating experience for a lot of students.
(04:14):
It's not as stark as that having no non-white tenured faculty at Cornell.
But I think what ends up happening is that there's this tendency to, for a lot of people,
teach only what they have learned.
And even with canons shifting since the 90s and even a little earlier, there's just not
a lot of effort to get started for a lot of people reading outside of basically an all
(04:41):
white or mostly white canon.
I know it was certainly the case for me and it's something I'm still trying to work on
in my own teaching is thinking about who am I teaching to and what am I teaching from?
And one of the reasons I wanted to have you on is because one, I really, really like your
poems and two, for the podcast as well to branch out a little bit.
I think there's, so far I'm very happy with how it's going, but it's a little wider that
(05:05):
I want it to be, which is how I think of myself as well.
Well, let's go ahead and turn to the Natalie Diaz poem.
Any preface you want to give before you read the poem?
Natalie Diaz is one of my favorite poets.
She's a Mojave poet and she's enrolled in the Hilo River tribe, I believe.
(05:29):
And she is just amazing.
She won the Pulitzer recently, just a phenomenal poet and a big influence for my book, especially.
I think you can hear that in the piece that I wanted to share.
So Natalie is a rock star and that's all I really want to say.
So if you're not familiar with her work, definitely pick up one of her books.
(05:50):
I totally agree.
I believe Anti-Colonial Love Poem is her most, or Post-Colonial Love Poem.
Yeah, Post-Colonial Love Poem won the Pulitzer.
Well go ahead and take it away whenever you're ready.
Sure.
They Don't Love You Like I Love You by Natalie Diaz.
My mother said this to me long before Beyonce lifted the lyrics from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
(06:13):
And what my mother meant by Don't Stray was that she knew all about it.
The way it feels to need someone to love you.
Someone not your kind.
Someone white.
Someone, some many who live because so many of mine have not.
And further, live on top of those of ours who don't.
(06:35):
I'll say, say, say.
I'll say, say, say.
What is the United States if not a clot of clouds?
If not spilled milk or blood?
If not the place we once were in the millions?
America is maps.
Maps are ghosts.
White and layered with people and places I see through.
(06:58):
My mother has always known best.
Knew that I'd been begging for them to lay my face against their white laps to be held
in something more than the loud light of their projectors of themselves they flicker.
Sepia or blue all over my body.
All this time I thought my mother said, wait, as in, give them a little more time to know
(07:23):
your worth.
And really she said, wait, meaning heft, preparing me for the yoke of myself.
The beast of my country's burdens, which is less worse than my country's plow.
Yes, when my mother said they don't love you like I love you, she meant, Natalie, that
(07:45):
doesn't mean you aren't good.
Oh, thank you so much.
I'm so glad you brought this poem in.
Why did you, why did you choose this poem?
I adore this poem for a number of reasons.
I think because my collection pulled a lot from music.
This was a really great example.
I think when I was learning how to lace in lyrics and find different meanings and also
(08:11):
acknowledging different iterations of songs and how they mean different things to people
through generations.
I think generational love was also a really, I mean, poignant part of this poem.
I teach this poem when I teach the poetics of platonic love to students.
And so it's looking beyond romantic, heterosexual love, like what kinds of love are really healthy
(08:35):
for us and as native people specifically or native young people, what do we see in poetry
that we can write about or honor?
And so this is a really interesting poem because it loops in history and it has this grand
scale of talking about maps and ghosts and genocide, but at the same time it is a love
(08:56):
poem, which I think is so fantastic.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Not only do I love that it gets the Yeah Yeah Yeahs song stuck in my head, but also the
fact that it has that scale, that it moves from something very, very intimate like this
platonic love.
And I'll be curious, I'm curious to hear more about the poetics of platonic love, but also
(09:16):
the fact that the individual experience and the sense of love is rooted in place and is
rooted in all these horrible histories and that self-image and desire kind of comes out
of these histories.
And so there is desire and the platonic love here, the idea of the way it feels to need
(09:37):
someone to love you, someone not your kind.
And I love the way those lines move, the way it feels to need.
And I listened to a recording of her reading it last night and she hits that the way it
feels to need really hard.
And it's this mix of that just interpersonal desire for platonic love and then a desire
(09:57):
that she's talking about, the desire to be loved by someone not your kind.
I'm curious just to hear about a little bit about the poetics of platonic love.
It may take us away from the poem a bit, but I want to know more about it.
Yeah, it's a really fun workshop.
I just did it at the University of Utah with some native students and faculty, but it's
(10:17):
really cool to talk about love.
It always seems like it's something so universal.
It's so poetic.
I mean, so many poems are about love.
But in terms of indigenous poetics, there's a lot of love poems we had and we have, and
I think Natalie Diaz is a great example of this, her entire collection, that extended
(10:39):
things beyond romantic or traditional conceptions of love.
So that could be writing a poem to one partner who is of the opposite sex and it just being
romantic and also I think impacted by gender roles, of course, how you write about the
person.
And so with this poem, for example, we see so many different forms of love.
(11:01):
We talk about generational love as a form of non-romantic love.
There's love between a person and the land.
There's love between non-human beings and human beings.
There's love between our creators or those that we honor and our ancestors.
We have ancestral love.
There's things that are so important to us, just as important to us as romantic partnerships.
(11:24):
And so it's kind of a re-centering of those things when we write poems.
And in a way, it's they like my students usually say, it's like a cool way of decolonizing
the love poem by re-centering relationships that have always been important to us.
So that's kind of the focus of the workshop.
And we talk about Simon Ortiz usually.
We talk about Natalie Diaz and we have all these great examples of love.
(11:48):
And then we challenge each other to write sort of like a letter to a thing, a place,
a person that matters to us that is not necessarily a partner, a romantic partner.
So that's basically how we do that workshop, but it's always really fun.
And it's really cool to see how the poets realize like there is a place for those relationships
(12:11):
in poetry and there's ways of writing about them that demonstrate this intimacy beyond,
you know, again, traditional conceptions of love.
That's really fantastic.
And bringing it back to the poem, it's not just the complexities of those loves or the
different kinds of loves, but even within those loves, there's something complex.
(12:32):
As a mother daughter relationship, I love the last sentence.
She meant Natalie, that doesn't mean you aren't good.
Double negative ends up having that kind of, there's something, it's not cutting, but the
negatives emphasize themselves a lot.
And it's not a simple relationship, that kind of platonic mother daughter love.
(12:55):
And then the rest of them are as well preparing me for the yoke of myself, the beasts of my
country's burdens.
And so there's this, for me, there's this sense in which it's that love and that there's
a complicated dynamic even within each of those kinds of love.
Yeah, there's a heavy love.
And also at the end, it reminds me of, I want to say that poem is by Maggie Nelson, but
(13:18):
the poem that goes, you don't have to crawl on your knees.
I'm going to totally butcher it, but you know what, you might know which one I'm talking
about.
You don't have to be good is basically part of that poem.
And it reminds me a lot of this poem, this kind of Natalie, that doesn't mean you aren't
good.
Like you are also good and you don't have to conform to anything or alter yourself or
(13:42):
bend down.
I think that's the lap image is really poignant for that.
The folding of the body to be accepted and loved is really interesting.
And so I think it just has this lovely expansiveness towards the end, but also a really specific
image of like a mother reassuring the daughter of this kind of, you know, this is the right
(14:05):
way to love you and yourself.
And I don't know, I just love this poem.
So I think a lot of it really speaks for itself, which I think is fantastic about Natalie's
work.
It's just, it's like a beautiful, some so expansive and gorgeous affirmation of, you
know, you are worthy of love that is not devastating to you.
(14:31):
One, I really like what you say about the kind of straightforwardness, because I think
that's important for a poem that has this kind of scale.
And that I want to spend a second on that lapse image because it is so fantastic in
part because it embeds the intensity of that kind of desire for that kind of love.
(14:53):
And it's a moment that reinforces or creates that sense of the generational love that my
mother has always known best, which is a kind of, you know, familiar way of talking about
one's parents.
There's a terrible 1950s sitcom called Father Knows Best.
So this idea of my mother has always known best.
But then the way that she knows them, there's the great turn, knew that I'd been begging
(15:17):
for them, I feel like tells us something about the depth of the mother's knowledge and even
maybe hints at the fact that she herself had this kind of desire and knows the intensity
of this kind of desire.
You know, being a kid growing up and rebelling against your parents or thinking you know
more than your parents, I think it's always really funny when you get to a certain age.
(15:39):
For me, it was probably like 21 or 20, you know, and you realize like, oh, shit, like
they were right the whole time, you know, like, and they got to let you make your mistakes.
They got to let you, you know, do what you need to do to grow up and learn those things.
But it is really, you know, especially when they've had those kinds of, you know, experiences
of not being accepted or, you know, racist experiences, especially the pitfalls of trying
(16:05):
to appeal to whiteness, things like that, that appear in this poem.
You learn that it's the same story that they experienced, maybe different, maybe manifested
differently, but they lived through it too.
And yeah, they usually do know better.
They do know what happens eventually.
And so that's another sweet thing.
I think that is so normal between parents and children, which is that, you know, the
(16:30):
parents are ultimately right.
Or, you know, the parents are kind of like, you know, that's okay, I told you so, but
I still love you, that kind of thing.
Yeah.
My brother, one of my brothers and I, I think we're still convinced our parents don't know
best, but that's just us holding on to our childhoods a little too long.
(16:52):
I also like the something in thinking of it, I like the way you explain it in terms of
this is a common experience, and I also like the way that the poem, thinking about generational
knowledge and the way that indigenous lit and indigenous experience is talking about
a kind of communal shared knowledge a lot more than a lot of Anglo poetry, that one
(17:15):
of the things that is essential is the way in which knowledge is passed down and knowledge
is shared.
And I'm just, I like the way that gets instantiated here through thinking about America, thinking
about interpersonal relationships.
And I love that the loud light of their projectors of themselves.
I love that break on projectors.
I feel like the main way I think of the US these days is in terms of projection, like
(17:40):
anytime, anytime we voice a concern, it's because it's something we've done.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There are many examples of this.
The one that's been in my head because Henry Kissinger died not too long ago was that in
Indonesia, the US helped support a genocide because they said, well, the Soviets are going
to go around isolating and killing people.
(18:01):
And it turns out the Soviets had no interest in doing that.
That's what the US ended up doing.
But that idea of projecting themselves that they flicker, sepia or blue all over my body.
And it's such a contrast to the idea of something shared and communal.
It's about something directed to be accepted by other people.
(18:23):
And it is really, it's so those images with the US are so physical, which I think, you
know, it says something about, oh God, there's so much in this poem.
But it says something about, I mean, it is a native woman reading this poem and it's,
you know, the objectification and fetishization of the body is something that you can't separate
(18:43):
from this poem.
And ownership, I think, is that projection over the body, I can't help but think of individual
ownership, which is such a settler way of thinking about people and things and communities
and history and stories.
And you know, that one, the United States, like the white lover, like that is so singular
and individual in these poems, wanting to be accepted by someone versus, you know, the
(19:08):
chorus of the mother and the daughter that are kind of reassuring each other in a way
or affirming each other.
Yeah, absolutely.
Little things I just want to say.
So I think I said a couple episodes ago, talking about Louise Gluck, that she's one of my favorite
line breakers, I guess.
I love her line breaks.
(19:28):
And one of the things about this poem is how gutting so many of them are.
I already mentioned the way it feels to need and because those who live in that break,
someone, so many who live because so many of mine have not.
And there's that if not the place we once were, which is gutting enough in itself and
(19:51):
then in the millions, America is maps.
I just I just I'm blown away by this poem.
Yeah, I'm also a sucker for line breaks.
So that's definitely I think that's definitely why I chose it as well.
The way to the line breaks on the two weights.
So you don't exactly know what she she means until you go into that next line.
(20:11):
I love those.
And they kind of they kind of weigh the end of the line to that with that kind of pause.
They have a heaviness to them as well.
Yeah, I really like it's just so cool.
There's the weight like W.A.I.T.
And you do have to wait to begin the next line because you have to move your eyes over.
And then there's weight W.E.I.G.H.T., which is heavy on that end of the line.
(20:36):
And then you see that they mean heft.
And there is that I just love how he sounds to the poem.
It's a very hearty word.
Yeah.
And we get those italics to wait, meaning heft preparing me.
Yeah, this is great.
I also just I'm kind of amazed.
(20:57):
It's not a word bank exactly.
But I like the idea of taking the lyrics of a song like maps that doesn't actually have
that many distinct lines.
You know, it's the lyrics of it are very short compared to most songs of its length.
And yet she's still mining that for the kind of the structure of the poem or what feels
(21:17):
like the way the poem starts and what it builds out from.
So any other things you want to say or mention about this poem before we turn to yours?
I think if you haven't read it, please read it and look at all the italics.
And also, I think give a little credit to poets who are putting song lyrics in their
poems and engaging with songs.
(21:39):
I think I think it's interesting how that's sometimes discouraged.
And I think, you know, people like Natalie Diaz bring a really cool spin to something
that I think some professors don't really like as much to put it nicely.
I don't think any of us were really encouraged to use song lyrics in our poems in college.
(22:02):
So that's definitely something fun about this.
Well, I'll have a little more to say about this in a while.
But I also feel like there's and I think about this a lot in my students writing and my own
writing is how long is something going to last?
Like when do when you have some sign some sort of cultural reference or some sort of
reference to a song, you know, maps feels like it's going to last because it's lasted
(22:26):
as long as it is.
It's an incredible song.
But I think there's always I always feel like there's a risk that is a reader going to get
this and they this semester I experienced it time and again where I'm just like, what
is this thing that you're referring to?
And they all know what it is.
And they're all like, oh, this is this is common knowledge.
And I'm like, I'm 20 years older than you.
And that's both a lot older than you and not much older.
(22:50):
And so it's this question always comes this question of who are you writing for?
What can you expect a reader to know?
And I don't think there are easy answers to that for this poem.
I don't have any of that hesitation of like, oh, is this something that's going to be known?
I think in one of your poems, you referred to Baja Blast.
I think Mountain Dew Baja Blast will last just because it's radioactive.
(23:13):
I agree.
I think hopefully that's I think Baja Blast are eternal and holy.
So
you just start filling holy water with Baja Blast instead.
Baja Blast.
Yeah, there's this tweet that's like our father who gosh, what is it?
(23:34):
It's so funny.
Our father.
Oh, my gosh.
It's like it's like a it's going to haunt me until I remember it.
But it's like, holy be thy Baja Blast or something.
It's so funny.
And I actually that was what I think made me write that poem that does have Baja Blast
today because it starts off I feel God in this Taco Bell tonight.
(23:54):
Like, I just think that's I just love those.
I think Twitter plays a weird part in my poems.
So shout out to Twitter.
Yeah.
There are some Twitter jokes that are immortal and tweets that it's such a terrible website,
especially now.
But but God bless the people who do it well.
Yeah, God bless Twitter.
(24:16):
All right.
Just popping in to clarify something.
The tweet that she was referring to is by Kyle Plant emoji and it is our father who
art in heaven Baja be thy blast.
Just thought you should know.
Let's turn to your poem, Relocation, and I'll ask you to read it whenever you're ready.
(24:41):
Here, Relocation.
Salt Lake City boasts white tabernacles, half filled parks, a mineral highway, an archive
so vast they fill mountainsides.
One summer we researched our family genealogy there, surrounded by giddy Mormons.
(25:02):
Their screens flickered with famous relatives.
A Custer, Jackson, Theodore, Kit.
Everything came up on ours, so we went and got burgers at a place that sold no liquor.
The burgers were okay, but we shared our shakes and secret smiles and imagined ourselves renegades
(25:24):
in that room.
Old West portrait, an Indian girl on the run with no records and no documents.
Her wind whipped father clutching his sarsaparilla.
We had infiltrated the saloon and city hall.
I locked eyes in the burger joint with the confidence of a pistol whipper.
(25:46):
The room stirred.
It smelled of grass and gun smoke.
I would not be moved again.
Oh, thank you so much.
I love this one too.
Thank you.
I mean, I'm curious.
I have things to say about it in terms of the Diaz poem, but I'm just curious.
You said that she was such an influence on you and I'm curious if at all there's any
(26:10):
sense of her influence here.
Sometimes that's hard to tell with an individual poem, but I'm curious where you see it maybe
now in retrospect or even felt it at some point.
Yeah.
I think some of that beautiful imagination she has when talking about really heavy subjects
like the speaker's brother's drug use, for example, and her first collection.
(26:34):
I think it is her first collection, but if I'm mistaken, I'm sorry.
But in When My Brother Was an Aztec, there's this whole through line of imagining the speaker's
brother as an Aztec and sacrificing themselves, sacrificing his parents by hurting them and
harming them through his own drug use and violence and things like that.
(26:59):
I think that definitely was an influence on this Old West portrait.
I have this imagining of something that both dips its toe into stereotype, but also expands
beyond that.
I think that was probably the most central image of this poem that she captures in her
(27:20):
first collection.
I think it's this lush imagination that we do have when it comes to our pasts and our
histories that we can be so dynamic with how we describe them and how we bring them to
life and reanimate them through poetry.
Yeah.
(27:41):
I think that that is part of the core of the poem that I really love.
I'm glad you mentioned her first book.
I'm going to link in the show notes to her poem My Brother at 3 a.m., which gets at a
lot of the same things we talked about with They Don't Love You Like I Love You, but through
a very different kind of story, the story about her brother.
(28:01):
I like what you say about the way people imagine their past.
There's this irony to having these archives that fill mountainsides for a history that
is so brief in a way.
Of course, I like their screens flickered and the idea that these things are...
I can't help but think of TV and movies and that these kinds of links are fantastical
(28:23):
in a way.
I remember my brother...
My mom has done a ton of genealogy research and then my brother picked it up and discovered
that we are somehow related to Thomas Jefferson.
For a split second, I was like, oh, that's interesting.
Then I thought, well, it's just a complete accident and there's nothing in my family
that holds onto that in any way.
(28:45):
This idea of the history making them giddy in this way and then also the irony of a longer
history that has been painted over.
That's one of the things I love about this poem as well is that there is that sense of
scale that the names evoke certain things and then the poem itself evokes both the idea
(29:08):
of the Old West portrait and brings it into this present moment.
There's a connection there that's richer than the connection I feel like for the giddy Mormons
in a way.
Yeah.
I think the temporal words there flickered.
It's interesting seeing...
Well, yeah, it's always interesting talking about my old homes, first of all, but being
(29:29):
in that space, literally, this was a literal experience I had going to the archives and
being with my father, laughing our asses off, being like, oh my God, of course we don't
have any famous relatives.
Why would people care about natives?
My dad is from potato farmers from Ireland, of course.
(29:49):
We know all of his family and where they come from.
There's no way that any of them are famous.
The feeling that by being related to these great, I mean, to put it very frankly, these
great colonizers, because I put those names in there for a reason, you have a kind of
legitimacy to be there or to be proud of something, of a country, of a history.
(30:14):
It's interesting seeing what people who aren't like me or my family cling onto or hold up.
I think it's really interesting.
It reminds me of the daughters of the American Revolution and stuff, and the people who trace
their ancestry to the people on the Mayflower and things like that.
When you really think about it, it's like, well, what are you really celebrating?
(30:35):
That's kind of messed up.
I don't know.
Well, it's strange.
I feel like a lot of times people don't really know what they're celebrating.
What they're celebrating is the poem gets at this.
It's an image that's been given to them or that they're fantasizing about or imagining.
And granted, I think we do that with, it's easy to do that with history.
(30:59):
And the way that history is taught in this country, in most places, people don't really
know what that history is.
And so there's something in a way very sad about that kind of celebration, not just because
it doesn't know the history or it erases the history of other people, but also because
often that celebration is people don't know what they're leaving out.
(31:23):
I love the last line, I would not be moved again.
It's such a hard thing for a poem to have that kind of strong statement at the end and
to pull it off.
I think part of it is the double meaning of move, that there's the emotional movement
as well and that that's a thing no one can guarantee.
(31:44):
I feel like there's, at least the way I'm reading it, there is the firmness of I would
not be moved again in the sense of being the pistol whipper, but also the sense that there's
no way to avoid this kind of difficult emotional response.
At least that's the way I'm reading it.
All right.
Is there anything else you wanted to mention about the poem?
(32:05):
I know it feels very weird to talk about one's own poems.
Yeah, it is funny talking about your own poetry.
I think, well, one influence on this poem was Lele Long Soldier.
I think anytime I write about grass, I'm basically calling Lele Long Soldier by name.
I'm evoking her spirit.
(32:27):
And that's what good poetry does.
It's impossible for me to write about grasses now and not think of Lele Long Soldier.
So if you haven't read her collection as well, whereas you definitely should.
And I think that kind of haunting and that whisper of grasses, the sound of it, the way
that it gets kind of reanimated in poems and just the symbolism of that.
(32:53):
I mean, grasses were something that were wiped out from the prairies here.
It's something that are themselves a ghost.
It sounds like a ghost.
Grasses, that S sound.
It's so haunting and so beautiful.
So I don't know, if you don't have that kind of feeling, like I do freak mode, like thinking
of Lele Long Soldier every time you think of grass, I think you should definitely read
(33:14):
that collection.
And it might add something to your reading.
Yeah, I will have a link to it.
And I think the poem is called 38.
Yes.
Yeah, there's quite a few.
Yeah.
And I think that's the one where there's that part of the poem where the poem swings out
from the platform.
And it's just an incredible poem.
(33:37):
So definitely read that.
Thank you so much.
Are you ready to turn to the silliness part of the show?
Yes.
All right.
Before we get to the game, today's episode has an ad as always that is brought to you
by the revised rhyming dictionary of contemporary slang 22nd edition.
Older poets, are you tired of sounding like a fuddy duddy?
(33:59):
Are your students and children still bringing up the time you tried to rhyme getting jiggy
with it with doing figgy whippets?
The answer is here again in the 22nd edition of the revised rhyming dictionary of contemporary
slang.
Since the first edition was published in 2017, it has helped poets over the age of 25 keep
their poems sounding on fleek.
(34:20):
No poet wants their work to be sus, so give your poems a glow up.
No cap.
The revised rhyming dictionary of contemporary slang will make your poems bussin and give
your reader all the feels.
Your poems won't be mid, they'll help you have that riz.
That's the revised rhyming dictionary of contemporary slang 22nd edition.
And look out next month for the 23rd edition.
(34:42):
All right.
So those ads are basically my place to get off really dumb jokes.
I was like, wow, holy, I was like, there's no way that's real.
That sounds like my dad after we taught him the word yosification.
That's so funny.
I was like, well, that's impressive if it is real.
I would believe that, to be honest.
(35:02):
Yeah.
Maybe, you know, I could probably make a little money with that.
But the funny thing is, like, coming out of my mouth, it all sounds fake and ridiculous.
I love how cynical it is.
Yeah.
I had a student at the end of class.
This is my brag.
I had a student at the end of class right after I said something this semester, he said, wow,
(35:22):
Dr. Green is spittin today.
And I just, that's, I want that on my tombstone.
That's so funny.
That's so funny.
And it's, yeah, I'm 23.
I have to teach like high school students, like when they start talking like that in
my workshop, I don't know how to react.
I'm like, well, I'm not old, old.
Like I'm not like, you know, I know what you guys mean, but like, I don't, and I don't
(35:46):
want to seem like I don't understand it.
But also I don't know how to react right now.
Like when they talk about things like that, they're like talking about, yeah, I know exactly
what you mean.
Riz in the classroom, I'm like, oh, well, channel that into your poetry or something
like that.
It's just, you just got to roll with it.
Yeah.
I learned of Riz through that headline that kind of went viral.
(36:09):
Something like baby Gronk, Riz, something like baby Gronk, Riz, is Livy.
And it's just like, these aren't even words.
No, that's not, that's not, that's crazy.
I remember that.
I remember people, actually, I remember people's reaction to that headline.
I didn't actually even see the headline.
It was just people, I think getting mad about how it sounded, which I think is really funny.
(36:33):
There's, I got a, I'll, I'll link to that so people can, or to an article about that
so people can take it in its glory.
So today we're going to play a quick game that I am calling, you got a reputation for
yourself now.
It's always important to know your namesakes.
And so as far as Charlie Greens go, I'm outranked by a singer who appeared on Britain's Got
(36:54):
Talent, a makeup artist and a jazz trombonist who worked primarily in the 1920s.
In fact, I get these emails from academia.edu asking me if I'm the author of songs he performed
on.
Oh my God.
I'm not even the best known Charles Green at Cornell.
There's a guy who teaches in oceanography and people love his class.
(37:15):
So my job here is to help you know your namesakes better.
I'm going to give you a biographical detail or a polymer song title.
And I want you to tell me if it's about or by Drake, Nick Drake, or Sir Francis Drake.
Oh my God.
This is the best game ever.
Do you know who Nick Drake is?
Yes, I do.
Pinkwood, baby.
(37:36):
Okay, good.
Good.
I was, you're 23.
I didn't know.
I'm wise beyond my years.
All right.
I'm taking a point off for you saying that.
I take it back.
I take it back.
All right.
Kinsale Drake, are you ready to play?
You got a reputation for yourself now.
(37:57):
God, yeah.
I'm nervous.
Okay.
The first one is a title.
Northern Sky, is that Drake, Nick Drake, or Sir Francis Drake?
I'm going to say that that is Nick Drake.
Well done.
That is Nick Drake.
One for one so far.
Let's go.
Number two, title.
(38:18):
Disturb Us, Lord.
Is that Drake, Nick Drake, or Sir Francis Drake?
I'm going to say Sir Francis Drake, but honestly I wouldn't be surprised if that was Drake.
That is Sir Francis Drake.
That's actually why I chose Northern Sky because I thought, well, he's from Canada maybe.
No.
But yeah, that's Sir Francis Drake.
The poem is attributed to him, so that's a little loose.
(38:38):
He was not known for writing poetry.
He was known... Well, we'll get there in a minute.
He was known for other things.
Yes.
Number three, title.
Forever.
Is that Drake, Nick Drake, or Sir Francis Drake?
Bruh.
I'm going to say Drake.
That is Drake.
That is Drake.
That is him and Lil Wayne and Kanye and someone else.
(39:03):
Maybe Jay-Z.
I can't remember now.
That was 10 years ago.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Number four, and this is biography.
His father is a drummer who played with Jerry Lee Lewis.
Do you know who Jerry Lee Lewis is?
I believe I do.
Oh my God.
Well he's just as a refresher.
(39:24):
He's most noted for the song Great Balls of Fire and for marrying his 13-year-old cousin.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
Well, is that Drake's dad?
No.
Oh yes, that is Drake's dad.
That is Drake's dad.
Thank you.
I was like, holy, if I get this wrong.
I was hoping you would think, well, Jerry Lee Lewis, a little older, maybe Nick Drake,
but no, that is Drake.
No, no.
(39:45):
I don't think... I mean, knowing Nick Drake's music, I'm like, I don't think.
Dang.
All right.
Number five.
Four for four so far.
That's good.
I like the mood.
Yes.
Okay, biographical detail.
He is known for participating in the early English slaving voyages of his cousins Sir
John Hawkins and John Lovell.
(40:05):
Is that Drake, Nick Drake, or Sir... It's a Strake.
Oh my God.
Sir Francis Drake.
That is Sir Francis Drake.
If it was any of the others, I'd be gagged.
Time traveling Drake before Degrassi participated in early English slaving voyages.
That is Sir Francis Drake.
And number six, this will be the last one.
His father is known for working as an engineer in Burma.
(40:27):
Is that Drake, Nick Drake, or Sir Francis Drake?
I know that's Nick Drake.
I know that's Nick Drake.
That is Nick Drake.
How do you know that?
Yeah, because I know a lot of weird and obscure facts about musicians, and I weirdly remember
that for some reason.
Well, there you go.
You nailed it.
Six for six in the game.
You got a reputation for yourself now.
And Kinsale Drake, you have a reputation for yourself now.
(40:50):
Thank you so, so much for being here.
Is there anything you'd like to say or plug before we go?
I'd like to give a shout out to my cat who tried to walk on my computer like 20 times
during this podcast episode.
If you're a big fan of Siamese cats, she's the best.
She has no tail.
And her name is Ahsoka Malibu Barbie.
(41:11):
Oh, that's great.
That's great.
A little scene setting for listeners.
I'm recording in our basement because it's the only room our cats can't go into.
Our Siamese is Lavender, and then we have a few others.
So Lavender.
Siamese is the best.
Yeah.
She's wonderful, except when she's waking me up at three in the morning.
(41:34):
Oh, yeah.
My girly likes to eat my hair.
It's a good wake up.
Nice and long.
The hair licking and hair eating.
Yeah, that's a fun feature of cats.
No one tells you about that before you get it.
Well, I didn't get a cat.
I married a crazy cat lady.
Oh, I didn't get a cat either.
Yeah, I was part of the distribution system.
(41:57):
She just appeared on the rez.
I'm not even kidding.
She appeared no tail on the rez.
And I was like, well, I guess you're mine now.
Yeah.
You don't even have a good story about how she lost her tail.
You'll have to invent that.
Yeah.
So as always, thanks for listening.
If you enjoy the show, please leave a five star rating and a review.
And as always, go have a great day.
(42:17):
Read some poems, pet some dogs and support striking workers wherever you find them.
Bye.
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