July 2021 Meeting Transcript: Postcolonial Love Poem

Brandon’s note: In the past couple months, I’ve shed light on some of the stories in Book Club’s community. The post below is what actually happens when the Club meets to share their thoughts, feelings and experiences about and around a given month’s selection. This transcript of our July 2021 meeting is lightly edited, only to give the reader more of the rhythm of the room’s speech.

Yahdon:

Good evening, everybody. Welcome to the Literary Swag Book Club. I am your host, Yahdon Israel. This is the seventh meeting of the year. I don't even know how many meetings we are in from 2015. I think we are like 66 or 67 or something like that, that many books. One of the things I'm... continuing to learn with something like a Book Club is like, you just continue to do the work, which is show up and make sure that this is... I make sure I'm doing the work, which is making sure y'all get y'all books. If not on time, y'all get them. And with that, just allowing us to continue to have these dope conversations about books.

Yahdon:

For people who are new, how many people are new? Raise your hand, if you, this is your first time to Book Club. We got Kirsten. Who else? We got Maggie? Who else? Jumi, This is your first time at Book Club, right? Not... Technically, yes and no. I saw you Chip... Just raise your hand for this, for this purpose.

Yahdon:

All right, so we got three new people. I always have people do a round of applause for the new members, whose first meetings... If you can unmute your cameras, because it's weird when you clap and then there's no sound. If you could just...

Yahdon:

Oh, Serafina, my bad. I'm sorry.

Yahdon:

Serafina's new, too, so like just, you know, give a clap for the new members. Welcome to the Book Club.

Yahdon:

So I'm going to give the spiel. I always give the introduction. I always give whether you've been a member for many years or this is your first meeting.

Yahdon:

The Literaryswag Book Club is a subscription service, based in Brooklyn. But it's a monthly book club where we get to discuss books and the reason why I created this Book Club six... Going on six years next month, September 24th, this year would make it six years since we first started, sine I first began Book Club. And the reason why I started the Book Club, because in all the literary spaces I was entering, I noticed literary spaces were not spaces that were particularly kind to readers.

Yahdon:

They were particularly kind to writers and practitioners and people who wanted to write, but they were not ones in which readers could really get to ask questions. So I would go out to a literary event and I would notice for an hour and a half event, the moderator and the writer would talk for 45 to an hour. And then they would open the floor at the most crucial point, which I found to be the most interesting moment was when they allowed the readers to ask questions. But yet that was always the space that got the least space and I was like, "What happened if we inverted that, and we gave the readers the floor and enabled us to have the discourse around the books that we read?"

Yahdon:

So I collaborated with Strand back in 2015 to create a space like that. And I remember the first book we read was Between the World and Me, which almost feels like a whole different world from the one we in now. And I remember them being very adamant about having a "big writer" come to lead the discussion. And I was like, "I don't want that, because I wanted their people to show up because they wanted to talk about the book. Not because they necessarily wanted to talk to the writers who would show up." And I really wanted to make it something that centered reader's experience and not the writers. And so that's what this Book Club ended up becoming was a space where the readers get to... We get to lead the discussion of how we read, what we're reading, and how we understand it.

Yahdon:

And this, I think that something I've struck is a sort of goal, because what we've built in six years as a community of people who, since six years, we never... In the pandemic, something I'm going to continue to be proud of is that in the pandemic, we have not missed a meeting yet. And I don't even know where we are in this pandemic. Like this is like those relationships that's non exclusive, but you don't know what it is. It's like, "I don't know if we in the pandemic or a post pandemic or whatever," but the fact of the matter is from March of 2020, till now we have yet to miss a meeting. And it just indicates the strength and the support and the belief that you all have. And like how important these conversations are to continue to talk about books and ideas and our experiences as a group and as a community. So I want to thank you.

Yahdon:

A layout for how the Book Club meeting goes. What usually happens as a way to get everybody discourse, my man, Randy is in the corner. He's in my corner. I don't know where you see him. My man, Randy's here. He, long time ago, when we were still meeting in person, he gave me an idea. He was like, "Yo, Yahdon, a lot of the people in Book Clubs, don't talk, we need to do a prompt."

Yahdon:

So what we always start the Book Clubs with is a prompt, just to get everybody talking at least once, because usually when a Book Club begins, I recognize that people have a different interaction. A lot of people like to listen to the ideas that unfold, that people share. And people's understanding of participation is different and I honor that, but the prompt is just the way to get to hear everybody's voice and for everybody get to just begin to meet everybody. We have a prompt. That's linked to the book.

Yahdon:

After the prompt where we do the introductions, you say your name, where you're based, and answer the prompt. Then we go into the discussion, which is an open forum discussion, that you can talk about anything. You can talk, you can connect it to books, your life, read... Movies. There is nothing that's off limits even to the point that something that's... I think, what is it? Like a unique thing about this Book Club is I'm very big on you don't have to read the book or finish the book to be a part of the discussion, but you do have to practice the sort of discernment of knowing when it is... Not acceptable, but when you should.... How and how you should share your... and express your idea, and the rigor of what happens when you express an idea that's not fully cooked.

Yahdon:

This is as, this is a room where we all come with fire. So if you come with a half baked idea, we're going to challenge you to really develop that idea. And that's what I love about this space is that we don't tell each other... What has yet to happen in this space is we've never told anybody... Me being the main person, I've never told anybody what they couldn't say, but I've led in saying, "What do you mean by what you're saying?" And what this allows for each of us to go deeper into those thoughts that sometimes we don't get to go into when we're at work or when we're with a partner, and all these different things. And one of the most difficult things as a book reader is when you've read a book that you love or even if you hate and you want somebody to talk to with, and you can't find that person who's read it.

Yahdon:

And so you spend time trying to give the person the book and they get the book, but then they don't read it. So this is also a space where, you know, presumably we're all on the same page, proverbially and meaning that you know we have at least read some of the book, if not all of the book, and that enables us to have a discussion about books. So after we have the open forum discussion, I conclude the evening with the conferment of the latest members of the meeting, and those are the people who find ways to connect the conversation, no matter where it goes back to the book, to remind us that a book club is nothing without the books. And then I announce the next book club space, and then we do something that has been a really great initiative at the end, where we do a good news segment where people just share the good news that they've experienced in the last month, from the last time we met.

Yahdon:

And that has been one of the most, I think, invigorating and just like replenishing moments with everything that everybody's dealing with is just hearing other people's good news. And you'd be surprised at the end of the meeting where people feel like they don't want to share, but then when they start seeing how excited people are getting about other people's good news, they go, "Well, damn it. You know, I, you know, I got a ticket knocked off today." Like it's just like a beautiful thing to see people get excited about, you recognize the gratitude that we have in life, which is like with all the loss that we've had in the last year, and all the things that could go wrong in life, it's beautiful when we can take pause to be, you know, gratuitous for the things that we might not have been gratuitous for otherwise.

Yahdon:

So, with that being said, let's jump into this meeting. So I picked this book, but you know, Postcolonial Love Poem. As I wrote in the email to everybody, when I picked it was, usually I do poems, poetry collections towards the end of the year, because it's like the year's winding down and I want to give a book with just less pages. But it doesn't mean that this is a book that demands any less rigor in reading it. And I would just want it to, and I wondered what would a book club meeting look like if we did poetry in the middle... Like, literally in the middle of the year, because July is the seventh month. So it was like, we got six and six. So I was like, you know what, let's do poetry in the middle of the year. And like, especially with, this being America's birthday year and we're... There's we got the embargo in Cuba going on.

Yahdon:

We have like, we still have Puerto Rico deliberating about statehood and independence and all these different things and just largely grappling with what it means to live in a colonial power and an Imperial power. I wanted to pick a book that could give us language of how to talk about and how to think through not just the colonial aspects of our society, but the post-colonial aspects of our society. Meaning what do we do with living in a post-colonial society on a personal level? And I thought that this poetry collection could get us to that.

Yahdon:

So today's prompt was, in the spirit of poetry, I am one of the first people who will admit always that poetry was difficult for me simply because I would read it like I read everything else, meaning if I read it on the first time and I didn't get it, it's like, "Well, maybe I'm not smart enough or maybe the writer didn't make sense." And then I had a gift a poet share with me that part of poetry is you're supposed to return to it, like a novel, like something you love. And so in returning to it, the prompt for today is in your reading of the poems, which poem did you return to the most and why?

Yahdon:

All right, so I'm going to start always... Oh, before we begin, there are some people who haven't done it. I want to make sure that we respect each other's identities and person...

Yahdon:

Respect each other's identities and personhood, so if you have not put into your chat name, your pronouns, please do so now. I'm going to do that as well. Just so when people are referring to people in the third person, we are all respecting each other. So, I'm going to lead it. Yahdon, based out of here in Brooklyn. I'm in the backyard right now. The poem I return to the most was just a poem on a context of logistics, and for me, it was Blood-Light. Not only because the language was beautiful, but because I was trying to figure out that did her brother stab her too, after she stabbed her father?

Yahdon:

I was trying to figure that out, and I kept reading it. So, that was the poem I return to because the language was suggestive, but I wasn't sure if it was actually saying what happened is what I read happened, or if it was just something that was figurative. But that was a poem that I returned to the most. I'm going to go down the line. Ashley, it's on you.

Ashley-Anna:

Me?

Yahdon:

Yeah, is there another-

Ashley-Anna:

Okay.

Yahdon:

Yeah, it's on you.

Ashley-Anna:

Awesome. Okay, so I'm in Miami. This will be the last meeting I'll be in Miami for, because I'm about to move to New York, because I'm excited. The one that I come back to the most is American Arithmetic. I really liked it. I want to put a little star on top because it was my favorite, but I just really liked that it was kind of to the point, but then also there's so much hidden beneath it. Like she's obviously talking about, which the whole book is about that, but like colonialism and all this, but in such a way that it's mathematical. I really, really liked that because you don't find that a lot in poetry. A lot of her poems are very verbose in some ways and very, very poetic, so I kind of liked that this one was less of that, but at the same time, that all at the same time. I said, "Same time," twice. But it was that poetic and poetic at the same time, and so I thought it was very unique.

Yahdon:

Thank you. Beth, what poem did you return to and why?

Beth:

Hi, I'm Beth from Philly, and the poem I returned to the most was Catching Copper. I return to it the most actually for comprehension. I have probably about two different versions of what it meant. I am so curious to actually contact her to find out what it truly meant, because I have at least two perspectives.

Yahdon:

Share those perspectives right now. Share them.

Beth:

Share my perspectives?

Yahdon:

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

Beth:

So, in the obvious poem, she said, "My brothers have a bullet." So at first I thought it was actually a true bullet. That was my first perspective. I was like, "They got a bullet?" And I've read the whole thing with having the concept of her brothers, just having this bullet, and this bullet went through so much and she had this perspective, or she pretty much explained what the bullet went through. And then I said, "No, I think it's a metaphor." I think the bullet is just... It's meaning something else, but it was so many different things I could put in the place of bullet that it could fit in. One, being an actual gun. They lose that bullet all the time. I was like, "Is it their wallet?" I had so many things that this bullet was in. Then I started to think, is this something that's non tangible. She really had me really trying to grasp the meaning of this poem.

Yahdon:

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yo, Brandon, it's on you. You available to jump on?

Brandon:

You took mine. This is Brandon. Virginia, currently.

Brandon:

Ight. If you don't know, I'm hoping somebody else in the club knows this, if her brother really stabbed her or not, but that was the one that I keep returning to. And I sent it to a couple of people and we all got the same, "I don't know who done it." So, that's my conundrum.

Yahdon:

All right. I feel you. Christina, it's on you. What poem you return to and why?

Christina:

Yes. I'm Christina in Jersey city. I actually only read the first two poems, so I didn't... I won't lie that I return to any of them. So, I guess just kind of listening in.

Yahdon:

Huge honesty. Christy, it's on you.

Christy:

I'm a little bit like Christina. I didn't read a whole lot. I've been preoccupied. I am normally from Pennsylvania, but right now I'm in North Carolina. It's the first time I left the state since the Dapper Dan meeting in New York. So, I've been preoccupied with leaving. But the lines that jumped out at me, I think were from American Arithmetic, when she says, "In an American room of 100 people, I'm Native American, less than one, less than whole. I'm less than myself." That, I've read over several times, even though I didn't read everything, but that stuck out to me.

Yahdon:

Thank you. Deni, what about you?

Deni:

Yeah, so I kept going back to Like Church on page 29, on third and 31. So, I recently moved to a really small city in Indiana, so I'm going through this like weird... Oh yeah, it's like a very close-minded strange place, so it's a really big culture shock to me. I feel like this one was, I don't know, I felt like it got me and it was just like right for the time of my life. So, I kept reading different lines and it just kept meaning different things and yeah, it was really awesome.

Deni:

I think you're muted.

Yahdon:

I'm muted. My bad. Dev, it's on you.

Dev:

Hey guys. These Hands, If Not Gods, and there's this one line, "Atlas of bone, fields of muscle," and I think, "One breast a fig tree, the other a Nightingale." I just love the idea of the Atlas of bone, fields muscle. That line, I don't know, it just... I kept coming back to it and thinking about all the different ways that took my mind and images, and yeah.

Yahdon:

All right. Thank you. Thank you. Diana, it's on you.

Diana:

Hello everyone. I'm in Brooklyn. I didn't get to finish the whole book, but I did really enjoy it. So, two of the poems that I kept going back to actually where The First Water Is The Body and the other one was Exhibits From The American Water Museum. She had this like beautiful way I think, of, in essence, making it so simple to see how she is a river, and her alignment with nature. Now she makes these sentences that are so simple yet so dense, and some sort of present her understanding of nature and the body in almost like a childlike way, but also in a... Not as in it's like remedial, but as in like it's both. It's like wonder and beauty with understanding her connection to nature. Yeah.

Diana:

Like when she was like, "I carry a river, it is who I am. This is not a metaphor." And every time she sort of compared herself to nature or water, the river, and then also turned it on itself too. "Even when it feels like I live in the desert along a dammed blue river, the only red people I've seen are white tourists, sunburned after staying out in the water too long." It's like a very... The way she observes is obviously highly observant, intelligent, many levels of depth to everything she's saying. But she presents it in a way that is, I think, sort of digestible in a way, but also a very powerful.

Diana:

I love the way she compares nature and water, and herself, and makes it a very... Something you could fall into and follow, I felt. And same thing with the Exhibits From The Water Museum. Her spacing and grammar, and the way that she uses line spacing, I thought was really powerful too, like the way that it always does seem fluid because of the grammar and spacing. That was another beautiful element that she did too. Okay, that's it.

Yahdon:

I appreciate you. I appreciate you. Eunice, it's on you.

Eunice:

Okay, there you go. So, the one that got me was the poetry on, "To kill, to take their water. To kill, to steal their water. Then tell them how much they owe." Well, their whole thing is back to what this whole book is about. The human consequences of control and exploitation. So, that was really powerful because she talked about water. I guess, taking their water, damming up their water and of course... Well, I mean, that was what... It was throughout the book, water. Water flowing through her body, and at the end of this it says, if you... Well, let me go back to this... Her-

Yahdon:

Which poem was that?

Eunice:

That was page 66, but she talks about water, water, water, water, and of course, at the end, how they were deprived of it. Right, that's 66, it's called 123 Marginal from BAA watermongers congressional records and redacted.

Yahdon:

Right. Hold on. Well I'm just trying to figure out... Hold on. I just want to make sure we're on 66. So, that was the poem that's titled Exhibits From The American Water Museum, just so everybody knows.

Eunice:

Yeah.

Yahdon:

Yeah, okay cool. Cool, cool.

Eunice:

So, I have to go back to... It's page 51, where she talks about, "My elder says cut off my ears and you will live. Cut off my hands, you will live. Cut off my legs, you still will live. Cut off my water, we will not live more than two weeks." That was powerful to me. So, based on this colonialism and the consequences of it. Yes, so-

Yahdon:

Yeah, thank you. What you brought up, I'm really curious about how people read this, reading Braiding Sweetgrass the month before.

Eunice:

I made the connection. I did make the-

Yahdon:

No, no. Yeah, I know. We're going to go into the meeting. I'm just-

Eunice:

Okay.

Yahdon:

I'm just planting the seed now so that we can talk about it later. Jackie, it's on you.

Jackie:

Hey, folks. Jackie, based out of San Francisco. Pronouns, she/her. The poem that I revisit is on page 19, it's called They Don't Love You Like I Love You. This one, to me, is... Maybe at least to me, it was more complex than I initially read it to be. That's why I had to kind of keep going back to it, because it seems the way that I kind of went about this and how I understand it, is that it's both about otherness, a longing to be loved by people who perhaps don't love you, understanding when enough is enough, a longing for ancestors. So, in particular, when she writes, "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, some one, some many who live because so many of mine have not, and further live on top of those of ours who don't." Then kind of referencing the love of people or from people.

Jackie:

But then also the love of an entity when she writes, "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 referring to the Yeah Yeah Yeah song. And then you can kind of go into like the actual lyrics of that song, which takes it to another level. Then even if you want to reference Beyonce's song too. So, there's just so much inner references within that poem that it took me a long time to process.

Yahdon:

Mm-hmm(affirmative). Thank you. Jake, it's on you homie.

Jake:

Jake in Brooklyn. Pronouns are he/him. I kept coming back to... I mean you mentioned the one about her brother stabbing her, but then there was also the, It Was The Animals, about her brother being like Noah in Noah's Ark. There's just something about some of these poems that I feel it's like. When I go to an art museum and look at abstract paintings, and people are telling me all the things they see, or like when people are drinking wine and telling me like all the notes they get, and I'm just sitting here like I'm completely lost. I read a couple of these like three, four times. I was like, "I still have no idea if this is real or if this is like metaphor," like what's going on. So, the brother one, especially, I kept coming back to just completely lost.

Yahdon:

Yeah. One thing I know is her brothers are some wild boys. That's one thing I was able-

Jake:

Yeah.

Yahdon:

Her brothers, they're in the streets. Jumi, it's on you.

Jumi:

Hi, everybody. I'm Jumi. I'm coming from Las Vegas, Nevada. The poem that I re-read for interest actually, more than, I guess interest and curiosity can feel like the same thing. For me, it was Skin-Light, and the reason I went back to Skin-Light is because I was just like, "Yo, what the fuck is going on in here?" Because as a reader, I'm very naturally attracted to structural changes. I'm really interested when writing is making a formal breakage of rules, and I could feel the breaking in this poem, structurally. And I was rereading it just trying to understand it, because there were certain facets of its structure that are unlike the other poems in this book. I mean, Diaz does these line breaks that are really fascinating to me because they resemble, to me, the shape of a river or the shape of a bloodstream, and she is trying to mirror that experience in the form, so that it follows the function.

Jumi:

I'm really interested in how form and function work in tandem together in the text, and those choices, why making those choices this way. But then also, I mean, there's some interesting other stuff like the dashes and the colon. Is that what it's called, a colon or semicolon? I don't know, fuck punctuation rules. But I'm like, "All right." In every stanza, Diaz makes the decision to incorporate that. Why? Like, "My whole life I have obeyed it-" Then we see it after, place, court, another, and then it bridges split bodies, and I'm wondering, is this supposed to be operating as a bridge or kind of tendon because it's called Skin-Light. I was thinking about, what does that mean to her? I was thinking a lot of the breakage... Like light enters when something is being...

Jumi:

Light enters as a breakage. Light doesn't come into a room, it breaks into a room. It floods it. It doesn't slowly come in. So, there are these interruptions or strong entrances and exits that are part of like the movement of water, in my mind. Water and blood being the same things. She does a lot of different structures throughout the book. But this one is one that stood out to me because it's unlike any of the others, and she puts it in the front of the book. So I'm like, "I wonder why she did that. So, that I wouldn't have too many expectations about what form can be in this book?" I get used to reading things in these traditional stanza forms. I'm getting used to that. Blood-Light is like that. These Hands, If Not Gods, Catching Copper. Even American Arithmetic. It has a lot going on in content but by that point, I'm beginning to have these expectations of how to read the book. The Skin-Light disrupting that, saying you need to stop thinking you know what's what, because this is not a Western text.

Yahdon:

Thank you. I just want to lay out for anybody who feels intimidated by following her. This is a woman who writes books, so don't feel any pressure to follow that.

Jumi:

I'm sorry, am I being too intimidating?

Yahdon:

No, no, no. I know the Book Club members are just... Jumi, you did what you're supposed to do, which is talk your shit. I just want to lay out that your practice is what enables you to come to the conversation in the ways that you do, for everybody else.

Jumi:

Oh. I mean, I also just

Yahdon:

No, no, no. You.

Jumi:

... for most people? That's why I feel like my point of reading is always just a little bit like way over there, because like in, of structure a lot, and less so much about content. Or I'm curious how form impacts content, like the relationship between the two, and what she wants us to do because it did confuse me, but in a good way. I was like, "Why is she doing this?" What is-

Yahdon:

You know I'm excited to get into that. I want to make sure we... I want to come back to the, "Why do poets do what they do?" No, don't apologize. I just want to make sure we get everybody so we can get deeper into the sort of discourse that you're leading. Kenya, it's on you.

Kenya:

Unmute myself. Okay. So, the poem that I picked is on page 32. It's Wolf OR-7. I think this poem is one that I had to kind of come back to because I had skipped the first part that's in the italics, which gives you the context of what the poem is about, and I had gone straight into the poem. So, unless you read what she puts at the very beginning, the poem won't make sense.

Yahdon:

So why'd you skip it?

Kenya:

I don't know. I think I just went straight... It's kind of like the layout, like what Jumi was saying. It's the layout, sometimes you have to kind of train your eye. It wasn't intentional. Skipping it wasn't intentional. I just went straight into where I saw the un-italicized part of the poem.

Yahdon:

Right.

Kenya:

I picked this one because I feel like in this poem, she really emphasized on what happens to the animals as well. Not just the people and their food source, and things like that, but in the poem, she's emphasizing what's happening to what is essentially the last living breed of this type of wolf. At least, that's how I interpreted it. And what I think is so sad is that this was a wolf that had kind of strayed away from the pack. They found it and they eventually killed it. The language and the word, and the verses that she used to describe this wolf is literally universal. The language is very cosmic in a way. And as a Pisces, anything that's about the universe and just imaginary stuff, and just kind of like love language and stuff like that is very beautiful to me.

Kenya:

I think what's most sad is that they kill this male, but they leave behind the female. So, it ends up being the end of that species. At least that's how I interpreted it, reading it a few times. So, it's not just emphasizing what happens to the people, but what happens biologically to the animals, to the land and things like that. It's just so sad that they killed this animal. Not that I'm vegan, nothing against people that are vegan or vegetarians, I'm not. I eat, sorry. But they killed this animal for the sake of it just being part of a government bounty. There was no point in killing this animal, other than to maybe put it in a museum or something, which I thought was really sad. So, that's why I picked the poem, but I mainly picked it because of the language that she used to describe this one animal, and not just saying that it's just a regular gray wolf.

Kenya:

No, she goes into really explicit detail on how rare and how... I think she actually used the word charted, where she says, "Some things can not be charted. It's kind of like, there are some things that you can't really put a price on, that you can't replace. It's completely irreplaceable, and that's how she views this animal. It was irreplaceable. I think to a lot of Native Americans, who have a very deep connection with nature and the power of animals and animal spirits, I think it's very, very similar to how they think of animals in that way. So, she gets it.

Yahdon:

Okay, thank you. Thank you. Kirsten.

Kirsten:

Hi, my name is Kirsten. Thank you for having me. She/her. I'm in New York. The poem that I returned to the most was, I share Jake's answer, It Was The Animals. The reasoning, because the first time that I read this poem, I actually didn't read it. I heard it. I heard Natalie Diaz herself read it at, I think it was Best American Poetry, at the new school, five years or so ago. So, having heard her read it and then coming across it in the book, about three quarters of the way through, it stopped me because I didn't expect to see it in here. The imagery; the sharpness and the violence of the imagery in it, alongside the tenderness that she observes her brother's detachment from reality with. I think that sort of juxtaposition, that combination of those two things, is so startling.

Kirsten:

The one area that always... That the name comes from too, he... For everyone who isn't familiar with this one or doesn't remember, it's page 58. I definitely very much recommend it. But he brings in the end of a picture frame, which he believes is part of Noah's Ark because there is an inscription on it, and it's just a logo from the picture frame company. And he's saying, "You should read it. But, O, you can't take it no matter how many books you've read. He was wrong. I could take the Ark. I could even take his marvelously fingers. The way they almost glittered. It was the animals, the animals I could not take. They came up the walkway into my house, cracked the doorframe with their hooves and hips, marched past me into my kitchen, into my brother, tails snaking across my feet before disappearing, like retracting vacuum cords into the hollows of my brother's clavicles, tusks scraping the walls reaching out for him."

Kirsten:

It's just the imagery is so sharp in that. So, that was the one I returned to.

Yahdon:

Thank you. Laura, it's on you.

Laura:

Hello, can you hear me? Okay. Hi, I'm Laura. She/her. I live in Brooklyn now. Poetry is a little difficult for me to read. They always look like jigsaw puzzles to me. They're non sequential. So, I sort of like tend to grab text and latch onto it. I thought a lot about, The First Water Is The Body, which starts on page 46. I don't have anything for amazingly profound to say. Since the pandemic started, I've spent a lot of time here in New York and then also out in Wyoming, where my family has a home. I've had some health issues, so I've had to renegotiate my relationship with my body, and doing that out there has brought up sort of like my relationship to the land as a white woman, and occupying native spaces. Like being near a national park, and trying to experience my body in a new way, but also understanding that the way that the national parks are a gift from Teddy Roosevelt or whatever. It's like not maybe... Like not true.

Laura:

So, there's just a lot of language here that reflects some of my, not dis-ease, but dis-ease with my own body and with the land, and the spaces that I occupy and... Okay, I'll stop talking now. Thank you.

Yahdon:

It's all good. It's all good. I appreciate you. Molly, it's on you.

Molly:

Okay. I'm going to choose the same poem as Jackie. They Don't Love You Like I Love You, which when I first saw it I was like, "Oh, I have listened to that song so many times and I-"

Yahdon:

Hold on. Hold on. You're coming in choppy. I don't know if you... Molly. Okay, I'm going to type it in the chat.

Molly:

...kind of a mode, and... Oh, okay. Can I write it?

Yahdon:

Sure. Yeah. Yeah, let's do that. Let's do that. Let's do that. As you're typing. Maggie, it's on... Did I skip Maggie? Maggie, I'm sorry.

Maggie:

It's okay. Laura was saying how poetry is hard for her, and one of the things, you just hit on the tip I got from someone. I suggest as you're reading it, highlight the phrases and the lines that stand out to you, so that when you go back, that helps you pull more out of it. Almost like you're leaving little breadcrumbs for yourself. Like when you're listening to a song and you think, "Oh my God, that lyric just hit." I felt like this whole book was like that. Her turns of phrase are insane. I think the poem that stood out to me, which I could have underlined half of it, was That Which Cannot Be Stilled.

Maggie:

I feel like any... There's a lot of musicians who would have killed to write any one of these many stanzas. It's also maybe one of the most personal poems because I felt like she was saying a lot, but sometimes how she said it was a little oblique. I don't know. But the, "All my life I've been working to get clean, to be cleanest, to be good in America. To be clean as the grind." Just every little bit of this. If you just slow down and read it is just... I'm just jealous of this poem.

Yahdon:

Thank you. Thank you on that.

Nuvia:

...You're going to have to skip me..because I...

Yahdon:

All right, wait. Hold on. You're coming in choppy too. Sorry. Why am I apologizing? You don't need to apologize. No one needs to apologize. Just type your chat. I don't know if your reception... But just type your answer in the chat. Randy, it's on you big dawg.

Randy:

Hey, y'all. I'm Randy, Brooklyn, New York. I will say the essay that really stuck out to me or like-

Yahdon:

Did you say essay?

Randy:

I'm sorry. I'm thinking about my writing. A poem that stuck out to me is the, Isn't The Air Also A Body, Moving? For me, poetry is like swimming. Sometimes I'm above water, sometimes I'm going down. It depends on how deep we're in the pool. I felt like I was in the deep end this time, grabbing the wall. So, I can't really speak to... I can't say anything profound. I can tell you how I felt reading this. This was like one of those poems where you feel like she's...

Randy:

I don't know. I felt like she was using air, the element of air, to break the idea of words put together to make meaning, and then using words to shape air. I don't know, it's just something that I always came back trying to find the answer to, like an equation where you see the equation on the board, you see the answer, but you don't understand how we got to that answer. So, just kind of rereading it over and over until I get it. But that's the one for me. That was the one for me.

Yahdon:

Thank you, brother. Ricca, it's on you.

Ricca:

I was going to talk about, They Don't Love You Like I Love You, because I connected with the lyrics so much, but I feel like Jackie and Molly said a lot of the things I was going to say. So, I want to talk a little bit about Ode To The Beloved's Hips. This woman can write a damn sexy poem, and I really appreciate that. It is so sexy. But I love how it's erotic and romantic, and I feel like it's really hard to strike a balance between those two things, right? It's like so often, one or the other, and I think it's really hard to do both. But also, there's a Star Wars reference in it and nerd meme, got really excited about it. So, I'm just going to read this one bit.

Ricca:

"O, constellation of pelvic glide. Every curve, a luster, a star. More infinite still, your hips are kosmic, are universe. Galactic carousel of burning comets and big, Big Bangs. Millennium Falcon, let me be your Solo. O, hot planet, let me circumambulate. O, spiral galaxy, I'm coming for your dark matter."

Ricca:

Also, I'm just wondering if anyone has any idea what circumambulate... Because that's just a word I've never seen before. And I'm wondering if that's a word she made up because I respect that a lot, but I also... Yeah.

Jumi:

I think she made it up.

Ricca:

Yeah, but I like it. I like it.

Jumi:

Made it up.

Ricca:

Yeah, but I like it. I like it. Anyway, this is the answer

Yahdon:

That's that shit you say in high school when you hear a fire poem. And it's like, you like, Ooh, I'm going to marry this person. Like, I don't know what they just said, but it sounds enthralling, I'm enthralled.

Ricca:

Yeah. I like that. Anyway. She can write a sexy poem. I love it. Ricca. She/her live in New York.

Yahdon:

Thank you, Ricca. Um Serafina? Only because you got the S are you, which? Serafina? Are you with us? Oh, okay. But you muted. You muted. Hold on. I just sent you a request to unmute.

Serafina:

Can you hear me okay?

Yahdon:

Yeah. You're good.

Serafina:

What about now?

Yahdon:

No, you was good. You good!

Serafina:

Okay. Okay. Great. So Serafina or I go by Sera, she/her. And I'm in Southern California, with a puppy trying to climb on my lap. Several people mentioned the first water is the body. And that was the one that I kept coming back to. I also felt like it connected for me with Manhattan is a Lenape word. I'm not sure if that's pronounced correctly. It probably isn't. But I think what's really resonated with me, is this idea of names and belief being packaged behind words. And then the words of conquerors being layered on top of those names of places or rivers or towns.

Serafina:

I think that this has resonated with me personally, because this year I connected with biological family that I didn't know I had. I discovered I had a birth certificate that had a birth name. I didn't know I had. Just the sense of discovering pre-verbal belief and desire, and this sense of continuity between first water and the way that water enables our bodies to function and the way that there's this just sorrowful, rootedness in the land, as well as the sense of freedom and just fulfillment from understanding how rivers work. The other thing that stood out to me about it was the idea of a river, having rights, like a human being, which is something that legally corporations have in the U S, they're treated like a person, even though they can outlive us a real long time.

Serafina:

And it's, I think the whole collection, which I feel like I need to reread to even begin to learn more of what's behind the words and the imagery. There's so much sorrow, and there's also somehow so much hope. This idea of, we can know these many names for the same place, or the same person, or the same tribe, or the same river, but together we can find something. I hesitate to use the word resurrection or redemptive, but something new that integrates this land and the way that we live on it. And the way that we meet each other as first water comes back to its origin.

Yahdon:

Thank you. Sarah it's on you.

Sarah:

First. I just, I love all of the poems about the brothers. I have brothers and I've lost brothers. So I just appreciated that as a way to kind of connect and process. But the poem I keep returning to is "That Which Cannot Be Still", the first line. "Ash can make you clean as alkaline as it is a grief". I felt like it was really striking, but this section towards the end is I'll just read it.

Sarah:

"Undisturbed each quartz particle in its place, but a baby is crying in the green wooden crib". Also green. Can we talk about green in this book. "Where someone is fighting someone else, a quavering radio, a distempered dog, our sorrow for silence, motion then doing soft with my hands, and please, which is no implication for peace. I stepped lightly. I'm holding my breath, maintaining to keep it off. I'm shifting. Then it happens through what was perfect of carbon rebels shifts up, tangled rebar torn fences, scramble, sheet metal, oxidizing spiking, breaking the sand like it's my own skin. I feel the junk of it all in my body arising wild. I can't stop the happening. The resting is in me". Right it gets dark. And then she's like, "like how a deep wound heals, glimmered open". I just appreciated that. Like, you know that flip.

Yahdon:

All right. Thank you. Tonya? Tonya you with us? Hi Betty. I know you came in on the backend, Betty, you with us?

Betty:

Yup. Hello. Well we're answering like what? Which one sat with us the longest?

Yahdon:

No, you said what?

Betty:

We're answering what? Like what poems stuck with us?

Yahdon:

No, no, no. Which one you find yourself returning to and why?

Betty:

I am Minotaur on page 55. Cause this bitch was speaking some truth in this goddamn poem. I was like girl! Read my entire life and especially the line, "like any desert, I learned myself by what's desired of me and I am demoed by those desires". I read that like 20 times and I was like, yes, that line. I needed it. I needed it in this moment. And I appreciate her for it.

Yahdon:

Okay. Thank you, Tonya. You with us. I see you turned your camera. Which poem you returned to and why?

Tonya:

Yeah. I'm from Boston. She/her. Just because today I made the mistake of reading the comments on the status of Simone Biles, leaving the Olympics competition. I came to the Mustangs, about her brothers, her brother being a basketball player. And that resonated because of how it, I think, summed up where we can be Americans on teams, but when we're not on teams we're African-Americans, or indigenous or Puerto Rican or whatever. So that's what I came away with because at the end it says, I'll just take off my glasses. "We ran up and down the length of our lives. All of us lit by the lights of the gym toward freedom. B Mustangs are those nights. We were forgiven for all we would ever do wrong".

Yahdon:

Was that it? I don't know what you about to, I don't know if you was about to...

Tonya:

I just wanted to include that, to explain what I, hopefully explain where I was coming from with that.

Yahdon:

Just content re contextualize the reading of the poem or what you were saying.

Tonya:

So with Simone Biles leaving from the Olympics, I made the mistake of reading a lot of the comments made by folks who were not happy with her leaving like she was not American. And, and I was saying with this poem, to me, it showed how her brother is a Mustang. Well, a member of this community. And at the end, that's the only way you can be recognized by being a part of the status quo. And I was late getting to the comments on Simone Biles, some people saying she's not American because she's left the Olympic competition and is now African-American. And that she's un-American, it's sort of Toni Morrison. She said everyone's hyphenated except for white people And then so on.

Yahdon:

Right. All right. So everybody you know, we hope everybody got to go. So now this is one of my favorite parts is just an open forum discussion about the poems themselves. Something I was thinking about when I was reading these poems is in many ways, the title of the idea of what postcolonial means of being such a larger framework, which extends beyond a single continent, but multiple continents, but then at the same time, how intimate the poems were and what they documented. I was thinking about this sort of grappling with, I guess, the political as a larger framework and how the political is personal. I think that with the frame, what is it? The quote is, the personal is political, but this was a poetry collection that made me think about the political is personal of how politics plays itself out into personal interactions with human beings every day.

Yahdon:

So what I got from this collection, a lot was how politics, the history of, and I asked this, I think this was at the point that I think you spoke Eunice about, what it made me think about was, if y'all had made any connections between last month's reading of Braiding Sweetgrass and this month's reading? Because, Robin Wall Kimmerer did such a, I think, singular job of connecting, how can I say this? Over the course of the time I've been reading. And this is just as a personal, as a human being and my own upbringing of not really understanding the implications of what policies mean on a personal body. And only after reading many books about policy and how it impacts personal movement, warmth of other suns.

Yahdon:

This was like, I've been thinking about how policy impacts our ability as people, individuals, how we interact with one another, because so much of my life personally, I've been raised to think that, that shit don't matter, quote, unquote, like politics is that's whatever we believe in God. Cause that's the thing I was raised in. So like now that I'm understanding policy as a real thing, and that policy has an impact on how individuals carry out their interactions with everyday life. I was looking at the poems and looking at these moments where even in the poem that I had identified, which was the poem, hold on one second, "The Blood Light" poem, what policies were in place that enabled that interaction between a son and a father to occur in the way that it did.

Yahdon:

Not to say that this is something that y'all have to think about, but that was just something I was thinking about. Not when the personal becomes political, but when does the political become personal? Because so much of her work is about sort of doc, sort of seeing this is the vestige of a colonial world. Much of what she's living with and living in is what is the vestige of colonialism. And then the last thing I'll say before I take it to Jake is, what points are sort of from my own. And I'm reading it. What parts are just the person and their own agency and what parts are actually informed by policy?

Yahdon:

Maybe it's not just as simple as it's one of the other, but it's, at what point does one become the other and at what point is one-one? One meaning when is it just oh, this person just didn't like their father and he just wanted to harm him. Versus how could colonialism inform this sort of like what James Baldwin called growing up in the Western world gives you this despise for your father that you have.

Yahdon:

It's very hard to kind of know, maybe this man is then like his own father and maybe this could have happened before colonialism. And I find myself grappling with when is, what does that play when? Jake and then Jackie.

Yahdon:

Before you talk before you talk, Betty, thank you. You always catch me. If you want to say something, raise your hand with the raise your hand icon. If you can't find that just type an exclamation point in chat and I'll call on you, Jake it's on you.

Jake:

Yeah. I mean you tied it back to Braiding Sweetgrass, but I even thought of this as it's kind of in a three book arc kind of, of leftover or Collector of Leftover Souls into Braiding Sweetgrass. Cause you had in the Collector of Leftover Souls, you had the family who had been displaced off of their little island of land and they had to move their home and we're losing it. So it's like the displacement and disconnect from land and displacement of people who cared so deeply and had such an attachment to the land to be replaced by people who come in and have no relationship to the land. It's just a place of land and it gets destroyed. There was the environmental aspect that came into it too, that played through Braiding Sweetgrass and into today.

Jake:

Thinking through that, I don't think you can disconnect it from policy, like we were saying, it has to be there, but the environmental lens of it, really stood out to me, and of people who just have to stand by and kind of have been displaced by policy that they didn't create. Power that wasn't created, and have no say over what's going on and really still have the answers, but can't, aren't being listened to. So just the helplessness of that really stuck with me when I thought back of these last three books.

Yahdon:

And the that being what? Just before I go to Jackie, just so I'm clear

Jake:

The helplessness of having been displaced from your land, recognizing the power and the need to take care of the land and the water, I guess I'm saying land, land and water and just natural resources and recognizing that the people who displaced you now have no care of it are just destroying the land and water and not taking any of kind of the ways that you were living and the ways that you were taking care of that land.

Yahdon:

Yeah that's negative shit. Jackie.

Jackie:

So the poem that stood out to me in the regard of policy and the way it influences life is "Running Gun", which is on page 23, because it's one of the few poems in here that's reflecting on childhood. When you're a child, your semi-autonomous as an individual, you're often influenced by your parents or some other entity, in which case like for this it's life on a reservation, life isolated from the rest of the United States in some regards, except for these moments here, where she's talking about these basketball games that she used to play with her cousins and her friends and her brothers against the white kids, right. They'd go under the highway and play in these other courts. She even throws in the word enemy, and so to have that kind of precursor to have that understanding that's built on perhaps like enemy in terms of a competitor and the game of basketball, but it's clearly founded on all of those who have experienced life before her, which is informed by policy.

Jackie:

It's informed by forcing people onto reservations and isolating them from resources, whether that is economic resources, it's water, it's electricity, et cetera, and other kinds of infrastructure. I mean, it carries so much sadness and I've read like Sherman Alexei in the past and it feels really similar to their writing too. Even though it ends with these, these words, "while they slept, we played our dreams", and she writes about being able to beat these kids in this game. It doesn't really matter because in the end they're still living in, I understand it to be pretty abject poverty and still not really breaking through at that moment and stuck on the reservation as children. Even later into adulthood and so I just think that kind of common theme and tragedy really runs deep and is influenced of course by policy.

Yahdon:

Hm. Okay. I like the way to hands are going up. Ricca, Betty, then Jumi.

Ricca:

I mean, you had originally asked when does policy become personal? I feel like for any marginalized group, but particularly for black and indigenous Americans, there's just so many policies that directly affect people. And Jackie, you were talking about life on the reservation, but even just the requisition of land and Kenya had brought up the Wolf poem and I wanted to chime in, but I didn't want to seem explaining or anything, but there was a government program where wolves were killed on purpose in order to preserve livestock, right? Because like wolves eat cows and other livestock. And in order to help farmers, the government killed off all the wolves, and now we have an overpopulation of deer and an overpopulation of deer ticks, which directly affects many of us.

Ricca:

It's all these decisions that affect some people more than others, but ultimately are sort of detrimental to all of us. Right? The Wolf is example, the water too, especially in the West, the way that people have the relationship that people in the Western part of the country have to water and how scarce it is and how precious it is. But, and yet, like so many people still insist on having their stupid ass green lawns that they water every day, despite living in a place where green grass is not really natural to the environment. It's just all emblematic and symptomatic of sort of this ownership that white people in this country have had over sort of everything and how the policies that have been created just sort of are detrimental to everyone, but in particular to a native population like hers and the perspective that she's writing from.

Yahdon:

Hmm. Betty.

Betty:

So I have two thoughts. First is the importance of water in this collection, right? And her way that she continuously brings it up like many people. The first water is the body. That poem is everything. And the way that she says "so far I have said the word river in every stanza, I don't want to waste water. I must preserve the river in my body". Then on page 69, she says, "I'm fluent in water. Water is fluent in my body. It spoke my body into existence". For indigenous peoples water is crucial, right? That's why in 2021 we're still fighting for rights to have pipelines not be built on indigenous land. Like for example, the line three battle that continues to happen in Anishinaabe land. I believe it's happening. It's in Edmonton, Alberta, this Canadian company wants to come in and just build on and continue to build.

Betty:

It's been happening since the 1960s. So it was an ongoing, just wanting to dispose people of their water rights. I think showing the connection for their, indigenous peoples, some of them that are connected to the water that it, depending on what tribe refer to themselves as water peoples. So it's by wanting to build this pipeline on the water, you're saying fuck your rights. Right? Screw everything. My money, my rights. Does this company matter more than your rights as the person that was here first on this land, I think that's a political undertone here and forever, right? The colonizer it's like what they say goes, it's never about what, the people that have been here since the beginning of time and what matters for them. It's just about getting more money and screw the land. And the people let's arrest them, let's hurt them, because the water and what we'll be able to gain from it monetarily is what matters. I'm not even going to share the second point, I'll come back to that. But that's just, what is getting me mad.

Yahdon:

We're going to come back to it. We will come back to it. Jumi and then Diana.

Jumi:

So I was thinking about the personal is political question. There were other things I was thinking about, but to answer your question Yahdon. I want to talk about something that hasn't been talked about yet, which is the presence of illness in the text, and I was also thinking about how this work is in conversation with her previous collection, because the previous collection was called, "My Brother Was An Aztec", and there was a lot of poems, about brothers in here. I was thinking actually earlier about Beth's point about the bullets and the relationship between the bullets and the brothers, and like, why is that? And for one thing, the poem that moved me the most, or I felt myself personally reacting as a reader was the Polaroid Cameras one on page 75. "Cranes, Mafioso's, and a Polaroid camera". It just, it was just heartbreaking.

Yahdon:

In what ways for you.

Jumi:

Well, for one thing to me, I interpreted this as a brother who is struggling with mental illness, the delusional chain of thinking, and that it's not the first time that the speaker has received this phone call, just because of the tone of the poem has this acclimated voice to it. There is no reflecting on the heartbreaking nature of this brother who believes in something that the speaker doesn't believe, knows isn't true, but still operates in that line of thinking. That poem tied me back to Blood Light. I was thinking about Blood Light as the brother suffering from a delusion or the brothers suffering from a trauma response. Then I was thinking, you know is DIA's making, speaking to addiction here and the throes of addiction as the disease and how addiction lives in the blood and how blood is another type of water. Then I was thinking as well about how water in the body can be its own.

Jumi:

I was kind of pushing myself far here, but I was thinking about, because there's so much about land and the relationship with land and water, but the body is another type of land. The body is another type of water. So what is that relationship to ourselves. There's just so much doubling of meanings in regards to what water means, both literally and figuratively. I mean, there is that, that illusion to that she makes in one of the other poems about Toni Morrison saying that water has memory. So what does that mean? Not just in the political sense, but in the psychological sense and the trauma that comes from colonization of the body. But if we think about I mean, I was thinking about Indian reservations and one of the biggest issues plaguing these communities is addiction and alcoholism. Why is that because of certain policies have been put into place leading to skyrocketing unemployment and how that comes through in the form of her brother. I think it's a deliberate choice that it's, the brother shows up. Not that many times, right. When he does, it's always incredibly personal.

Jumi:

The first poem is Blood Light. It says up in here, my brother has his knife in his hand, he has decided to stab my Bible, stab my father, excuse me, I have a dyslexia. This is already crazy. This is already taking a very, the image of the father versus the brother and how they seek to dismantle each other and how she does. And then the expectation that he dismantles her. It's part of the lineage. And I don't know, I have a lot of thoughts about this.

Yahdon:

It's not, this is why book club exists. I'm going to come back to it. I want to address what you're saying. Diana real quick. Not real quick, not to rush you, but like it's on you.

Diana:

I was like, I don't know if I can follow that up. There's so many great points you brought up Jumi. Can I bow out? I'll come back later. No. I think in many beautiful ways you brought up some of the profound points and also to the point of how our policy does in essence, separate us from our body. I think one of the things that Natalie's poems kept bringing back is that we are not separate from everything. Everything around us is not a resource. It is part of who we are. I thought a lot of that was so profound within all of her water poems, and also in the way that she structured, of showing it as not this formal structure always and breaking up the way that we read it to make it as almost more interactive and more present to the page, of how it moves and also how we move through the page and how we move through what she's expressing by not getting caught into this.

Diana:

Then the line is just going to end this way and just have this expecting way of how it's formatted. So we just sort of glaze over it. In regards to how we separate ourselves from the land through our policies, even not understand that land is something that we can own. Like I went away recently to place in Maine and it was this small island and I would go on a trail and start to explore. And every time you thought you'd go to a certain place to go look further, it's private sign, private sign, half of the island was private property.

Diana:

So what is the point of this place? I can only stay in this one box, everything's private, but it's another very visual reminder of the fact of how we separate ourselves from the land. And another way to detach from that to feel attached to it without realizing through all of Natalie's poems. You realize there is no detachment from water, from land, from air, from anything, and when you do that, you're detaching yourself from yourself once again. She constantly brings it back in such a beautiful way through both her structure and her words of how we should. Yeah. How it's a loss to do that. How we're losing ourselves.

Yahdon:

You know something as you're talking, I was thinking about also in many ways how, the violence is something that's documented between the men and the family and how it plays out. The entire time I'm reading the way the brothers show up, and I'm just thinking about this whole, like I said, the James Baldwin dynamic of what did he, he talked about white supremacy making you hate your father because you have this framework in which your father is supposed to be the most powerful person in the world. Then you have to grapple with the way in which your father is at the mercy of white supremacy and white men and all these different things. So you end up despising your father. Then what does that end up looking like, besides you trying to kill your father?

Yahdon:

There's just parts of me that when I'm thinking about these poems of the ways in which in many ways as a poet, Natalie is both interlocutor and witness of what's happening, but not necessarily in my reading of the poems, a participant in the madness that she's witnessing. I was curious about if, one of the things I think that has been made very apparent in any poetry collection, we've read whether it'd been this and there was another collection that some of you may not have been present for, but you might have read on your personal reading was Layli long soldier. Whereas we read that I think a year and a half ago, but then we also read what book was that? Jenny, Jenny, Jenny Xie's Eye Level.

Yahdon:

I'm even thinking about just even as a person who like most of the culture collections I've picked has been by women and how that, what role, how in reckoning and identifying the ways in which certain things unfold in the course of what you're witnessing, how sometimes the language sometimes poetry is necessary to describe the thing that's happening, because what is happening is actually not as simple as what's in front of you.

Yahdon:

So as a person who is learning to both read poetry and quote unquote, main poets would resist this verb, but would understand it. I'm trying to understand what a poet is actually naming and, or trying to bring language to. Jumi. Your hand is up again. So I'm going to go back to you.

Jumi:

Oh man. Well, I was about to change the subject. Is that okay?

Yahdon:

I mean, if you want to change the subject, change the subject.

Jumi:

Okay. Y'all, let's talk about the sex in this book, Natalie Diaz is crazy.

Jumi:

What about the sex in this book? Natalie Diaz is crazy. I'm shook all the way. Ode To The Hips, I was like, "Oh shit. I can see the vulva in here." She doesn't hold back. She names the different parts. I felt like as I was eating a woman out, I was also thinking about the anatomical terms for all of the landscapes I was covering.

Yahdon:

Oh, we going there? Okay.

Jumi:

I mean, it really goes into it. Most people will be like, “Oh, I feel so hot and bothered,” but were not thinking about the labia. And she just brings this atomic level of tension to the body. But not just in terms of it being an anatomical figure, right? Like the Vitruvian Man. It has that feel to it in the language she uses, but also this language of desire that is not so much about the pleasure of desire, but the feralness and the wildness of sexual liberation. I was, I was thinking because so... Not just in Ode To The Hips.

Yahdon:

Let's take us to the page you on?

Jumi:

i'm sorry that I'm jumping around.

Yahdon:

No, no, don't apologize. You don't got to apologize. Just bring us to the page you on.

Jumi:

Okay. Oh, yeah. 37, right? We got this biblical language that's paying homage to the body. "Infinity of blessed trinity, communion of pelvis, sacrum, femur. The body's Bible opened up his good news gospel." Then she had this, "bone butterfly, bone wings, bone Ferris wheel, bone basin, bone throne..." "At night your legs, love, are boulevards leading me beggared and hungry to your candy house, your Baroque mansion." I want to be a Baroque mansion. And then she had some lines that would... This was, I felt, like worshiping at the altar of sexual desire, but then she has other poems that will do a little wink. She called her throat a velvet tunnel. I was like, that is...

Yahdon:

All right now. Yeah. I saw that. I was like, "Yeah." I was like, "Okay. All right."

Jumi:

I was like, "Okay. Get happy." Like, "Whoa."

Yahdon:

I might have to slide in DMS. You know, this was what's going on with this velvet tunnel you speak of, what's happening there?

Jumi:

Yeah. There's some other writers that make me think of her. I think of Garth Greenwell in this way. I feel like Natalie Diaz is kind of doing the same thing.

Yahdon:

Yeah.

Jumi:

It's a trip.

Yahdon:

You know, as you bring this up, something that I've always been curious about is like, I think that poetry is one of the few genres that really do the work of cultivating language around how we think about the sexuality of our bodies. And there's novels I've read that sex is described as real... Like, it's just like, "He entered her" and it was like, "What? This sounds really like borderline, sounds like a case on the back end."

Yahdon:

And when I read poetry about the ways in which... I think something I'm even grappling with, and I want to just contextualize that as I talk about poetry, something I'm learning about poetry, even as a person who runs this book club is, I'm learning how to read it and I'm learning how to not categorize it, but recognize what it does that other genres don't do.

Yahdon:

And it's important that in these conversations, not that I'm just doing it, but we're thinking about, what does poetry do that fiction doesn't do? What does fiction do that non-fiction doesn't do, what does novels do that short stories don't do and vice versa. And I'm thinking, one of the things that poetry does is it gives us language for how to think about the sensations of the body. Like how we might think about what it feels like to be in our body experiencing pleasure and what language we have to describe that pleasure. Like, "Oh, that felt good." It's like, well, what does that mean?

Jumi:

And she-

Yahdon:

And...

Jumi:

Oh, I'm so sorry.

Yahdon:

No no, keep going. Keep going.

Jumi:

I want to be in conversation with you for a second here. Because there was another poem that I felt like...I mean, I was saying about doubling. So, The First Water is the Body. This poem really changed the way I thought about things. Because when she talks about desire, I feel like she's also talking about water at the same time. And she said this line on page 50, and I'm going to be thinking about this for a very long time. She said, "If the river is a ghost, am I?" And then she says, "Unsoothable thirst is one type of haunting." What? I was like, "What?"

Yahdon:

Well, you know, you call it on social media, the thirst trap, when you post pictures. That's what it's called. So I'm thinking, I'm tapping into what you're saying.... Hold on. I just want to.... Molly, please expound on what you mean by "Sex never sounds good in fiction, but always in poetry." Expand on what you mean there. Molly, are you here? No. Oh, you just, okay. I'm talking to a computer here. All right.

Yahdon:

Is there anybody else? I like where the conversation is going, where we're drifting from sort of like the adverse elements of post-colonialism in terms of how it adversely impacts the body to like how desire and how we articulate it. Kirsten, please talk about it. I think that there's something... as a person who reads these books, I always want to look for what's subversive in these books and a way to talk about them in a way that's not just adhering to the discourse that already exists, which is like, "Oh, like post-colonialism affects people of color adversely and it's terrible", but like we're talking about desire.

Yahdon:

Could you speak more to the play-by-play? Like the distinction between what Natalie was able to do with the poetry that the fiction wasn't able to do?

Kirsten:

I can try. So I think what poetry does, what Natalie does really well, first thing is the rawness of it, not just in the language that's used, but also in the order of the poems. She's so unabashed in putting a really erotic sex poem directly after or before a poem about her family or a poem that is political, these things that we find so taboo in our society. And that's what life is like, you know? You have the best sex of your life and then you're maybe at your parents, something that's so wrong. So I think that that's one way, in fiction, sometimes I'm sure that there's some good sex scenes in fiction, but it ends up being a linear experience.

Kirsten:

It ends up reading like a play-by-play and it's this ramping up to... You almost feel like you can see what's coming and the stage is set, and the tension builds, when in real life, it's usually not like that. And it maybe happens in the middle of the night, you both wake up at the same time or an after, like a very hard day, or it's too hot in the apartment. It doesn't play out like it does in the movies usually.

Yahdon:

Yeah. So as you're talking as, I want to address what Kenya asked was, "What do you mean?" Kenya, could you ask your question on that?

Kenya:

Yeah, I think I heard you say that Instagram, and I think you referenced social media, is similar to unsoothable thirst, and I'm just curious, what did you mean by that? But we had to go to someone else, but you were in that one train of thought, but you didn't get a chance to...

Yahdon:

Yeah, so what I was describing as is the desire of what social media, on social and Instagram and Twitter, more Instagram, what it provides is part of... When I think about somebody...And Eunice has talked to it and Jumi has talked to it, as what it means to be thirsty, and the interesting thing of thinking about thirst is something that has... I remember growing up and people talking about someone being thirsty about something, that particular language being described as like, "Oh you mad thirsty. Why are you so thirsty?" It's a very interesting vocabulary to link to desire. Like, you not hungry. No one says, "Oh, you mad hungry right now." Like, "Oh, you starving." It's like, "Oh, you thirsty." And I'm thinking about the language of the thirst trap of, whether it be men or women or anybody who's posting images that is, whether it be cultivating a sort of desire or speaking to a desire that the person posting has.

Yahdon:

There's this underlying level of insatiable desire that's at play. Insatiable meaning when you encounter the image, the image is not enough, but you know you're not going to get nothing more. So you want more images, but you know, the images is not really what you really want. You want to experience the thing in real time, but I also know this ain't happening, so it's the thirst trap. And I'm thinking about the thirst trap, is that I recognize that the desire for more is only going to leave me more thirsty.

Yahdon:

And I'm even thinking about just desire in the sense of being in college or wanting, "Oh, send me a picture." And then it's like, you get a picture and it's like, you don't want no fucking picture at that point. I want, and in many ways I don't want no damn picture, but that's what I know in that moment I have to settle for. And what do I do with that desire?

Yahdon:

But thinking about the desire as a matter of, what does desire look like when it's for an actual natural resource that's limited? Like when you taste water and you recognize, "Oh, I need more of this and this is not enough." And so to your point... I don't know if Jumi, you spoke to this, about the way in which desire is feral, but somebody was speaking, I think, I forget who was just speaking, but I immediately thought of in terms of the connection of poetry and intimacy and like the movie, I don't know if any of you have seen this movie, Love Jones with Lawrence Tate and Nia Long. And that movie was one of the sexiest movies I had ever seen, not even because of the sex, but because of the thirst that they had for one another.

Yahdon:

And I was like, "This is a lot." Betty, you described the tension of what they wanted. It was watching the tension play out. And I think that for myself personally, when I think of poetry as a form, I think of poetry as a thing that aligns itself most with sex. I think of poetry as the sexiest genre that exists, of when somebody is "sexualized" or somebody who's expressing desire, expresses their desire in the form of poetry. And as we're talking about this book, I'm thinking about the ways in which everything that Natalie Diaz describes about what's going on around her as she doesn't lose sight of her own desire.

Yahdon:

Betty. It's on you.

Betty:

Yeah. I think it's to continue to connect to this, bringing me back to the other poem I wanted to pull from, Snake-Light on page 82. So in that one, she talks about "I can read a text in anything. To read a body is to break that body a little." Right? And then goes on to say, "the body after itself, the after body, undressed with banquet for yellow jackets and butterflies." And even though most of this poem is about a rattlesnake, right, and even in page 83, it's like, "in the woods with my love, there was a snakeskin dangling from the tree bark, sleeve of bold honeycomb scaled with light. I touched it softly the way I touch a line while reading, trembling with the body of the snake before it left itself, like leaving one word for the next, becoming and impossible."

Betty:

I think for me, what was powerful about this poem was like the desire for writing and how she's relating the importance of the written word. And for me, in the connecting that to the snake that's all throughout this poem, but also on page 86, she says, "My elder says, 'You are like that rattlesnake, she is quiet, quiet then she strikes and it's too late. You can rewrite, but not unwrite.'" And that line is another one line that really stuck with me because I struggle with even starting to write because I'm like, "I don't even want to write something that is wrong." My writing is also non-fiction for work, so I'm like, "I can't get the facts wrong." I don't want to mess things up.

Betty:

And I'm like, "Well, you have to start somewhere." So like, I think I hold myself up by not even wanting to put words to paper. So I think the beauty of this whole metaphor and how she's going on around, "to write is to be eaten, to read, to be full." So it's still the connection to the body, but the written word and desire. It's all looped in to this as well. And I thought that was beautiful, and I was wondering for other writers in the room, if that also resonated in that way.

Yahdon:

Serafina. Hold on one second before I open it up, the floor, Serafina, this distinction that you make between hope and desire. Do you want to expound on that? You can say no, by the way, I just want to make it clear.

Serafina:

I think you just said it much more clearly than what I was trying to say earlier about there being this hope mixed in with this sorrow, and I think it's really closely tied to what you said about her not losing sight or sense of her own desire, both physical, spiritual, emotional, environmental, and beyond.

Yahdon:

Okay. I appreciate you bringing that. When you think about.... This is something that if anybody wants to answer. If you think about the worst moment in your life that you were dealing with, just one of those traumatic moments, what do you recognize in that same moment that you wanted? What was the desire that you had? I remember after like a really good asswhooping, the one thing I wanted was sleep. I just want to go to sleep. And I think about that in terms of, the reason why I'm even asking that question, is because I think that what's ... even the title of the poetry collection, Postcolonial Love Poem, there's this tension between, is she saying that she's in love with colonialism? And it's like, no, it's what somebody could want in the face of the records that they have to deal with, that just because I'm dealing with some serious shit doesn't mean I can't still want a hug or sex or to touch someone's hand.

Yahdon:

And so the reason why I'm asking the question I'm asking, in different ways, one of the things I'm thinking about as we're continuing to have this conversation about this poetry collection, is the language for how desire can unfold. And until this conversation, which is why I appreciate these conversations, I did not think about this poetry collection as expressing desire in a very particular way, that part of what each of these poems are expressing is a certain type of desire. Kenya?

Kenya:

Just to say, I don't know how to put my hand down. Okay. Just to answer your question, the worst moment type of thing that I wish that I could have had is sometimes not knowing. If you want to use the example of a relationship or something, sometimes it's like, "Damn, I wish I didn't know people were like this" or I wish...sometimes ignorance is bliss, but in the end it's good to kind of know these things so you can learn your lessons, so that you don't have to make the same mistakes. But I also think that Diaz understands that as well, where it's not just about... I feel like reading her poems as the collective, I think she's also in shock of knowing that this does exist and this is something that she does have to acknowledge.

Kenya:

And I think it's something that probably took a very long time. It's kind of like how you look back at yourself when you were a teenager and yell, "You're an adult." And you're kind of talking to yourself now as the adult that you are in a way to reparent yourself. It takes a few years to be able to realize that, "Oh shit, that's what happened" you know? Like it's the shock, I think as well.

Yahdon:

Christy and Beth, if y'all both want to speak to it, what you say, y'all, in the chat.

Christy:

Yeah. Just about that idea of a low time after going through a trauma. Because I don't think you always know how you feel and I'm thinking about like, I was in a bad car accident once, these are the big traumas, I was sexually assaulted when I was in high school, finding out my dad had cancer, thinking I had cancer. All those times, I just needed to not talk to people for a little bit. And then I had to talk about it, especially the assault because I had to call that person out. But yeah, sometimes I think you just need to sit and understand how that trauma is hitting you before you can express your feelings about it.

Yahdon:

So a question for y'all and reading this collection, do you feel... do you think that, if this is a postcolonial love poem, that the people in the poems have time to process that which they're dealing with before. Not even the people on the poem, but Natalie, if the language that she's cultivated for the experiences in the thing she's describing is a product of her taking time to express or if it's the lack of time to express it. Do you understand my question? No. Okay.

Yahdon:

So what I'm saying is, with respect to what Christy just said, in terms of... And Beth, of wishing you had more time to process shit that was just dramatic and just make sense of it. I think this is larger than just even just Natalie's poetry collection, but we'll use Natalie's poetry collection as a battleground for this, if the poetry collection is a matter of her taking the time to cultivate language, to process the trauma that she experienced, or if the poetry collection is the way in which she processes the experiences she had. Is she working out the trauma she's experiencing, or was this a way in which she goes, I got it. Here's the poetry collection. That's what I'm saying. Christy. Kirsten.

Christy:

Do you think the writing-

Yahdon:

Hold on.

Christy:

Oh, sorry. Go ahead.

Yahdon:

No, no, no. It's okay. Kirsten. I just want to...

Christy:

I was just wondering, the writing of the poems themselves, writing in itself is rewriting, and when you're rewriting, you're rethinking, you're processing. So maybe the process of the rewriting is the thinking about it. And then the poem, the end result is the, "Here's my thoughts. Here's my feelings." But you've been through... the rewriting process is giving you that time to reflect and to think maybe.

Yahdon:

Okay.

Kirsten:

I think that's well said. I think it's absolutely a form of catharsis and it's a way of integration, any form of writing, certainly poetry. It's integrating that life experience, by means of putting it down on paper, you can sort of put it down emotionally a little bit too.

Yahdon:

Diana then Beth then Jumi.

Diana:

I guess it's more of like a pondering or a question in regards to the effects of trauma and how sometimes I think it will manifest or how you become aware of it when you process it. I don't always think of it as a very methodical or logical thing of like, "Oh, let me just go through these events in my mind and figure out what happened to me." I think it's sometimes almost becomes tangential in regards to... Especially through these poems, that you discover the impact or trauma through something that's divergent from the actual source of the trauma in some way. And in regards to the way she seeks desire, the way she really feels desire and the way that she's able to embrace or understand desire in her own body is the way that she understands other traumas that aren't always directly sourced from desire, perhaps. And I wonder if that made any sense or has any other tangent to it as well? Yeah, I think that was basically what I was wondering.

Yahdon:

Just bring back, what's the wondering?

Diana:

So the actual source of the trauma is not always experienced at the same source and perhaps you find a different emotional mental output that actually is what reveals to you how that trauma affected you. Right? So say that there was, this is very arbitrary, but a car accident. In this case, obviously it's her experience as being indigenous person in America, as we see it today. In a sense, the actual source of where the trauma come is not actually manifested in a very logical linear point, in a sense it's probably maybe tangential or emotional aspect of who you are. That is, through the way that you seek something else, yes, I suppose it would be a ripple effect. It wasn't just the girl that's causing all this trauma, but the way that she also expresses the way that she thinks is experiencing trauma is the desire path. That is, this is very poetic obviously, very abstract in many ways. So our source and our experience of actually reflecting upon our source of trauma are not always linearly connected, but abstractly connected and then brought back to it.

Yahdon:

Damn I think you... the explanation on the second part, I'm like... I'm going to just go to the neck. If anybody wants to address what Diana just asked, please do so because I don't even know how to address it.

Jumi:

Can you just ask it a second time, Diana, because I would...

Yahdon:

This is the third time she's going to ask the damn thing.

Diana:

Oh. So this is making no sense. So I was curious...the source of the trauma is not necessarily how you're able to reflect upon or experience or express your healing or actual reflection upon it. It's almost as if using another source of yourself or another emotional palette or another desire or another form of yourself to actually understand what happened to another part of yourself or another...I don't think the linear path of it is... In a sense to some degree, how it's water, it's very fluid.

Jumi:

Yes. I can answer you.

Diana:

Go ahead, someone, please help me out here.

Jumi:

I mean, for one thing, it does very much feel, this is a non-linear way of thinking, right? And I was agreeing. I felt resonance in what you were saying about the connective tissue that's working between the poems and the sources of trauma, is more about associations that are being made on the language level. And they could be moving. It moves through emotional intensities. A lot of ways how reprocessing trauma works is moving through these emotional tendencies. I felt that in this text, because it's not linear, it's merely an attempt. And some of what you're saying when you were describing this, some of it sounded like dissociation to me. In the act of remembering a traumatic event, we have been altered by that event. And so in order to have a more objective view that removes us from the emotional intensities, we must step outside of ourselves to see that self from a different angle.

Jumi:

I mean, that's psychiatric and neurological, but trauma in so many ways works that way. When people talk about trauma and success, I always feel like those two words can't go together. I feel like some disagreement about that, that there is a catharsis or that the catharsis is what people associate catharsis with, which is a sense of completion or release a sense of freedom. And yes, it is those things, but not in this finite way I see people describing. And then I was thinking a little bit about EMDR, like what would be the closest thing to-

Yahdon:

Wait. Hold on. What's that?

Jumi:

I was just about to explain it. So-

Yahdon:

Okay, I'm just wanting to make sure. Okay.

Jumi:

Yeah. Now I know I was going to lose. So I was thinking about EMDR, which is a method that's used in therapy for treating trauma.

Yahdon:

What's the actual acronym mean, if you can explain it.

Jumi:

I'm like Googling it, because...

Ricca:

Electromagnetic something.

Diana:

It's a movement of your eyes.

Jumi:

The most basic way to explain it y'all is bipedal movement. So, when trauma happens in the brain, we create certain neuro pathways that we're used to traveling down because we're used to thinking with one side of the brain or the other. And so these neuro pathways get firmed. So the way to break that chain is bipedal movement, which means using the alternating sides of your body, because it forces your brain to get lit up on both sides at the same time. So EMDR is when you play a sound in alternating ears, as you're remembering a traumatic memory so that the neural pathway gets changed by the sound being played in alternating sides. Imagine wearing headphones in here. And so, as you're thinking of the traumatic memory, and you're getting that stimulation, both sides of your brains have to wake up, which means the neuro pathway changes. And that means the traumatic memory no longer has the same intensity that it did before. So you change the source itself, and that makes

Yahdon:

Well, what is....you got to change the source from what though?

Jumi:

The source site of trauma is an established pattern in your behavior and process of thinking. Even the active remembering it as this is an established path, right? Imagine you're in the woods and you want to get back home. There's a million ways to get back home, but there's the way you know. But that way it can't work for us because it hurts us to go that way. But it's the only way we know, am I getting too...

Yahdon:

No, I just see why motherfuckers don't like poetry. This shit is just mad heavy.

Jumi:

I just think that what she's talking about...

Yahdon:

I just experienced that. I'm just thinking about all the people who got their cameras turned off and they like, "This is why I don't fucking read poetry." Like that's all I'm thinking.

Jumi:

Well, I mean, something I will say about poetry-

Yahdon:

This is not about you at all, this is some heavy shit.

Jumi:

I just think it's really common. I think poets often always have really non-linear ways of thinking. I'm a non-linear thinker myself, so I was like eating this up. Maybe it's because I have a mental disorder, so I'm very attracted to minds that feel like my own, that think in the same ways, because there's a kind of internal logic. Someone said something to me once that I have never forgotten. They said, "To the outside world, hallucinations look ridiculous or irrational, but to the person who's experiencing the hallucination, their response is entirely rational within the logic of their own universe." And so there is a logic to how she's thinking, even if it's just an attempt to reverse engineer it, it can only be an attempt. Yeah. Naruto. Why people use drugs is creating these alternate pathways in the brain, right, but with her, it feels like a reach. Like when I was reading this text...

Jumi:

... like a reach. When I was reading this text, I felt like she wasn't coming in with the expectation that she would be changed, but rather the hope, and the hope... the hope is a kind of reaching, and the poetry is the reach itself, but we're not grabbing anything.

Yahdon:

Yeah. I-

Jumi:

And I think what she's trying to do with her trauma, "I'm not... I don't think I can overcome it, but I'm trying", and that the process itself is a rewiring that's unfinished. I don't know.

Yahdon:

Listen, this ain't about no one. We chopping it up. This is... Beth I'm going to give it to you. What you got to add to contribute to the conversation?

Yahdon:

Beth you there? Oh okay.

Beth:

What I just wanted to add was that I feel for me, trauma... My alone time for reflection and digestion is so... It varies honestly what I'm doing, whether it's recalling the trauma, or writing a poem, journaling, or just reflecting, or doing something fun to distract myself, whether it's intimacy or going to do something with nature. I think that everybody... not everybody, I can only speak for myself. I think that for me, it's not linear what I'm doing when I reflect or step away. And I feel that in Natalie's poems, that it wasn't linear. Each poem when I'm thinking about my brothers or my family members or how my trauma affects them, it's so not linear how I deal with it. So I could see that in Natalie's poems.

Beth:

You can do so many things, or, I do so many things to deal with trauma.

Yahdon:

Yeah.

Beth:

There's not a one thing that I do that I say, "This is exactly what I do every time." It varies so much.

Yahdon:

Right. Before I come to you Ricca, the one thing I do recognize, and I wanted to use this as an opportunity to just honor the people who turn their cameras off and "I'm going to just listen."

Yahdon:

In terms of the way in which... This is my personal opinion, I've really have come to understand that people who write poetry, people who often deal with a deep... Sometimes, I'm going to say this, this is a personal opinion. They are dealing and are trying to process trauma more than any other John or writers out there. And, I think that for people... When you are trying to create a language for the way in which traumas impact your ability to articulate that trauma, which impacted your ability to articulate the trauma, I think when you're trying to read through that shit and you haven't processed your own shit, it's like "What the fuck am I reading?"

Yahdon:

It might as well be Mandarin for people who can't read Mandarin. It's French for people who don't read French. It's English for people who don't read English. It's just... This is another language, is basically what I'm saying. And I think personally, even when I've read poetry, I think that something that I recognize that I would have appreciated is they made an essay at the beginning of "what's happening?" How do I go into this experience? What am I supposed to be considering and thinking about as I move through it, because if this language that a poet is grappling with is language that has half-invented, half... not fractured, not re-fracturing, but sort of re... What's the word... Bringing back to, I don't know what that... Reconciling languages is, "What is it that I'm actually reading, and how do I read it?"

Yahdon:

And I think that's a constant thing. As a book club, anybody who's been in his book club for... Enough to read more than one or two poetry collections. We read contemporary American poetry when we had... What's his brother's name, John Mario here. And it was such a benefit to have him here because he got to explain... There was a poem he did on swans. And he got to explain that the poem was about different iteration, different moments where he encountered a swan and he was just coagulating the different moments together. It was just so... It was just ... not even just informative, but it was just, "Oh, okay. That's where you were coming from." It was just good to know, "Oh, that's what you was doing," because so much of it is interpretive and figurative that it's like, "Damn, am I reading this right?"

Yahdon:

And I genuinely think that the people who read the books in this book club, but then at large read poetry, it's not even about getting the poetry right. It's about I want to understand that what the poet is trying to communicate. And I think that's really where... I think that one of the things I appreciate about these meetings that we continue to have is that it gives me insight on how to communicate to poets who don't necessarily think about... who can't even entertain the fact that there are people outside of their immediate circle who are reading their poetry. That's like, yo, they need some insight into what's happening to give, "Oh, snap. I didn't know that that's what people cared about." even a little thing that's like "did your brother stab you?", And it's, "Oh, I wasn't even writing about me being stabbed."

Yahdon:

I was writing about these other things, but it's like, "yeah, yeah, yeah", but the people want to know, did you get stabbed? I think about, the last thing I'll say before I come to Beth, Ricca and Serafina and before we wrap it up for the evening, is Jay-Z. When that Meek Mill song 'What's Free', came out, he had a line in there about him and Kanye paralleling to Ye. And I mean to Michael Jackson and Prince, and then Twitter was like "oh, he's saying that he's at odds." And then Jay-Z had to tweet this is... The line is actually... no, the line is about the fact that when you're black, they constantly try to pit you against one another." And then in the responses to that tweet was people asking about lyrics from 10 years ago, like "Jay-Z, did you mean Wale or, whale, when you..." And it was just interesting to see that there were people who still had unresolved understandings of the lines that he had written years ago.

Yahdon:

And I'm like "bro, this is Jay-Z." Who's... In many ways is... This guy has sets of music and he has interviews. If that's happening with a Jay-Z, who's a pop star. What is happening with poetry and poets who are not pop stars at all? Who so much of this is I just need to understand a basic line, like "did your brother stab you?" And to a poet, a poet doesn't care about that, but it's what the people do. Because it gives them a real understanding of what's at stake in these poems that I don't understand otherwise.

Yahdon:

I always appreciate the fact that regardless of the fact that many of the people who are in these poems, I appreciate that y'all... you will read what you can, as you can, not knowing like "I don't even know what I'm reading", because so much of poetry... And I explained this to my friends who were poets, y'all got to really understand that a lot of people who read y'all, not that they don't want don't understand y'all, but they want to understand. And what can you do as a poet to bridge that gap between understanding and misunderstanding. And also just, "I don't get it", I just don't know.

Yahdon:

Ricca and then Serafina we going end.

Ricca:

I feel like it's a lot like modern art, right? When you go to a museum and you look at a painting that just has a bunch of lines on it. And I know that, I think, "what the fuck does this mean?" and I think a lot of people approach poetry in a similar way. And I understand why. But the point I wanted to make was about what Diana was talking about earlier with trauma. I kept making connections to 'I May Destroy You' and how that show portrayed trauma and its nonlinear form in the way that we experience it. And I know that for me, in my experience, I had a lot of trauma in my childhood. And some of it is repressed and forgotten. And then some of it is misremembered.

Ricca:

And I think that different things that happened to you throughout your life can trigger. And I know that there are certain things that I do and certain behaviors that I have that are related to it. And that's only cause I went to therapy to talk about it, right? But when I catch myself in those moments, I don't know, I just feel when she's talking about all this stuff, the way that she intersperses the poems about the brothers, right? It's... Because she's not going to go through and do a bunch of poems all at once because that's not how her mind... That's not how anyone's mind works. No one's going to dwell on that one thing for a long time. Right. It just comes up because of other things that are going on in your life.

Ricca:

I know that when, as a result of my own trauma, when anyone is talking negatively or lecturing me or yelling at me, I have a tendency to I focus on their mouth because that's what I did when I was being yelled at as a child so that I didn't have to make eye contact, right? And that's this muscle memory behavior, and Jumi was talking about the EMDR and all this stuff. And it's so interesting how our physical reactions to things that have happened to us mentally or emotionally are so hardwired and how hard it is to un-wire. And I also think about William James who wrote this book called 'The Varieties of Religious Experience', which I read in college, I was a religion major. And his whole thesis... But I think it could have been called 'The Varieties of Human Experience', how everyone's experience is personal.

Ricca:

And if it's true to you... if you believe in God, then God is real, right? And it doesn't matter what anyone else feels, right? So everyone feels trauma. So personally in a similar way that they feel faith and love and all of these other vague, strong feelings, which is why I feel poetry does such a good job of conveying what those feel like and why it feels a different language. Because, it's that individual person's language of talking about love or lust or fear or hatred or sadness. Those are hard feelings to convey in traditional prose or traditional language. And poetry is each person's individual experience of that strong feeling and that strong experience.

Yahdon:

Mm-hmm.

Ricca:

Yeah. I don't know. That's it.

Yahdon:

It is always phenomenal when people say some deep shit and they be like, "well, I don't know", "I'll give it up."

Yahdon:

Serafina. You with us Serafina? I don't know if you on mute, but if you talking and you don't... you not... you got to unmute yourself. Oh my goodness. All right. Okay.

Yahdon:

So I don't know if she's talking or not, but I want to bring this meeting to a close because these mosquitoes is fucking me up in this backyard. So I want to just have a round of applause for another good meeting on this poetry collection.

Yahdon:

I don't know what it is, but there's... as we end the meeting, I definitely got to give the littest member to Jumi, who was just turning up this entire meeting. And there's been a consistent track record of new members who have been here for the first time, just owning this space like they've been here forever. And I really appreciate that this is a space where people who just show up, just feel immediately comfortable to just start talking. So definitely that.

Yahdon:

Before we end, I want to do two things. I want to... once again, to Jumi and Ricca and Kenya for littest members in terms of just constantly bringing the conversation with the poetics in these larger conversations.

Yahdon:

I want to announce the book for next month. I appreciate y'all for always entertaining the poetry, but I'm... and I'm excited for next month's read are y'all ready for what it is?

Eunice:

Yes!

Yahdon:

I hope so. Okay. So next month we are going to be reading the short story collection of, oh damn I didn't even..:(shows book:

Betty:

It's so good!

Yahdon:

Yeah, yeah, yeah! We're going to be reading the Deesha Philyaw's 'The Secret Lives of Church Ladies' for this month. We're going to be reading these short stories. Brandon, I know I told you one story, but you know the back end stuff. So, that's all I would say, the back end stuff. Brandon is... he is the editorial director. And I told him a book yesterday that wasn't the book today, but that has to do with a lot of other things. That's behind the scenes.

Brandon:

I had to hit "Wee-Bey Meme"(The Wire reference) for a second.

Yahdon:

Listen, brother... Listen, all right, I'll explain it to you in the morning.

Brandon:

Alright.

Yahdon:

But we going to do 'The Secret Lives of Church Ladies', short story collection, a brilliant short story collection. She's a national book award finalist. This book's... This is about the intersections of black womanhood and religion and faith and the ways in which these different characters grapple with their faith against their personhood and womanhood. And this is a short story collection that I wanted to do for a long time. And I'm excited that we get to do for August. So the books are... I got to order them. I'm going to be really frank with you. The books are ordered. They will arrive early next week, which means I will be sending them out no later than Friday of next week. You will get the email from me of updating your addresses so I can get these books to you.

Yahdon:

But this short story collection is a short story collection that I'm excited to speak with you... to discuss. Many people who don't understand the distinction between a novel and the short story collection. I want to always be clear that you don't have to read a short story collection in order because it's not linear the way a novel is. So you can bounce around and just read the stories as you go. So one of the things I've been consistent about... We read Kali Fajardo-Anstine's 'Sabrina and Corina'. And I made the same point about, sometimes the best thing to do, not best, but what I suggest as a practice that helps you understand how to read short stories is read the last short story first, just to disrupt your sense of this idea of linear reading. And reading the last short story kind of gets you out this idea that you have to quote unquote, "finish the book" and you can bounce around as you go along.

Yahdon:

So a short story collection is almost like a mixtape. You don't have to... You can listen to it in order, but sometimes you see "oh, this is not an album". A short story collection is the mixtape where you can just bounce around and just get different moods and feels. And so when you get this short story collection, I'm just excited to see what short story is the one that resonates with you the most, because I have mine, but I don't want to talk about it until... I don't want to lead. Anybody's understandings of it.