October 6, 2024 • 43 mins
Check out Amanda's conversation with Tess Taylor!
Tess Taylor’s body of work deals with place, ecology, memory and cultural reckoning. She’s published five celebrated poetry collections: The Misremembered World, The Forage House, Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, and Rift Zone, one of the Boston Globe’s best books of 2020. Her book Work & Days was one of the NY Times best poetry books of 2016. In fall 2023, she published the anthology Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens and the Hands that Tend Them, a collection of contemporary gardening poems for an era of climate crisis. In 2024-2025 she will serve as the Poet Laureate of El Cerrito California. She lives and gardens just outside Berkeley, California.
Tess's links: https://www.tess-taylor.com/
Be sure to check out The Poet Speaks Podcast on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/thepoetspeakspodcast/
And listen to,The Poet Speaks Podcast, on the go on ALL STREAMING PLATFORMS WORLDWIDE!
Apple:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...
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Did you know The Poet Speaks is also Amanda's touring global workshop? She teaches people all about how to make, create and the history of Spoken Word and Indigenous oral traditions! To make a booking for The Poet Speaks Workshop with your organization, apply for mentorships with Amanda, book interviews, as well as writing consultations, please use this link: https://www.amandaeke.com/services
Music by: Buzu Buzu
https://www.instagram.com/bbuzu/
Tess Taylor’s body of work deals with place, ecology, memory and cultural reckoning. She’s published five celebrated poetry collections: The Misremembered World, The Forage House, Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, and Rift Zone, one of the Boston Globe’s best books of 2020. Her book Work & Days was one of the NY Times best poetry books of 2016. In fall 2023, she published the anthology Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens and the Hands that Tend Them, a collection of contemporary gardening poems for an era of climate crisis. In 2024-2025 she will serve as the Poet Laureate of El Cerrito California. She lives and gardens just outside Berkeley, California.
Tess's links: https://www.tess-taylor.com/
Be sure to check out The Poet Speaks Podcast on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/thepoetspeakspodcast/
And listen to,The Poet Speaks Podcast, on the go on ALL STREAMING PLATFORMS WORLDWIDE!
Apple:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...
Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/1cM1rdF...
Did you know The Poet Speaks is also Amanda's touring global workshop? She teaches people all about how to make, create and the history of Spoken Word and Indigenous oral traditions! To make a booking for The Poet Speaks Workshop with your organization, apply for mentorships with Amanda, book interviews, as well as writing consultations, please use this link: https://www.amandaeke.com/services
Music by: Buzu Buzu
https://www.instagram.com/bbuzu/
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hello everyone, it's your host, Amanda Eka, and I have
some amazing news. Starting this fall, The pote Speaks is
coming to your TV screens. Yes, that's right. After eight
amazing seasons as a podcast, The poet Speaks with Amanda
Eka is now a TV show erin on the Archaeology
Channel's new streaming service, Heritage. Everyone, get ready for a
(00:26):
visual feast, spoken word performances, and deep dives into the
minds of poets from all over the world. Something extraordinary
is coming and you won't want to miss a single moment.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Stay tuned.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Hello everyone, and welcome back to The poet Speaks Podcast.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Now our next guest.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Body of work deals with place, ecology, memory, and cultural reckoning.
She's published five celebrated poetry collections. Her bookwork Work in Days,
was one of the New York Times Best Poetry Books
of twenty sixteen, twenty twenty four to twenty twenty five.
She will serve as a poet Lord about Serena, California.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Everyone, Welcome to the pols Speaks Podcast. Test Taylor, Test,
how are you?
Speaker 2 (01:06):
I am so happy to be here. Thank you, Amanda,
absolutely so.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
Tell us a bit. Where are you at currently right now?
In the world.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
We love to find out where our guests where we're
talking to them from, how far away we are in
a digital space.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
So where are you at currently in the world?
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Right now, I am sitting in my living room in
a little bungalow in Elsaito, California. That's the town I
grew up in. I left. I lived in Boston and Brooklyn.
I did the writer thing on the East Coast for
a while, and then I ended up back in the
little town I grew up in. It is a suburb
that is between Richmond, California and Berkeley, California, and in
(01:46):
some ways you could just think it was a boring
little suburb, but I actually think there's a lot of
fascinating stuff about it. It's the endpoint on a lot
of people's migration routes. It's been the most diverse school
district in the country since the nineteen eighties. I grew
up and went to public school here, and one of
(02:07):
the cool things about coming back and getting to be
the poet laureate is I'm going back into the schools
that I attended and just looking at them a few
years later down the road, thinking about all of the
places and stories that converge here. I really love that.
Another thing that's cool about the town of El Crito
is that the photographer Dorothea Lang photographed the Great Depression
(02:30):
and photographed a lot of people in shelterlessness and migrancy.
She actually had a note to herself to do a
photo essay on El c Rito in the nineteen forties.
She thought it was a fascinating place because again it
was getting built up really fast. People were coming together
to work in the shipyards. Richmond had the first desegregated
workplace in America in the nineteen forties, and at the
(02:53):
same time, people who lived in El Cirito Japanese Americans
were getting taken away for Japanese tournament. So has it
been a place of like fracture and paradox and possibility.
And it's also very beautiful. It's literally right across the
Golden Gate. You can stand at the edge to stand
(03:14):
in the Elsrito bart station and you're looking straight into
the mouth of the Golden Gate, watching the fog come
in or go out every day. So, I don't know,
it's like, it's an interesting thing to try to describe
your home. I love that that's your first question.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
Absolutely, And it's one of those things too, you know,
because I actually grew up in Sacramento, California. I don't
know if you're familiar with this nor cal Unite, but
I grew up in Sacramento and I went to school
for undergrad at UC Davis. Actually my brothers went to
school UC Berkeley, but very familiar with that area. I'm curious,
you know, because already you have such a celebrated career,
(03:52):
but you kind of think about your life kind of
plays out like a beautiful novel too, going back to
your hometown then become a poet Laurette.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
I mean, you know, I kind of want to hit
on that a little bit.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
You know, I think everyone they always want to leave
their hometown and then you know, some people find their
way back.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
How do you how do you kind of do you feel?
How do you feel about that?
Speaker 1 (04:12):
You know, some people, I know, I know my experience,
some people that it's their biggest fear to go back
to where they start from.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
Other people they love the idea of going back. How
have you kind of.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Reckoned, Like you said, home is an interesting place. How
do you reckoned with that idea of home?
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Well? I feel so lucky that I have a place
that's this lovely that I could go back to. I mean,
a lot of our lives, a lot of the stories
of this century are about exile and about plate people
being far from places, you know, and we all have
different homelands that you know, are further away from us.
(04:48):
And just even in a funny way, my father's family
was very deeply in Virginia for so long, and my
mother's family was very deeply in New England, and in some
ways I almost felt like our generation, their generation of
coming to California that even that was like a funny
diaspora from like these settled places where even in that
(05:09):
way they had been kind of like ingrained in a place,
in a culture. And you know, my parents, both of
them had kind of distinct ways of being that were
a little bit incompatible, almost like this northern New Englander
with who was like salty and stony and like she
was a little flinty, and she had all of these
(05:30):
like makerly cottagy ways, and my dad was from this
Virginia family that had other ways. And and I thought
a lot about the fact that we have these trade
routes in our bodies that are like the stories of
where we come from and the stories of the funny
expressions our parents use. And it was always really interested
(05:54):
in dialect towards and you know, the sort of the
histories that we carry with us. And I think that's
what I love in literature too, like I love I
love those stories that make me aware of, like just
the compassion that we have for one another's, like long
(06:15):
trade routes that are inside each other's bodies, or like
the unexpected convergences of stories that we feel. That's not
the answer of how I come back to Sorto, though.
The truth is I did not want to come back here.
I was just too old to school and I just
didn't I thought I was up and out. I was
(06:37):
in Boston and Brooklyn, and I thought I was going
to live on the Eastern Seaboard, and you know, it
was really getting to be just a little older, getting partnered,
expecting my first child. And I remember this day where
I drank too much coffee running around New York on
(06:59):
an empty stem, and I really agitated my pregnancy. And
I was walking up like a fifth floor walk up,
and I was just exhausted, and I thought, I don't
want to do this. I like, I could if I
had to, but I don't want to. And I suddenly
just thought about like these bungalows and these lemon trees.
(07:20):
I thought about I thought about this neighborhood that was
this kind of homely, scrap working class neighborhood that I'd
grown up in. And you know, I came back here
and it's the Bay and it's changed.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
It's like.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
So expensive to live here. Really, the Internet economy really
transformed a lot of the things that I loved. When
I grew up here, there wasn't an Internet, so it
was really like you were there was the distinctness to
this place, this Berkeley place, as opposed to other places
(07:57):
you weren't able to get, you know, to community as
quickly across all these boundaries and borders. And in one
of my poems, I said that California felt like a
crumbling outpost and like we were just like the furthest
edge of the edge of something like of the imagination
of America, that we were like this kind of sun baked, crumbling,
(08:23):
scrappy place that was tacked on to America at the
last minute, you know, for gold. But now the Internet
is here and We're this engine of this crazy economy
and this crazy like projection of images, and people were
you know, selling ads for Facebook and they work selling
ads for Twitter, and the whole kind of idea that
(08:44):
this is now the center of selling images is like,
so it's really different in some ways. Another thing about
coming back is I think actually some of the stuff
that I write about and thought about a lot, about
the fractures I felt in the public school system, about
(09:08):
this like earthquake zone that we live on, about like precariousness,
California feels only more precarious to me. It feels gosh,
the problems around income inequality and housing shortages and climate
catastrophe are all just they feel so intensified, even from
(09:29):
things that were here decades ago when I was growing up,
and you know, going back into the public schools that
I grew up attending, I'm aware that some of the
issues have maybe resolved themselves and some of them haven't,
And it's just fascinating to see the movement of a
life like that.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
No, I think that's such an interesting place. That's an
interesting perspective to have, and it really touches on like
I read in your you know, reading your bile. A
lot of your work, you say, deals with memory and
cultural reckoning, you know, especially kind of your your explanation
of California from what it was to what it is now.
(10:09):
That's a very that's a very fascinating perspective. I'm kind
of curious though, for you. I mean, you've had a
very very successful career in poetry and writing. I mean,
what is the kind of what is what is the
you know? I think the word memory that's such a
that's very specific to each person, but it's also a
very vague term word. When you think about the word memory,
(10:31):
what does that mean to you from when you started
your career writing to now? And then also tell us
where did this Well? First off, let me say this,
tell us where did poetry find you?
Speaker 3 (10:43):
Just talking to you alone right now.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
You're a very You're a very deep sinker. I can
tell you're very introspective even before we even.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
Start the interview.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
I can just tell by the way you're forming your thoughts,
your sentences, you're very introspective. When did writing even find you?
Was it in was it in California as a little
girl growing up? Or did it find you somewhere along
your path? As you moved across places, across the states,
where did poetry first and foremost find you? I love
(11:12):
that you asked that question.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
I have an uncle that's a blues musician, and when
you ask him why he's a blues musician, he said,
I didn't choose the blues. The blues chose me, which
I think is good. You know, it's a good answer.
And I mean, one of the stories that I tell
(11:35):
is that I was in college and I had auditioned
for the lead and a play from the visiting playwright
who is also the visiting poet, and the play was
in verse, and I delivered the lead and the visiting
playwright poet said why don't you show up for my class?
And so I did, and my heart was kind of
a flutter. And then the poet, his name was Lynn Maxwell.
(12:01):
He said, you know, some of you are going to
be using these skills to write advertising copy, or maybe
you'll become a lawyer and that's a really good way
to use language. But maybe some of you will become poets.
And I remember feeling incredibly stubborn that the person who
should become a poet would be me. The funny thing
(12:24):
is he was a great teacher, and in fact, a
number of us have become poets from that class, like working,
working writers, And there was something sort of magical about
the early moments of this training that we started to
get together. I trained a lot to be a musician.
(12:47):
As a young person, I sang. I was in a
choir that was allowed to sing children's parts in the
San Francisco opera.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
So I was doing like a high level training. I
don't know, oh, if I exactly wanted to be an
opera singer. I knew that I loved like this intense
level of practice, and I loved like tinkering, and I
loved all the possibilities of art making like the I
(13:17):
loved I loved practice.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
You know.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
That was kind of magical to me. But at a
certain point, somehow I didn't see the path forward. I mean,
this wasn't like nobody said, don't be a singer. It
wasn't like that. It was just like one day I
was tired of that, and I took up smoking and
singing jazz, and then I started writing poems. And early
(13:43):
on one of the best important sensations to me was
that poems could be musical, that they had the quality
of language distilled into music. So one of the examples
I like to give of that is, if you say
the woods are lovely dark and deep, but I have
promises to keep and miles miles to go before I sleep,
(14:08):
you've basically said a logistical sentence. It rhymes a little bit,
but it's like I've got to go home. But if
you say the woods are lovely dark and deep, but
I have promises to keep and miles to go before
I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep, that
(14:31):
repetition right there gets you in the presence of something
else and you're in the presence of dealing with death. Really,
it feels like death has showed up in the poem,
and it's really in the magic of the echo that
something at some other meaning is being transacted, and the
(14:54):
idea that you're doing some music with your words that
is pulling against with the surface of meaning, that the
music of language is working with the surface of language
to create this sensation of being inside something like that reverberates.
I just that I think was the first of the magics,
(15:18):
and that was like the first kind of spell casting
part of the poem making. Who was kind of like
getting to be a magical musical composer for the breath,
you know, and that was that was like one of
the gateway drugs. And then ever since then there have
been so many more gateway drugs. I'm like twenty five
(15:39):
years in keep going.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Absolutely tell me a bit about like that, Like you
said that magic making.
Speaker 3 (15:47):
How was that magic making from the start of your
career to where it is now? I mean, what is that?
Speaker 1 (15:53):
What is that kind of trajectory for you felt and
look like like when you began, did you ever see
that you would have? You know New York Times Best
Poetry Book at twenty sixteen from the poet Lurie of
your Hometown. I mean, all these celebrated works, What has
really changed from.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
Beginning till now for you?
Speaker 1 (16:11):
And in terms of maybe your growth, Like you said,
memory and cultural reckoning is something you really take note of.
What has been your own cultural reckoning and your own
lineage path of life?
Speaker 4 (16:23):
Oh wow, Yeah, you asked a great question earlier about memory.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
So memory, like I said, memory making, that is such
a vague term, but it's very specific to each person
at the same time, right, memory, what does memory mean
to you? From the beginning of when you started twenty
five years ago, as you said to now in.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
Your career, what does the kind of cultural.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
Reckoning and what does memory mean in terms of your
writing and your poetry from now until today?
Speaker 3 (16:52):
What does that term even mean for you?
Speaker 2 (16:54):
Now?
Speaker 4 (16:56):
You know, it's funny when you say the word memory
and you ask me to talk about memory, I immediately
think of that Louse Sille Clifton poem that says why
some people be mad at me sometimes, and it's a
very short poem, Why some.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
People be mad at me sometimes? They ask me to remember,
but they want me to remember their memories, and I
keep on remembering mine. And I just love about each
of us that we all carry within us something that's
(17:34):
defiant to received history. I'm sure that we do. I'm
sure that each of us has this moment when we're
told it's a certain way and we discover that's not so. Yes,
we discover that there's something else we need to know.
And I think that's the moment when we confront the
(17:55):
ghosts of our family, the ghosts of our culture, the
ghost of our country. Really, and what's really interesting and
important about poetry is that poetry, especially the lyric, is
a place to have conversations that cannot really be transacted
by other medium. Absolutely, I could tell you did you
(18:20):
send the letter on Tuesday, and you could say yes,
we would not be speaking in a poem. But if
it is at the level where we have to address
the ghosts of our family, the ghosts of our culture,
or the ghosts of our country, we begin to be
transacting speech that needs to take place at the level
(18:42):
of poetry. And that speech might take place in a play,
but the play would be delivering monologues that would essentially
be poems. You know, when you are addressing an inanimate
or something that can't speak back, but you need to
reckon with it, that is like an essentially poetic form
(19:03):
of address right there. And so when I realized that
poetry was a vessel for having these arguments, which are
essentially about trying to get right with the broken places
in our history and ourselves and our families and our country,
(19:23):
that was something that woke me up a great deal.
And so that's one thing. It's a place for recovering
things that have been left out or to the side.
And I think all of my books so far have
(19:43):
a way of doing some kind of digging or excavation
with things that had been left out or left to
the side or don't sit right. And you know, I
was talking about all of this kind of feeling of
returning to California, and I'll just say it like the
most gracious way I can. You know, I attended a
(20:04):
very imperfectly desegregated school district. The I mean that is
a gracious way of saying like, I grew up in
the presence of like gross inequities and violences that were
happening around me, and I didn't have the language to
understand what they were or what was happening, or exactly
(20:26):
why or how. And I'm not even sure we ever do.
But I think that sense that we need to explain
the places from which we came, or that we want
to reach out and look into the things that we
didn't understand before and that we need to understand. And
(20:46):
poetry is just such a powerful way of having tools
for giving voice. So I think that's kind of what
I mean by memory and reckoning.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
For sure.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
For sure, there's something that you said that I really loved.
It was this idea that memory is What did you say?
It said you basically may note that memory is. People
want you to remember things the way they remembered it, right, Yeah, absolutely,
This idea that we are, you know, our own perspective
(21:16):
on the world and our own history and our own
culture is what really uh ingrains itself in us to
create those memories.
Speaker 2 (21:24):
No, I love that.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
I love that. So let's move on a bit right now,
let's talk about one of your widely knowmeworks, work in Days,
which was one of New York Times Best Poetry Books
of twenty sixteen. Tell me a little bit about, you know,
to receive an honor like that, I mean, tell me.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
Kind of what you know.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
A lot of people that listen to this show always ask,
you know, ask the person, ask the poet how they.
Speaker 3 (21:48):
How they even began a career in writing.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
I think so many people want to write poetry, So
many people write poetry. A lot of people don't see
it as a career, right for a numerous myriad of reasons,
money making, economic, cultural, right.
Speaker 3 (22:03):
You know, being an artist is not an easy life.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
Tell us, like a little bit about, I mean, to
receive such an honor for was a very special piece,
I'm sure to you. What does that you know, looking
back in twenty sixteens. Even now, what is that now?
Kind of when you look back on I'm sure, what
was a wild ride for that release?
Speaker 3 (22:22):
What does it mean now?
Speaker 1 (22:23):
And what does it what does it feel like?
Speaker 3 (22:27):
Still?
Speaker 2 (22:30):
Well, that book, Work in Days was a really special book.
It came out of a really special time. I mentioned
that I'd been kind of scrapping it together. In Brooklyn,
I worked, you know, I worked as a waitress in
a funeral parlor that I worked as a waitress in
(22:52):
a restaurant that had been a funeral parlor. I wrote
pr on the side, I wrote jacket copy for books.
I taught a little bit, and I was hustling the
hustle and a lot of us do in this crazy
gig economy, this kind of thankless crazy gig economy that
is super late capitalism or whatever we're going to call
(23:14):
it right now. And I received for the first time,
you know, a major fellowship, which was this fellowship to
go live at the Amy Clampett House in Western Massachusetts.
It's way out in Lenox, It's right by where Tanglewood
(23:35):
is and they usually give six months fellowships. And for
some reason it was a complicated year. I just they
gave me the whole year to sit in this house
of this poet who also had a hard life, but
she had left she'd you know, want a MacArthur and
left her house for other poets to write in. And
(23:56):
this is a gift, right, this little oasis that happen.
So for an entire year I had housing and a
really good stipend, and in fact, I knew I'd have
more time on my hands than I could really productively
use because I've always been a gardener, and gardening is
(24:19):
one of the things that I do as a kind
of like practice. I called them to see if there'd
be any community gardens up there, and they were like, well,
it's nice that you want to come to this rural area,
but we don't have community gardens. We have farms. Would
you like to work on a farm? And so I
said okay, And I found a three acre community supported
(24:43):
agriculture farm that was irrigated by the Green River that
served a bunch of restaurants and eighty eight families vegetables
this summer. And I called them and they were like, well,
it's January. You can show up in like March, sure, April.
As soon as the earth melts and then they'll be
work to do. And I signed on and it was
(25:08):
crazy because you know, at first there wasn't any work
to do because it was frozen. And then the very
first work was literally bending down, you know, old school
style and pulling stones out of the field. And then
you know, the next work was coddling these little starts
(25:30):
inside this greenhouse and they literally sat on electric blankets.
They were in a greenhouse with electric plugged in electric
blankets to warm them up, to get them ready to go.
And then just as the leaves started coming out, that
same week that the leaves come out, you put the
first lettuces in the ground, and there was such this
(25:53):
intense worry. Then you know, what if there's one more storm,
or what if it's suddenly too hot? Like I I
felt so intensely aware of the fragility of the enterprise
of farming, which is the enterprise of getting us food.
And so it was this year that I had off
of normal hustle and to do like deep thinking and
(26:16):
deep work.
Speaker 3 (26:17):
And I just.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
I want to say that I really, you know, you
feel sort of guilty or something like everybody else is
out doing their hustle, and I had this gift of
a year. But it was a year where I could
be really watchful sort of on behalf of big questions,
on behalf of the culture. And I still love that
(26:40):
book and I've never I haven't had that kind of
time since. Then by the end of the year, I
was becoming a parent, and you know, then I went
back to like again, the juggling the gig economies of
late capitalism and childcare and you know so, but I
would just say the fact that I was given that
(27:03):
time and that it was honored was a huge deal,
and it made me really understand the need for deep
space that like if where there can be spaces for
artists to have that time to go deep, like I sow.
I would love for every I would love for every
maker in America to be able to apply for like
(27:26):
long fellowships, to be able to just really go think,
think more unconstrainedly.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
You know, you make such a great point test that
idea of I was just I was doing a panel
the other day for a mental health show and we
had talked about this idea of just being able to.
Speaker 3 (27:49):
Not create, not you know, create produce.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
A lot of us feel a genuine guilt when you
just sit back and maybe not do and produce right
because of like you had mentioned capitalism right though day
to day grin, it's one of those things, yeah, that
that kind of idea to give yourself that sacred time
to really just.
Speaker 3 (28:12):
Just be right.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
Like I know, even people, let's say, even they pay
for a holiday and vacation, they feel guilty about just
sleeping all day. Can you imagine that you feel guilty
after you just paid for flights and hotels.
Speaker 3 (28:26):
To go all the way across the world, right, And
it's this kind of idea.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
We feel, this kind of a nested me to just
kind of create, create and produce, produce. And it's one
of those things, like you said, Yeah, if we could
just really give that to every single human being, every
soul on this earth, the opportunity to just just be right.
Talk a little bit about how how how important do
you think that that concept is though to especially to
(28:53):
someone that's an artist, or even just for just all
of people, how important is it to just kind of
just be like you said, that space, that's something you
clearly look back on fondly, that time that you were
given to just create or just really just stand still
and just be a part.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
You bring up such a great point about how are
we supposed to value rest in this culture? And I
actually have this project right now about reading books about rest.
And one of the people who's writing about rest is
this woman Jenny O'Dell who has a book about how
to Do Nothing. There's another book woman named Tricia Hersey
(29:34):
who she's written this book about the ministry of napping.
And she realized that she felt like she had to
produce every moment and that she was sort of like
working herself into sort of a deep exhaustion, and that
she would find that rest five minutes, ten minutes, twenty
(29:58):
minutes was this way of actually like honoring herself, her ancestors,
her spiritual wellbeing, and a way of like fighting back
against this notion that we have to like monetize every minute.
Another book is called Rest by Alex Sujung Kim Peng,
(30:20):
and a thing that's amazing in it is that he
actually kind of quantifies that some of the people who
are able to be the most creative and productive, we
focus on their productivity, but if you look at their lives,
they also have patterns that allow more rest. And I
talked to him recently, and he was like, all work
(30:42):
is creative work. You know, nursing is creative work, Teaching
is creative work. Anything that requires firefighting is creative work.
And that anything that requires human discernment is something that
should be done with a balance of resting. And what
would it be like if we really took it seriously
(31:05):
that we were going to be better off all of us, healthier, happier,
living longer, but also more in touch with our creative
beings if we just gave ourselves more rest. And he's
the kind of guy. This is a guy who gets
up at five in the morning to write. But but
but but he he takes twenty minute naps after lunch
(31:28):
every day, which I just thought, what is it, What
is it that I could give myself? You know, what
is it that each of us could give ourselves in
the middle of this crazy life that we're all doing
with this all of this hustle.
Speaker 3 (31:40):
Is there a.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
Way to create boundaries where there's space for reverie, there's
space for dreaming, and honestly, there's space for naps.
Speaker 3 (31:51):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, you know I love that.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
I love that phrase though. I love that all work
is some sort of creative work. I really I liken
myself to that phrase. Even just I would say, I mean,
even just the arrangement of how you you know, arrange
your toothpaste with your toothbrush in the morning, or how
you even decide to wash your body in the morning.
I mean, those are all just creative works of the
(32:17):
spirit and soul. I do believe, at least now you
arrange your dinner plate.
Speaker 3 (32:20):
No, I love that.
Speaker 5 (32:22):
I'm gonna go ahead taking flight in those things, right,
like take having time to have pleasure in your body,
having making the space for the joy that is available
to you is I mean, ross Que calls it a
defiant act, right, it is.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
It is so important, and that that's like this place
where we renew ourselves and we get ready to look
at all of the difficult things, you know, and to
live into some of these these you know, really painful
challenges come our way every day.
Speaker 3 (33:02):
One thousand percent.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
Absolutely finding the pleasure in the in the docile and
the mundane.
Speaker 3 (33:07):
Absolutely. I love that.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
Moving on a bit, I mean, test has been such
a great interview thus far.
Speaker 3 (33:13):
I want to talk about this is.
Speaker 1 (33:14):
A very interesting uh spick I found. So you're developing
the stage play of American photographer Dorothea Lang tell us
a little bit about what that project will be looking
like and what are you looking forward to it?
Speaker 3 (33:29):
Then how did this even kind of conceive together?
Speaker 1 (33:32):
So?
Speaker 2 (33:34):
Oh, so we talked about Alsto. We talked about how
I didn't think I could live here. Again, I didn't.
I thought I thought I was too cool for this place,
and I wanted to be gone. Yeah, and when I
came back, I had a small child, and the thing
that you can do with a small child is you
can walk around the block with the child on your
chest or in the st again and again, hoping that
(33:56):
they will go to sleep, or just soothing them down.
So I'm walking by the bungalows of my childhood that
I had left a long time before, and thinking, in
what way can I make something of this experience? And
then I realized through a little bit of research, that
Dorothea Lang had photographed this town of bungalows in the
(34:19):
you know, in the late thirties and early forties. And
I got really intrigued, like what did she see here?
And at the same time, you're a Californian, you know
that the kind of visual stuff that she documented in
the thirties and forties of people living intense and extremely
fragile and precarious housing. That is something that is part
(34:41):
of our visual landscape everywhere in California, and that the
feeling of living in the presence of unsheltered people or
people with marginal shelter has become endemic in these cities.
And I just kept thinking, was it Dorothea Lane just
here photographing this very problem, and didn't it seem to
(35:03):
go away or change? And why are we living in
the presence of She's the person who's taught me something
about what it is to look at this situation with
care and with dignity, And I got fascinated. I went
and looked at her notebooks. I ended up driving all
(35:24):
the places she'd driven in California in the thirties and forties.
I ended up writing her letters from the present. And
her notebooks have these cool, staccato, interesting, fabulous like pop
pop things that she gathered alongside of the road, like
how much gas cost, how much beans cost? All that
(35:45):
stuff about getting by. She was a documentarian of the
art of getting by. And she also had these haunting phrases,
like people would say things to her like, this country's
a hard country. When you die, you're dead, that's all
m And I just thought, yeah, this country is a
(36:05):
hard country, you know. And it ended up being this
collage poem of all these voices, voices, my voice to
Dorothea Lang, Dorothea Lang's notebook voice, all the voices on
the side of the road, and less like an exact
theater play and more like this kind of symphony of voices,
(36:28):
and the poem is like a collage of voices that
all talk almost past each other in this You have
to believe me. I think it builds. I mean, I
think it's more it's kind of musical. And somebody said,
what would it be like if you actually had the
voices speaking, like if you made it into a play,
And this idea grew. A wonderful director approached me and
(36:55):
working with a projectionist who is creating this back this
kind of moving interactive backdrop of projected Lang images. So
it's a little bit like a surrounding immersive experience and
you'll sit there and it will be like Lang and
(37:16):
the poet and the people on the side of the
road are calling out to you, and meanwhile her images
are going by and you know, it's going to be
the ninetieth anniversary of the Works Progress Administration, which was
the government organization that funded her work, in the one
hundred and thirtieth anniversary of her birth. And my hope
(37:37):
is that a consortium of California museums is going to
come together and do this sort of re engagement of Lang.
And I guess the question is, here's a woman that
photographed shelterlessness, climate change, climate migration, and all of those
(37:58):
issues are with us today. Yeah, what can she teach us?
Speaker 3 (38:02):
What can we.
Speaker 2 (38:03):
Learn about ourselves by re engaging her? And also I
guess the bigger, biggest question is like what could art
do to be part of the repair? She was on
a government sponsored journey that had to do with all
kinds of gestures to buttress America, to build bridges, to
(38:26):
build high schools, to build oral histories, to let zorniil
Hirshston and Ralph Ellison have a paycheck while they did
amazing work on behalf of our country. And she was
part of that. And is are we at a different
moment where we need to talk about how can art
be part of the conversations towards repair that we need
(38:46):
to be having like yesterday now tomorrow, and so to me,
I think part of getting her voice out there and
her images out there is to help us ask ourselves
now what should we do?
Speaker 3 (39:04):
Absolutely?
Speaker 1 (39:05):
Yeah, now it's very that sounds like a very passion project.
And not wishing you all the best. You have a
potentative year in which you hope to see that.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
Come to life fall of twenty twenty five.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
Awesome, all right, we'll definitely be looking forward to that
amazing legacy of laying all right, well tests. This has
been such a great, great, great conversation and for folks
that are wondering, you know again, check out all tests
is amazing work.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
I'll test before we go.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
We have one final question for you on the poll
Speaks podcast.
Speaker 3 (39:37):
Tell me why do you need to get your words out?
Speaker 2 (39:43):
Because they feel itchy. If I don't, they actually like
hurt on the inside of my brain, I will wake
up and I'll be like that is like it feels
like having like a little do you know when you
listen to like get like an earworm, you know, like
a little bit of song and it's just stuck in
(40:04):
your head. That's kind of how it starts for me,
and you know, in a way nobody cares if you
write a poem or not, like you could just take
a break from a poem. But I don't know. I
think there you are suddenly in the presence of this
thing inside you that wants to be heard, and then
you start to say yes and you give it space
(40:26):
and literally though like I will feel like I have
something knocking around and I just have to get it
down and get it out, and that in that first
moment when I get it out onto paper, I really
don't care if it becomes a great poem or not.
I just had an itchy feeling of lots of language
in the in the you know, on the side underneath
(40:47):
my eyebrow or something, and it's like I gotta drain that,
all right, all.
Speaker 3 (40:53):
Right, I'll set her itch. That's what it is. That's
why she must get her words up, all right. Thank
you so much.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
Tests Now before we end and do tell us where
can folks check out.
Speaker 3 (41:04):
Off your amazing work.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
Any links for websites, social media, and just tell us
what is coming up next for you for folks to
look into for twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
Okay, well, I'm at Tessathon on Instagram. I would love
to connect with you there. I'm a little bit on Facebook.
I am no longer much into X and I haven't
dabbled in the other things yet, so I like to
keep it like a little rosy and positive on Instagram.
It does not you know. That is like the place
(41:33):
that I probably hang out the most. I just edited
a book of contemporary gardening poems or an Era of
Climate Change. It's called Leaning Toward Light Poems for Gardens
and the hands that tend them. If you are a gardener,
if you love the way microbes and pollinators and flowers
conspire to make our lives more beautiful, if you believe
(41:54):
in the radical abundance the plants can give, this might
be a book for you. If your mama is that person,
and it might be a good book for her. And
I just finished up a big tour, so this summer
I'm laying low working on new poems. But I'll be
out again in the world in the fall. And I
(42:15):
would love to meet you. And I'm really happy to
be able to talk to fellow writers over this podcast medium.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
Absolutely l Tests would love to meet you as well,
and everyone check out All Tests is amazing work.
Speaker 3 (42:30):
We'll have her links in the description.
Speaker 1 (42:32):
No matter what platform you're listening to this amazing podcast,
her links will be in the description box down below.
Our tests were so honored, Prilegion, thankful that you were
able to embrace us your amazing presence and words and
have this amazing conversation.
Speaker 3 (42:46):
Thank you so much for being a guest on the
Post Speaks podcast.
Speaker 2 (42:48):
Test Amanda, it was totally the joy was mine. Thank
you so much for this afternoon.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
Absolutely all right everyone again, check out all Tests is
amazing work, and check out the Pole Speaks podcast wherever
you listen to podcast all right, the live one
Hello everyone, it's your host, Amanda Eka, and I have
some amazing news. Starting this fall, The pote Speaks is
coming to your TV screens. Yes, that's right. After eight
amazing seasons as a podcast, The poet Speaks with Amanda
Eka is now a TV show erin on the Archaeology
Channel's new streaming service, Heritage. Everyone, get ready for a
(00:26):
visual feast, spoken word performances, and deep dives into the
minds of poets from all over the world. Something extraordinary
is coming and you won't want to miss a single moment.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Stay tuned.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Hello everyone, and welcome back to The poet Speaks Podcast.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Now our next guest.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Body of work deals with place, ecology, memory, and cultural reckoning.
She's published five celebrated poetry collections. Her bookwork Work in Days,
was one of the New York Times Best Poetry Books
of twenty sixteen, twenty twenty four to twenty twenty five.
She will serve as a poet Lord about Serena, California.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Everyone, Welcome to the pols Speaks Podcast. Test Taylor, Test,
how are you?
Speaker 2 (01:06):
I am so happy to be here. Thank you, Amanda,
absolutely so.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
Tell us a bit. Where are you at currently right now?
In the world.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
We love to find out where our guests where we're
talking to them from, how far away we are in
a digital space.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
So where are you at currently in the world?
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Right now, I am sitting in my living room in
a little bungalow in Elsaito, California. That's the town I
grew up in. I left. I lived in Boston and Brooklyn.
I did the writer thing on the East Coast for
a while, and then I ended up back in the
little town I grew up in. It is a suburb
that is between Richmond, California and Berkeley, California, and in
(01:46):
some ways you could just think it was a boring
little suburb, but I actually think there's a lot of
fascinating stuff about it. It's the endpoint on a lot
of people's migration routes. It's been the most diverse school
district in the country since the nineteen eighties. I grew
up and went to public school here, and one of
(02:07):
the cool things about coming back and getting to be
the poet laureate is I'm going back into the schools
that I attended and just looking at them a few
years later down the road, thinking about all of the
places and stories that converge here. I really love that.
Another thing that's cool about the town of El Crito
is that the photographer Dorothea Lang photographed the Great Depression
(02:30):
and photographed a lot of people in shelterlessness and migrancy.
She actually had a note to herself to do a
photo essay on El c Rito in the nineteen forties.
She thought it was a fascinating place because again it
was getting built up really fast. People were coming together
to work in the shipyards. Richmond had the first desegregated
workplace in America in the nineteen forties, and at the
(02:53):
same time, people who lived in El Cirito Japanese Americans
were getting taken away for Japanese tournament. So has it
been a place of like fracture and paradox and possibility.
And it's also very beautiful. It's literally right across the
Golden Gate. You can stand at the edge to stand
(03:14):
in the Elsrito bart station and you're looking straight into
the mouth of the Golden Gate, watching the fog come
in or go out every day. So, I don't know,
it's like, it's an interesting thing to try to describe
your home. I love that that's your first question.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
Absolutely, And it's one of those things too, you know,
because I actually grew up in Sacramento, California. I don't
know if you're familiar with this nor cal Unite, but
I grew up in Sacramento and I went to school
for undergrad at UC Davis. Actually my brothers went to
school UC Berkeley, but very familiar with that area. I'm curious,
you know, because already you have such a celebrated career,
(03:52):
but you kind of think about your life kind of
plays out like a beautiful novel too, going back to
your hometown then become a poet Laurette.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
I mean, you know, I kind of want to hit
on that a little bit.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
You know, I think everyone they always want to leave
their hometown and then you know, some people find their
way back.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
How do you how do you kind of do you feel?
How do you feel about that?
Speaker 1 (04:12):
You know, some people, I know, I know my experience,
some people that it's their biggest fear to go back
to where they start from.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
Other people they love the idea of going back. How
have you kind of.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Reckoned, Like you said, home is an interesting place. How
do you reckoned with that idea of home?
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Well? I feel so lucky that I have a place
that's this lovely that I could go back to. I mean,
a lot of our lives, a lot of the stories
of this century are about exile and about plate people
being far from places, you know, and we all have
different homelands that you know, are further away from us.
(04:48):
And just even in a funny way, my father's family
was very deeply in Virginia for so long, and my
mother's family was very deeply in New England, and in some
ways I almost felt like our generation, their generation of
coming to California that even that was like a funny
diaspora from like these settled places where even in that
(05:09):
way they had been kind of like ingrained in a place,
in a culture. And you know, my parents, both of
them had kind of distinct ways of being that were
a little bit incompatible, almost like this northern New Englander
with who was like salty and stony and like she
was a little flinty, and she had all of these
(05:30):
like makerly cottagy ways, and my dad was from this
Virginia family that had other ways. And and I thought
a lot about the fact that we have these trade
routes in our bodies that are like the stories of
where we come from and the stories of the funny
expressions our parents use. And it was always really interested
(05:54):
in dialect towards and you know, the sort of the
histories that we carry with us. And I think that's
what I love in literature too, like I love I
love those stories that make me aware of, like just
the compassion that we have for one another's, like long
(06:15):
trade routes that are inside each other's bodies, or like
the unexpected convergences of stories that we feel. That's not
the answer of how I come back to Sorto, though.
The truth is I did not want to come back here.
I was just too old to school and I just
didn't I thought I was up and out. I was
(06:37):
in Boston and Brooklyn, and I thought I was going
to live on the Eastern Seaboard, and you know, it
was really getting to be just a little older, getting partnered,
expecting my first child. And I remember this day where
I drank too much coffee running around New York on
(06:59):
an empty stem, and I really agitated my pregnancy. And
I was walking up like a fifth floor walk up,
and I was just exhausted, and I thought, I don't
want to do this. I like, I could if I
had to, but I don't want to. And I suddenly
just thought about like these bungalows and these lemon trees.
(07:20):
I thought about I thought about this neighborhood that was
this kind of homely, scrap working class neighborhood that I'd
grown up in. And you know, I came back here
and it's the Bay and it's changed.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
It's like.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
So expensive to live here. Really, the Internet economy really
transformed a lot of the things that I loved. When
I grew up here, there wasn't an Internet, so it
was really like you were there was the distinctness to
this place, this Berkeley place, as opposed to other places
(07:57):
you weren't able to get, you know, to community as
quickly across all these boundaries and borders. And in one
of my poems, I said that California felt like a
crumbling outpost and like we were just like the furthest
edge of the edge of something like of the imagination
of America, that we were like this kind of sun baked, crumbling,
(08:23):
scrappy place that was tacked on to America at the
last minute, you know, for gold. But now the Internet
is here and We're this engine of this crazy economy
and this crazy like projection of images, and people were
you know, selling ads for Facebook and they work selling
ads for Twitter, and the whole kind of idea that
(08:44):
this is now the center of selling images is like,
so it's really different in some ways. Another thing about
coming back is I think actually some of the stuff
that I write about and thought about a lot, about
the fractures I felt in the public school system, about
(09:08):
this like earthquake zone that we live on, about like precariousness,
California feels only more precarious to me. It feels gosh,
the problems around income inequality and housing shortages and climate
catastrophe are all just they feel so intensified, even from
(09:29):
things that were here decades ago when I was growing up,
and you know, going back into the public schools that
I grew up attending, I'm aware that some of the
issues have maybe resolved themselves and some of them haven't,
And it's just fascinating to see the movement of a
life like that.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
No, I think that's such an interesting place. That's an
interesting perspective to have, and it really touches on like
I read in your you know, reading your bile. A
lot of your work, you say, deals with memory and
cultural reckoning, you know, especially kind of your your explanation
of California from what it was to what it is now.
(10:09):
That's a very that's a very fascinating perspective. I'm kind
of curious though, for you. I mean, you've had a
very very successful career in poetry and writing. I mean,
what is the kind of what is what is the
you know? I think the word memory that's such a
that's very specific to each person, but it's also a
very vague term word. When you think about the word memory,
(10:31):
what does that mean to you from when you started
your career writing to now? And then also tell us
where did this Well? First off, let me say this,
tell us where did poetry find you?
Speaker 3 (10:43):
Just talking to you alone right now.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
You're a very You're a very deep sinker. I can
tell you're very introspective even before we even.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
Start the interview.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
I can just tell by the way you're forming your thoughts,
your sentences, you're very introspective. When did writing even find you?
Was it in was it in California as a little
girl growing up? Or did it find you somewhere along
your path? As you moved across places, across the states,
where did poetry first and foremost find you? I love
(11:12):
that you asked that question.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
I have an uncle that's a blues musician, and when
you ask him why he's a blues musician, he said,
I didn't choose the blues. The blues chose me, which
I think is good. You know, it's a good answer.
And I mean, one of the stories that I tell
(11:35):
is that I was in college and I had auditioned
for the lead and a play from the visiting playwright
who is also the visiting poet, and the play was
in verse, and I delivered the lead and the visiting
playwright poet said why don't you show up for my class?
And so I did, and my heart was kind of
a flutter. And then the poet, his name was Lynn Maxwell.
(12:01):
He said, you know, some of you are going to
be using these skills to write advertising copy, or maybe
you'll become a lawyer and that's a really good way
to use language. But maybe some of you will become poets.
And I remember feeling incredibly stubborn that the person who
should become a poet would be me. The funny thing
(12:24):
is he was a great teacher, and in fact, a
number of us have become poets from that class, like working,
working writers, And there was something sort of magical about
the early moments of this training that we started to
get together. I trained a lot to be a musician.
(12:47):
As a young person, I sang. I was in a
choir that was allowed to sing children's parts in the
San Francisco opera.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
So I was doing like a high level training. I
don't know, oh, if I exactly wanted to be an
opera singer. I knew that I loved like this intense
level of practice, and I loved like tinkering, and I
loved all the possibilities of art making like the I
(13:17):
loved I loved practice.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
You know.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
That was kind of magical to me. But at a
certain point, somehow I didn't see the path forward. I mean,
this wasn't like nobody said, don't be a singer. It
wasn't like that. It was just like one day I
was tired of that, and I took up smoking and
singing jazz, and then I started writing poems. And early
(13:43):
on one of the best important sensations to me was
that poems could be musical, that they had the quality
of language distilled into music. So one of the examples
I like to give of that is, if you say
the woods are lovely dark and deep, but I have
promises to keep and miles miles to go before I sleep,
(14:08):
you've basically said a logistical sentence. It rhymes a little bit,
but it's like I've got to go home. But if
you say the woods are lovely dark and deep, but
I have promises to keep and miles to go before
I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep, that
(14:31):
repetition right there gets you in the presence of something
else and you're in the presence of dealing with death. Really,
it feels like death has showed up in the poem,
and it's really in the magic of the echo that
something at some other meaning is being transacted, and the
(14:54):
idea that you're doing some music with your words that
is pulling against with the surface of meaning, that the
music of language is working with the surface of language
to create this sensation of being inside something like that reverberates.
I just that I think was the first of the magics,
(15:18):
and that was like the first kind of spell casting
part of the poem making. Who was kind of like
getting to be a magical musical composer for the breath,
you know, and that was that was like one of
the gateway drugs. And then ever since then there have
been so many more gateway drugs. I'm like twenty five
(15:39):
years in keep going.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Absolutely tell me a bit about like that, Like you
said that magic making.
Speaker 3 (15:47):
How was that magic making from the start of your
career to where it is now? I mean, what is that?
Speaker 1 (15:53):
What is that kind of trajectory for you felt and
look like like when you began, did you ever see
that you would have? You know New York Times Best
Poetry Book at twenty sixteen from the poet Lurie of
your Hometown. I mean, all these celebrated works, What has
really changed from.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
Beginning till now for you?
Speaker 1 (16:11):
And in terms of maybe your growth, Like you said,
memory and cultural reckoning is something you really take note of.
What has been your own cultural reckoning and your own
lineage path of life?
Speaker 4 (16:23):
Oh wow, Yeah, you asked a great question earlier about memory.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
So memory, like I said, memory making, that is such
a vague term, but it's very specific to each person
at the same time, right, memory, what does memory mean
to you? From the beginning of when you started twenty
five years ago, as you said to now in.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
Your career, what does the kind of cultural.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
Reckoning and what does memory mean in terms of your
writing and your poetry from now until today?
Speaker 3 (16:52):
What does that term even mean for you?
Speaker 2 (16:54):
Now?
Speaker 4 (16:56):
You know, it's funny when you say the word memory
and you ask me to talk about memory, I immediately
think of that Louse Sille Clifton poem that says why
some people be mad at me sometimes, and it's a
very short poem, Why some.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
People be mad at me sometimes? They ask me to remember,
but they want me to remember their memories, and I
keep on remembering mine. And I just love about each
of us that we all carry within us something that's
(17:34):
defiant to received history. I'm sure that we do. I'm
sure that each of us has this moment when we're
told it's a certain way and we discover that's not so. Yes,
we discover that there's something else we need to know.
And I think that's the moment when we confront the
(17:55):
ghosts of our family, the ghosts of our culture, the
ghost of our country. Really, and what's really interesting and
important about poetry is that poetry, especially the lyric, is
a place to have conversations that cannot really be transacted
by other medium. Absolutely, I could tell you did you
(18:20):
send the letter on Tuesday, and you could say yes,
we would not be speaking in a poem. But if
it is at the level where we have to address
the ghosts of our family, the ghosts of our culture,
or the ghosts of our country, we begin to be
transacting speech that needs to take place at the level
(18:42):
of poetry. And that speech might take place in a play,
but the play would be delivering monologues that would essentially
be poems. You know, when you are addressing an inanimate
or something that can't speak back, but you need to
reckon with it, that is like an essentially poetic form
(19:03):
of address right there. And so when I realized that
poetry was a vessel for having these arguments, which are
essentially about trying to get right with the broken places
in our history and ourselves and our families and our country,
(19:23):
that was something that woke me up a great deal.
And so that's one thing. It's a place for recovering
things that have been left out or to the side.
And I think all of my books so far have
(19:43):
a way of doing some kind of digging or excavation
with things that had been left out or left to
the side or don't sit right. And you know, I
was talking about all of this kind of feeling of
returning to California, and I'll just say it like the
most gracious way I can. You know, I attended a
(20:04):
very imperfectly desegregated school district. The I mean that is
a gracious way of saying like, I grew up in
the presence of like gross inequities and violences that were
happening around me, and I didn't have the language to
understand what they were or what was happening, or exactly
(20:26):
why or how. And I'm not even sure we ever do.
But I think that sense that we need to explain
the places from which we came, or that we want
to reach out and look into the things that we
didn't understand before and that we need to understand. And
(20:46):
poetry is just such a powerful way of having tools
for giving voice. So I think that's kind of what
I mean by memory and reckoning.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
For sure.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
For sure, there's something that you said that I really loved.
It was this idea that memory is What did you say?
It said you basically may note that memory is. People
want you to remember things the way they remembered it, right, Yeah, absolutely,
This idea that we are, you know, our own perspective
(21:16):
on the world and our own history and our own
culture is what really uh ingrains itself in us to
create those memories.
Speaker 2 (21:24):
No, I love that.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
I love that. So let's move on a bit right now,
let's talk about one of your widely knowmeworks, work in Days,
which was one of New York Times Best Poetry Books
of twenty sixteen. Tell me a little bit about, you know,
to receive an honor like that, I mean, tell me.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
Kind of what you know.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
A lot of people that listen to this show always ask,
you know, ask the person, ask the poet how they.
Speaker 3 (21:48):
How they even began a career in writing.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
I think so many people want to write poetry, So
many people write poetry. A lot of people don't see
it as a career, right for a numerous myriad of reasons,
money making, economic, cultural, right.
Speaker 3 (22:03):
You know, being an artist is not an easy life.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
Tell us, like a little bit about, I mean, to
receive such an honor for was a very special piece,
I'm sure to you. What does that you know, looking
back in twenty sixteens. Even now, what is that now?
Kind of when you look back on I'm sure, what
was a wild ride for that release?
Speaker 3 (22:22):
What does it mean now?
Speaker 1 (22:23):
And what does it what does it feel like?
Speaker 3 (22:27):
Still?
Speaker 2 (22:30):
Well, that book, Work in Days was a really special book.
It came out of a really special time. I mentioned
that I'd been kind of scrapping it together. In Brooklyn,
I worked, you know, I worked as a waitress in
a funeral parlor that I worked as a waitress in
(22:52):
a restaurant that had been a funeral parlor. I wrote
pr on the side, I wrote jacket copy for books.
I taught a little bit, and I was hustling the
hustle and a lot of us do in this crazy
gig economy, this kind of thankless crazy gig economy that
is super late capitalism or whatever we're going to call
(23:14):
it right now. And I received for the first time,
you know, a major fellowship, which was this fellowship to
go live at the Amy Clampett House in Western Massachusetts.
It's way out in Lenox, It's right by where Tanglewood
(23:35):
is and they usually give six months fellowships. And for
some reason it was a complicated year. I just they
gave me the whole year to sit in this house
of this poet who also had a hard life, but
she had left she'd you know, want a MacArthur and
left her house for other poets to write in. And
(23:56):
this is a gift, right, this little oasis that happen.
So for an entire year I had housing and a
really good stipend, and in fact, I knew I'd have
more time on my hands than I could really productively
use because I've always been a gardener, and gardening is
(24:19):
one of the things that I do as a kind
of like practice. I called them to see if there'd
be any community gardens up there, and they were like, well,
it's nice that you want to come to this rural area,
but we don't have community gardens. We have farms. Would
you like to work on a farm? And so I
said okay, And I found a three acre community supported
(24:43):
agriculture farm that was irrigated by the Green River that
served a bunch of restaurants and eighty eight families vegetables
this summer. And I called them and they were like, well,
it's January. You can show up in like March, sure, April.
As soon as the earth melts and then they'll be
work to do. And I signed on and it was
(25:08):
crazy because you know, at first there wasn't any work
to do because it was frozen. And then the very
first work was literally bending down, you know, old school
style and pulling stones out of the field. And then
you know, the next work was coddling these little starts
(25:30):
inside this greenhouse and they literally sat on electric blankets.
They were in a greenhouse with electric plugged in electric
blankets to warm them up, to get them ready to go.
And then just as the leaves started coming out, that
same week that the leaves come out, you put the
first lettuces in the ground, and there was such this
(25:53):
intense worry. Then you know, what if there's one more storm,
or what if it's suddenly too hot? Like I I
felt so intensely aware of the fragility of the enterprise
of farming, which is the enterprise of getting us food.
And so it was this year that I had off
of normal hustle and to do like deep thinking and
(26:16):
deep work.
Speaker 3 (26:17):
And I just.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
I want to say that I really, you know, you
feel sort of guilty or something like everybody else is
out doing their hustle, and I had this gift of
a year. But it was a year where I could
be really watchful sort of on behalf of big questions,
on behalf of the culture. And I still love that
(26:40):
book and I've never I haven't had that kind of
time since. Then by the end of the year, I
was becoming a parent, and you know, then I went
back to like again, the juggling the gig economies of
late capitalism and childcare and you know so, but I
would just say the fact that I was given that
(27:03):
time and that it was honored was a huge deal,
and it made me really understand the need for deep
space that like if where there can be spaces for
artists to have that time to go deep, like I sow.
I would love for every I would love for every
maker in America to be able to apply for like
(27:26):
long fellowships, to be able to just really go think,
think more unconstrainedly.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
You know, you make such a great point test that
idea of I was just I was doing a panel
the other day for a mental health show and we
had talked about this idea of just being able to.
Speaker 3 (27:49):
Not create, not you know, create produce.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
A lot of us feel a genuine guilt when you
just sit back and maybe not do and produce right
because of like you had mentioned capitalism right though day
to day grin, it's one of those things, yeah, that
that kind of idea to give yourself that sacred time
to really just.
Speaker 3 (28:12):
Just be right.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
Like I know, even people, let's say, even they pay
for a holiday and vacation, they feel guilty about just
sleeping all day. Can you imagine that you feel guilty
after you just paid for flights and hotels.
Speaker 3 (28:26):
To go all the way across the world, right, And
it's this kind of idea.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
We feel, this kind of a nested me to just
kind of create, create and produce, produce. And it's one
of those things, like you said, Yeah, if we could
just really give that to every single human being, every
soul on this earth, the opportunity to just just be right.
Talk a little bit about how how how important do
you think that that concept is though to especially to
(28:53):
someone that's an artist, or even just for just all
of people, how important is it to just kind of
just be like you said, that space, that's something you
clearly look back on fondly, that time that you were
given to just create or just really just stand still
and just be a part.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
You bring up such a great point about how are
we supposed to value rest in this culture? And I
actually have this project right now about reading books about rest.
And one of the people who's writing about rest is
this woman Jenny O'Dell who has a book about how
to Do Nothing. There's another book woman named Tricia Hersey
(29:34):
who she's written this book about the ministry of napping.
And she realized that she felt like she had to
produce every moment and that she was sort of like
working herself into sort of a deep exhaustion, and that
she would find that rest five minutes, ten minutes, twenty
(29:58):
minutes was this way of actually like honoring herself, her ancestors,
her spiritual wellbeing, and a way of like fighting back
against this notion that we have to like monetize every minute.
Another book is called Rest by Alex Sujung Kim Peng,
(30:20):
and a thing that's amazing in it is that he
actually kind of quantifies that some of the people who
are able to be the most creative and productive, we
focus on their productivity, but if you look at their lives,
they also have patterns that allow more rest. And I
talked to him recently, and he was like, all work
(30:42):
is creative work. You know, nursing is creative work, Teaching
is creative work. Anything that requires firefighting is creative work.
And that anything that requires human discernment is something that
should be done with a balance of resting. And what
would it be like if we really took it seriously
(31:05):
that we were going to be better off all of us, healthier, happier,
living longer, but also more in touch with our creative
beings if we just gave ourselves more rest. And he's
the kind of guy. This is a guy who gets
up at five in the morning to write. But but
but but he he takes twenty minute naps after lunch
(31:28):
every day, which I just thought, what is it, What
is it that I could give myself? You know, what
is it that each of us could give ourselves in
the middle of this crazy life that we're all doing
with this all of this hustle.
Speaker 3 (31:40):
Is there a.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
Way to create boundaries where there's space for reverie, there's
space for dreaming, and honestly, there's space for naps.
Speaker 3 (31:51):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, you know I love that.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
I love that phrase though. I love that all work
is some sort of creative work. I really I liken
myself to that phrase. Even just I would say, I mean,
even just the arrangement of how you you know, arrange
your toothpaste with your toothbrush in the morning, or how
you even decide to wash your body in the morning.
I mean, those are all just creative works of the
(32:17):
spirit and soul. I do believe, at least now you
arrange your dinner plate.
Speaker 3 (32:20):
No, I love that.
Speaker 5 (32:22):
I'm gonna go ahead taking flight in those things, right,
like take having time to have pleasure in your body,
having making the space for the joy that is available
to you is I mean, ross Que calls it a
defiant act, right, it is.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
It is so important, and that that's like this place
where we renew ourselves and we get ready to look
at all of the difficult things, you know, and to
live into some of these these you know, really painful
challenges come our way every day.
Speaker 3 (33:02):
One thousand percent.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
Absolutely finding the pleasure in the in the docile and
the mundane.
Speaker 3 (33:07):
Absolutely. I love that.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
Moving on a bit, I mean, test has been such
a great interview thus far.
Speaker 3 (33:13):
I want to talk about this is.
Speaker 1 (33:14):
A very interesting uh spick I found. So you're developing
the stage play of American photographer Dorothea Lang tell us
a little bit about what that project will be looking
like and what are you looking forward to it?
Speaker 3 (33:29):
Then how did this even kind of conceive together?
Speaker 1 (33:32):
So?
Speaker 2 (33:34):
Oh, so we talked about Alsto. We talked about how
I didn't think I could live here. Again, I didn't.
I thought I thought I was too cool for this place,
and I wanted to be gone. Yeah, and when I
came back, I had a small child, and the thing
that you can do with a small child is you
can walk around the block with the child on your
chest or in the st again and again, hoping that
(33:56):
they will go to sleep, or just soothing them down.
So I'm walking by the bungalows of my childhood that
I had left a long time before, and thinking, in
what way can I make something of this experience? And
then I realized through a little bit of research, that
Dorothea Lang had photographed this town of bungalows in the
(34:19):
you know, in the late thirties and early forties. And
I got really intrigued, like what did she see here?
And at the same time, you're a Californian, you know
that the kind of visual stuff that she documented in
the thirties and forties of people living intense and extremely
fragile and precarious housing. That is something that is part
(34:41):
of our visual landscape everywhere in California, and that the
feeling of living in the presence of unsheltered people or
people with marginal shelter has become endemic in these cities.
And I just kept thinking, was it Dorothea Lane just
here photographing this very problem, and didn't it seem to
(35:03):
go away or change? And why are we living in
the presence of She's the person who's taught me something
about what it is to look at this situation with
care and with dignity, And I got fascinated. I went
and looked at her notebooks. I ended up driving all
(35:24):
the places she'd driven in California in the thirties and forties.
I ended up writing her letters from the present. And
her notebooks have these cool, staccato, interesting, fabulous like pop
pop things that she gathered alongside of the road, like
how much gas cost, how much beans cost? All that
(35:45):
stuff about getting by. She was a documentarian of the
art of getting by. And she also had these haunting phrases,
like people would say things to her like, this country's
a hard country. When you die, you're dead, that's all
m And I just thought, yeah, this country is a
(36:05):
hard country, you know. And it ended up being this
collage poem of all these voices, voices, my voice to
Dorothea Lang, Dorothea Lang's notebook voice, all the voices on
the side of the road, and less like an exact
theater play and more like this kind of symphony of voices,
(36:28):
and the poem is like a collage of voices that
all talk almost past each other in this You have
to believe me. I think it builds. I mean, I
think it's more it's kind of musical. And somebody said,
what would it be like if you actually had the
voices speaking, like if you made it into a play,
And this idea grew. A wonderful director approached me and
(36:55):
working with a projectionist who is creating this back this
kind of moving interactive backdrop of projected Lang images. So
it's a little bit like a surrounding immersive experience and
you'll sit there and it will be like Lang and
(37:16):
the poet and the people on the side of the
road are calling out to you, and meanwhile her images
are going by and you know, it's going to be
the ninetieth anniversary of the Works Progress Administration, which was
the government organization that funded her work, in the one
hundred and thirtieth anniversary of her birth. And my hope
(37:37):
is that a consortium of California museums is going to
come together and do this sort of re engagement of Lang.
And I guess the question is, here's a woman that
photographed shelterlessness, climate change, climate migration, and all of those
(37:58):
issues are with us today. Yeah, what can she teach us?
Speaker 3 (38:02):
What can we.
Speaker 2 (38:03):
Learn about ourselves by re engaging her? And also I
guess the bigger, biggest question is like what could art
do to be part of the repair? She was on
a government sponsored journey that had to do with all
kinds of gestures to buttress America, to build bridges, to
(38:26):
build high schools, to build oral histories, to let zorniil
Hirshston and Ralph Ellison have a paycheck while they did
amazing work on behalf of our country. And she was
part of that. And is are we at a different
moment where we need to talk about how can art
be part of the conversations towards repair that we need
(38:46):
to be having like yesterday now tomorrow, and so to me,
I think part of getting her voice out there and
her images out there is to help us ask ourselves
now what should we do?
Speaker 3 (39:04):
Absolutely?
Speaker 1 (39:05):
Yeah, now it's very that sounds like a very passion project.
And not wishing you all the best. You have a
potentative year in which you hope to see that.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
Come to life fall of twenty twenty five.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
Awesome, all right, we'll definitely be looking forward to that
amazing legacy of laying all right, well tests. This has
been such a great, great, great conversation and for folks
that are wondering, you know again, check out all tests
is amazing work.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
I'll test before we go.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
We have one final question for you on the poll
Speaks podcast.
Speaker 3 (39:37):
Tell me why do you need to get your words out?
Speaker 2 (39:43):
Because they feel itchy. If I don't, they actually like
hurt on the inside of my brain, I will wake
up and I'll be like that is like it feels
like having like a little do you know when you
listen to like get like an earworm, you know, like
a little bit of song and it's just stuck in
(40:04):
your head. That's kind of how it starts for me,
and you know, in a way nobody cares if you
write a poem or not, like you could just take
a break from a poem. But I don't know. I
think there you are suddenly in the presence of this
thing inside you that wants to be heard, and then
you start to say yes and you give it space
(40:26):
and literally though like I will feel like I have
something knocking around and I just have to get it
down and get it out, and that in that first
moment when I get it out onto paper, I really
don't care if it becomes a great poem or not.
I just had an itchy feeling of lots of language
in the in the you know, on the side underneath
(40:47):
my eyebrow or something, and it's like I gotta drain that,
all right, all.
Speaker 3 (40:53):
Right, I'll set her itch. That's what it is. That's
why she must get her words up, all right. Thank
you so much.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
Tests Now before we end and do tell us where
can folks check out.
Speaker 3 (41:04):
Off your amazing work.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
Any links for websites, social media, and just tell us
what is coming up next for you for folks to
look into for twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
Okay, well, I'm at Tessathon on Instagram. I would love
to connect with you there. I'm a little bit on Facebook.
I am no longer much into X and I haven't
dabbled in the other things yet, so I like to
keep it like a little rosy and positive on Instagram.
It does not you know. That is like the place
(41:33):
that I probably hang out the most. I just edited
a book of contemporary gardening poems or an Era of
Climate Change. It's called Leaning Toward Light Poems for Gardens
and the hands that tend them. If you are a gardener,
if you love the way microbes and pollinators and flowers
conspire to make our lives more beautiful, if you believe
(41:54):
in the radical abundance the plants can give, this might
be a book for you. If your mama is that person,
and it might be a good book for her. And
I just finished up a big tour, so this summer
I'm laying low working on new poems. But I'll be
out again in the world in the fall. And I
(42:15):
would love to meet you. And I'm really happy to
be able to talk to fellow writers over this podcast medium.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
Absolutely l Tests would love to meet you as well,
and everyone check out All Tests is amazing work.
Speaker 3 (42:30):
We'll have her links in the description.
Speaker 1 (42:32):
No matter what platform you're listening to this amazing podcast,
her links will be in the description box down below.
Our tests were so honored, Prilegion, thankful that you were
able to embrace us your amazing presence and words and
have this amazing conversation.
Speaker 3 (42:46):
Thank you so much for being a guest on the
Post Speaks podcast.
Speaker 2 (42:48):
Test Amanda, it was totally the joy was mine. Thank
you so much for this afternoon.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
Absolutely all right everyone again, check out all Tests is
amazing work, and check out the Pole Speaks podcast wherever
you listen to podcast all right, the live one
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