>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, DC.
>> Anya Creightney: Dawn Lundy
Martin is the author of four books,
excuse me, "a gathering of matter
a matter of gathering, Discipline,
Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life;
and most recently Good
Stock Strange Blood,"
published this year
by Coffee House Press.
Dawn received a BA at the
University of Connecticut,
an MA at San Francisco
State University,
and a PhD at the University
of Massachusetts, Amherst.
She's also the coeditor of "The
Fire This Time: Young Activists
and the New Feminism," and a member
of the Black Took Collaborative,
a multidisciplinary group
that performs and writes
in hybrid experimental reports.
Martin is a professor in
the Department of English
and the Director for the Center of
African American Poetry and Poetics
at the University of Pittsburgh.
Selecting Martin's
manuscript discipline
for the 2011 Nightboat Books
Poetry Prize, Fanny Howe said,
"These poems are dense and deep.
They are necessary
and hot on the eye.
Discipline is what it took to
write such a potent set of poems."
It is I think an apt description.
Though speaking in generality,
I might wager an extension.
To me, the "I" of Dawn's work
might as well be [inaudible],
a lens totally invested in a nuanced
accurate and interrogated view
of both Blackness and on a
larger scale [inaudible].
She is a poet obsessed with
the [inaudible] of words,
both the signifier and signified but
she's also one who loves paradox,
complication, lineage,
intuitive fragmentary plainness,
and all things tactile.
In Dawn Wendy Martin, I find
a brave, dedicated voice.
She's one who attenuates
the storm only
to the man we'd notice how
difficult, how caustic,
how particulate storms can be.
And it's her intense and strict
instruction to re-circle the poem
but really the everyday
that makes her so powerful.
So please, without further
ado, let's welcome Dawn.
[ Applause ]
>> Ron Charles: Thanks
so much for coming.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin:
Sure, it's a pleasure.
>> Ron Charles: I had a great
few days reading your work.
It is really challenging and
eye opening and unsettling.
Let's start with -- Tell
us about how you -- Sorry.
Tell us about how you made
space for yourself as a poet,
how you began to think
of yourself as yes,
this is something I
can do in this country.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: How I
made space for myself as a poet.
I think that, you know, I've always
been a person who's attracted
to language.
I was raised in a household
where my mother read to me
in a very persistent, consistent
way, whether I wanted it or not.
>> Ron Charles: What sort
of poems were you raised on?
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: You know, so
I was actually raised on the poems
of Paul Laurence Dunbar, who's
a 19th century Black writer,
and so he wrote both in conventional
forms, in conventional English
and he wrote in the
Black vernacular.
And when I was a kid, those
poems that were written
in the Black vernacular
were the most exciting to me
because I thought they
were funny and it was funny
to hear my mother read them because.
I mean, we'd speak a kind
of vernacular, I guess,
sometimes in the household.
It certainly wasn't our kind
of like everyday speech.
So to have that coming
up under the surface
of my experience attracted
me to language.
But to make space for myself as a
writer I think was just about trying
to figure out a way to explore the
world, to make sense of my reality.
And because I was raised with
literature, it became a kind
of natural inclination to go towards
literature and writing as opposed
to the visual arts, which I would
love but I can't draw at all.
If I play Pictionary, all
of my, all of the things
that I draw are stick figures.
So it's intensely frustrating
for anyone who's my partner
because they're like, that's
the same thing you drew before.
>> Ron Charles: So you brought your
own perspectives to your experience
when you wrote but you also
have to invent your own forms,
which a lot of other
poets did not have to do.
They wrote poems that look
like the poems they read.
You wrote poems that didn't look
anything like what you read.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: Right.
I did once, I did once upon a time.
I wrote poems that
looked exactly like most
of the forms that I had read.
My first series poetry teacher was
Marilyn Nelson [assumed spelling]
who is a formalist of sorts,
kind of a new formalist.
And so we were writing in
traditional forms, you know,
villanelles and sonnets and you know
she was really, really instrumental
in teaching me the kind
of foundational components
of what makes up a poem.
And then at some point I
started to get like feel itchy
within those constraints and started
kind of edge my way out of them.
So that's when the invention
started to come but I actually think
that in order to really innovate,
one has to know what they're
innovating in response to in a way.
>> Ron Charles: Yes,
I totally agree.
Yes. And your friend Walt
Whitman and other people
that were doing expansive
things in the 19th century
and then the 20th century too.
But why poetry?
Why not write essays or fiction?
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: That's
a really good question.
>> Ron Charles: Because you have a
lot to say, a lot of critical things
to say, I can easily see you at
home and other forms, other genres.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: I do write
essays but my first love is poetry
and I actually can't say why.
In some ways as a young person
I was trying to figure out,
a young person meaning like in
junior high and high school,
trying to process experiences
that were traumatic and drawn
for some inexplicable
reason to poetry.
At that point, by the
time I got to high school,
it wasn't as if we were
reading poetry in high school.
It wasn't as if somebody came and
said, oh you should write poems.
No one told any of
us to write poems.
At that point it was kind
of I wasn't listening
to my mother anymore.
She wasn't reading to me.
So I think that part
of the reason I was --
I mean, if I kind of look back,
like I don't know what was happening
in that moment, to kind
of like be a frustrated,
rebellious 16-year-old
sitting down and writing poems
when I really wasn't
reading that many poems,
it feels like a strange thing to do.
But now if I look, I think you know
the language of poetry is a kind
of terse figuring out and
it may be what I needed
to survive that particular moment.
And maybe somehow instinctually
in a way that is beyond me,
I kind of knew that, but yeah,
it's a difficult question to kind
of have an absolute answer for it,
to really nail down in that way.
>> Ron Charles: Well,
that's a good answer.
Identity is perhaps your
most fascinating subject,
a subject you return
to again and again.
The I that is me lies forever
in the mute mouth of the image.
That's a line you can just
think about for a long time.
This syntax, their syntax,
one definition of this body,
when the I speaks, it speaks into
another speech and this is labor.
Talk about that labor of poetry,
speaking in this other
language, their syntax.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: I mean, poetry
already, whether it be conventional
or experimental, whether it
be within a certain tradition
of poetry is already speaking
a very elliptical language.
You're telling a story and very
often in a short space and time.
And so you're making
it, you know, concise.
You have to take certain leaps.
You have to figure out what to leave
in and what to include in order
to make that story happen.
The labor of the speaker for the
work that I've been doing is a labor
to speak a kind of fragmented self.
That's where it begins.
And I talked about personal trauma.
The way that I think about trauma
and the way that I was able
to process sexual trauma that
happened to me when I was a kid was
through attempting to kind of cohere
myself on the page or something
and that became like
an impossible task.
>> Ron Charles: Like when
you can't stop doing?
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: Yes,
it's reiterative in that way.
One keeps kind of coming back
to this struggle to speak
or cohere and it's impossible.
So that's why all of those kind
of stammering around the I,
the labor of the I, the,
yeah the work that it takes
to speak one's self begins in that.
>> Ron Charles: You say, every
day it happens or doesn't happen.
The I struggles to become a
part of the wreaking body.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: Yeah.
>> Ron Charles: How do
you know when it happens?
How do you know when the poem works?
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: How do
I know when the poem works.
>> Ron Charles: How do
you know when it's done?
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: Yeah.
>> Ron Charles: You could
fiddle with it forever
and never publish a book.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: That's true.
I don't -- Some people really,
really struggle to kind of figure
out lie, oh, when is it done
or is this poem like perfect,
when can put it into the world.
I'm a little bit opposite,
where I kind of like to put it
into the world a tiny
bit prematurely.
>> Ron Charles: Nice.
Read one for us, would you?
I'll let you get a drink --
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: I
like the ragged edges.
>> Ron Charles: These?
>> Dawn Lundy Martin:
No, of the poem.
>> Ron Charles: The poem, oh yes.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: Those, too.
>> Ron Charles: This on page 71.
Thank you.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: Untethered
from happenings rooted
to temporality.
Untethered from happenings
rooted to temporality.
The I is made of many
arches and windows.
Enter this structure, the entrances
into the many houses of God and
yet each morning a fireheart
grief coming out of sleep,
the listening to the smoke as it
fills and weeps inside the chest,
choking strength out,
hands weighted, dangling.
We wonder where else it
lives before it fills us up.
We assume it comes inside through
the hole that promises invasion.
This layering of forms pushes
you toward abstraction.
We have stolen madness
from the White people.
An angry white man will call
us a crazy bitch in a text.
But we have long done been free.
Coffee is brought to our
bedside on a silver tray.
We are un-representable.
We sip into the grief mouth.
>> Ron Charles: Thank you.
The I is made of many
arches and windows.
Such a paradox to think of ourselves
as being portals, as being parts
of architecture and
then you conclude
by saying we are un-representable
even
as you try and represent yourself.
That is sort of a paradox
you through again
and again in your poetry.
There's another one here
I'd like you to read.
Page 47.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: Always the
I is fissure recklessly yearning
for its whole sense of
wholeness like a potato.
We walk backward into a room because
we want to restate our thoughts.
All the brown skins are glowing
in this light and no one is afraid
where all joyous but it's difficult
to tell if the joy is real joy
or if it's just lack of fear.
What kind of understanding
will sink into the body?
It's just one body despite
other previously stated facts
and when it feels something,
it really does.
It changes though and it grows up
and looks completely
different in the face.
>> Ron Charles: Very lovely.
The I is fissure, recklessly
yearning for its whole.
You seem like a poet who is
fundamentally skeptical of language
but doesn't have any other choice.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: That's true.
It's it paradox.
It's a paradox.
I'm always thinking
about or talking about,
I talk about it with my students.
I'm like, okay, we know
that language is flawed.
We know that language
sometimes doesn't do the thing
that we need it to do.
In the example, I -- A very simple
example I give to my students is,
you know, like if you're having
a fight with your boyfriend
or girlfriend or significant
other and you're trying
to convey something to them and
they're trying to convey to you
and you're just like
desperately trying this
to make this understanding
happen in language but, you know,
it's kind of going like this,
like neither person is able
to really take in the
thing from the other person
and they're like, oh, yeah, yeah.
Language isn't working.
You know, so I am skeptical
of language but then I think
that in my case it's the
tool that I use in order
to try to get to something.
Sometimes I think that
that failure in language is
where it's most successful in a way.
And the example I often give is
from Steven Mahler Maye
[phonetic] whose son died, I think,
at 6 years old and he was trying to
write these poems about the death
of his son Anatole [phonetic]
and he just couldn't do it.
So he filled up his notebook
with, you know, kind of fragments,
lots of [inaudible] dashes and then
he would try again and try again.
and I think it was Paul Auster who
first translated those fragments
and published them in a posthumous
collection but when you read
that posthumous collection,
all of those failures,
the grief that you
feel after reading all
of those attempts is so profound.
So even, you know, so, yeah,
language, I'm skeptical.
Yes, it sometimes doesn't
convey what we need it to convey
but on the other hand, you know, the
art I think of manipulating language
in that process and
sometimes those failures,
you get exactly the feeling
that you need to kind of convey.
>> Ron Charles: Yes.
Yes. You said in one interview,
[inaudible] clarity occur,
they do so by happenstance, circling
so close around and around a thing.
You touch it as if by accident.
You can feel that happen
in your poems
but of course that's
just an illusion.
The poem is not in
fact happenstance.
It's not an accident.
It's fixed on the page.
It's revised.
It's re-seen and yet
it still maintains
that sense of the accidental.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: The
accidental does sometimes happen.
>> Ron Charles: And you leave it?
>> Dawn Lundy Martin:
Sometimes I do if it works.
If it's an accident that doesn't
work, sometimes the accident,
I think some of the poets I'm
interested in, like Susan Howe
and Lauterbach and other
kind of poets interested
in the laboratory yeah, you
leave the accident when it works.
Yeah.
>> Ron Charles: In one poem
you write about the need
for un-recognizable speech,
resisting the tyranny
of the prosaic, the
beautiful, the poetic utopia.
I love that, the tyranny
of the prosaic.
What do you mean by that?
>> Dawn Lundy Martin:
What was the last part?
>> Ron Charles: The
tyranny of the prosaic,
the beautiful, the poetic utopia.
Those are the things
you're trying to resist.
It's not fair for me, is it,
to pick out these fragments
and throw them at you?
Things you wrote years ago.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin:
I think it's still --
What I am distrustful
of in some ways is
when somebody sings a
horrific song into my ear.
So, you know, I admire the
craft of lots of lyric poetry
but sometimes the story feels
like it needs something else
and I don't trust the lyric
quality of that story.
>> Ron Charles: Too polished?
Too pretty?
>> Dawn Lundy Martin:
It's too polished.
Maybe too pretty.
>> Ron Charles: Where does
language go limp, break apart,
fall into pieces, stammers,
glimpses,
that's what you're looking
for, where does the --
Where do the black
marks make up letters.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: There was like
a song in the '90s that was turned
into a dance song and it
was like "she's homeless,"
you don't the song,
"she's homeless."
And then it was like turned into
a dance song and so you'd go
out dancing and, you know, it'd
come on and everyone's dancing.
"She's homeless," which is
like a horrifying thing.
[ Inaudible Comment ]
You're so caught up in the
beauty and emotion of the music,
you forget to listen
to the actual lyrics.
But yeah, so sometimes I think
like the stammer, the guttural,
the sound, kind of
cacophony of speech, you know,
that has a meaning too,
that has a register.
That gives you a feeling in your
body as a reader, as a listener.
>> Ron Charles: Maybe
truer in some sense.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: Maybe, in some
cases, not in every case, I think.
>> Ron Charles: Read
this poem on page 37.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin:
This one I've read before.
There are poems I'm like, the
first poem that you had me read,
I was like, I haven't
read this in so long.
The proposition that
compels the book.
The proposition that compels
the books is already flawed,
hovering somewhere
between memory and fantasy,
repetition and desperation.
I know how you'll cock your head.
You'll ask, what is memory but what
I mean is that any existence inside
of both loss and abundance
feels impossible.
You can't have your
cake and eat it too.
Don't rob Peter to pay Paul.
Somehow after all these
years I'm still alive.
I cannot stand to exist
against the [inaudible].
I'd rather be a monster than
live inside of your cereal box
and I was a monster, wasn't I?
Did I grin when you suffered?
As an estimation of justice,
that night in question how
an infection entered my pussy
and got hold.
Like you, I am unforgiving.
It might be a perversion of my
blood inherited like a sore.
What language my grandmother
spoke I cannot tell you.
On the census records from
1903, the word "laborer."
My mother is crippled
and I will live
in her place [inaudible]
and hegemony.
>> Ron Charles: The way
that poem moves from talking
about something fairly abstract,
the proposition of a book,
down to your body, to your genitals,
there's a strange connection
you draw between those things.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: So, right.
The poem begins in this, there
are many places in this book
where I'm kind of thinking
about the artifice
and the apparatus of
the book itself.
I'm particularly thinking about how
Black writers are often compelled
in some way to write about
blackness in a particular way.
So this book is a kind of
resistance in some way of that.
And so that's where it begins.
And then it goes into this kind
of surreal place when of course,
you know, nobody asks
what is memory.
I know you'll ask.
I know what you'll ask.
You'll cock your head.
You'll ask what is memory but
most people won't ask that.
I just want people to
think about that question.
And so then it gets to this kind
of bigger story and lands actually
on the place where
it's supposed to land.
It begins in the question of writing
the black book and then it ends
in the actuality of writing
like my grandmother's history
and my mother's history, my
mother's present, actually.
>> Ron Charles: And that's
an act of resistance?
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: It is a kind
of act of resistance because I,
so in one way I want to say that one
of my basic questions around poetry
and poetics is how you
tell the same story.
How do you tell a story that's
been told over and over again?
How do you write a book
about that has, you know,
as an [inaudible] history, a
family and racial oppression,
these are books that many
people write these books
and we keep writing
over and over again.
So what are the ways to get
at that story, to see us,
to get us to see it
freshly and newly?
And so really there's this like
meta gesture in this book to say,
to really kind of raise that
question of what does it mean
to include blackness and Black
identity in a book, how do we do it
in a way that's unfamiliar to us,
how do we get us to pay attention
to it in a different way
because I think that all
of these artistic artifacts
that we as poets and writers
and visual artists put out into
the world help to make reality.
But I think sometimes when we hear
the same note or we hear reality
or history in the same note then
our ear becomes kind of deaf to it.
And so, right, so you know,
resistance but also a kind
of philosophy around
innovation that you have
to keep remaking something
new, you know,
in the words of the modernists,
in order to kind of it
to have a jolting effect
so that we can participate
in remaking reality instead of
I guess becoming a part of the,
you know, regimes of
oppression or capitalist regimens
or whatever unwittingly, more
active in our art making.
Long answer.
>> Ron Charles: No.
[ Inaudible Comment ]
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: Ask
Dawn to read this [laughter].
What I will say to
you will not be heard.
It will be unnatural.
It will be like something opening
up a row of corpses, proportionless.
I want to tell you my perennial
gracelessness of that epithet hunger
of a joy that is neither
sadness nor joy,
a joy that is a rung
of teeth say something.
>> Ron Charles: The irony there
is of course that we do hear you
because of the strangeness of
those images, the startling nature
of those words, when
you say we're not going
to hear you, we do in fact hear you.
It is something unnatural.
It is something proportionless.
It's not graceless.
All the protests over the last
few years, maybe the last year
and the response from the right make
me really question what you said.
I think a lot of Americans have
never heard this story before.
They're not getting
tired of the story.
They still haven't heard it once.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: Which one?
Which story?
>> Ron Charles: The story of what
people of color have experienced
in this country over the
last 300 or 400 years.
This idea that we're going
to jump to colorblindness
that they just haven't heard this.
When they come back and say things
like, well, don't all lives matter,
you just realize they're just,
there's just such an
unbridgeable gulf in this country
between what some people
have experienced and realized
and other people haven't.
It's just exhausting.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: Yeah,
you know, I wonder if it's
about the kind of moment that's
happening now where there's
like this like linguistic
breakdown, where language,
I think in particular,
like there's a reality,
we all see the same reality.
We see the same action, the
same body doing what it's doing.
But we make an entirely
different meaning through language
about that action depending
on our perspective,
depending on our ideology.
>> Ron Charles: That's
never been clearer I think
than in the last year.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: Right.
So I mean, I think, you
know, it's hard to figure
out like what it means to tell a
story in this particular moment
because you can tell the story and
then somebody else retells the story
in a way that's completely
unfamiliar to the story itself.
So I don't know.
>> Ron Charles: A story came
out today about how the use
of body cameras on police hasn't
made any difference at all.
I think a lot of us thought that
once we got the actual evidence
that behavior would change
but no, because it's thought
to determine people's
actions and experience.
It's not images and they can
think whatever they want.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: It's true.
I do think that there's a way in
which, you know, perhaps like,
you know, if there's a way out
of -- So my friend and colleague
and collaborator, we're working on
a book together, Erica Hunt writes
about normative language and
she says it produces normative
like realities and so one
of the powers of innovation,
even just messing with syntax,
can perhaps trick us a little bit
into something else, you know,
Like a grammatically correct
sentence is kind of dictatorial
in the way in which
it kind of urges us
into a particular kind of knowing.
So maybe, you know, switching words
around or messing with syntax,
maybe that's a way of kind of
helping us, to trick us and we need
to be tricked, tricked
into see something new.
>> Ron Charles: Tricked
into sympathy, into empathy.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: Yeah,
exactly, tricked into empathy.
>> Ron Charles: Could you read
poem number five, tab number five.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: Sure.
This is actually kind of excerpted
from a notebook or journal.
I have been writing all my adult
life about the irretrievable.
Often the same image appears
to me and finds language
in the poem resembling language
in some other poem
stroking the same wound.
The image is of the hand
outstretched, fingers pulsing,
sometimes into blackness,
a wandering depth.
Other times just short of the
thing the hand needs to touch.
The thing disappears.
The hand begs and begs.
I let the repetition occur
across writings as layers,
minute variations on a
writing through time.
Your body is spinning in a room
without furniture, white walls.
You look out onto a stark
beach, ocean with storm surges,
waves too far back and too far in
against shore, caught at the window
by this smallness of
your own existence.
You have the urge to
wander but cannot.
No feeling of a body present.
Instead, inevitability.
>> Ron Charles: That image of
the hand stretching out over
and over again, never reaching
what it's grasping for,
that's a very personal
image for you?
It's an image of your
work as a writer?
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: It's
really kind of a reading
across my work as a writer.
There's often the thing
that can't be accessed,
the thing that can't be touched,
but the interesting thing
about that particular piece for me,
just now like being reminded of it,
is that I went to see this
psychic -- It wasn't a psychic.
It was a shaman.
I went to see a shaman.
I don't actually believe
in psychics or shaman
but I got to them all the time.
>> Ron Charles: So
you kind of believe.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: I just want
to see what's going to happen.
I mean, I guess I believe it when
it sometimes in the moment I'm kind
of like, oh, this is great.
I'm totally believing it.
Anyway, so I go.
I think nothing is going to happen.
I go to see the shaman
in Austin, Texas.
A friend of mine said I
should go see this guy.
He's in a trailer.
It's only $40, which is amazing.
So I go in.
You know, he's like, okay,
you're just going to lie here
and he does this kind of
like guided meditation.
>> Ron Charles: Does he touch you?
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: No, no.
It's just kind of like
a hovering, you know.
I can kind of feel his presence
a little bit but not really.
And he says some things.
He's kind of like, you know,
go to a place where you feel
comfortable or something.
>> Ron Charles: It
wouldn't be that trailer.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin:
Well, that's the thing.
I know, it wouldn't be the trailer.
But so my friend who had done
this went on this whole journey
and she told me about it.
It was like a psychedelic
trip or something.
And I was like, wow,
I want to do that.
And I go and the only image I
have, I have this image of being
in this beach house that
has all white walls,
lots of windows but
there's no way out.
And besides the black dragon that
I saw for the first five minutes,
that's the only, my only experience
for like the next 40 minutes is
walking around this beach house
with white walls and windows
with like no doors out.
And for some reason in my
journaling or writing about that,
I kind of thought about the way
in my poetry where there is kind
of like unreachable thing that's
something that I'm trying to touch,
something that I'm trying to touch
with language or these images
of something that's just beyond also
happening in a way I guess in this
like meditative state,
in this trailer,
guided by shaman in Austin, Texas.
So I just put the two together.
>> Ron Charles: Wow.
Let's stand up and turn around.
It's not an intermission.
It's not an intermission.
You cannot leave.
Just stand up.
Turn around.
Sit back down.
We're all just little humans as if
from a dream, as if without form.
A useable body must
demonstrate its use.
This is what a woman's body
is, an effort in covering
or not covering, a way toward exits.
A boy is not a body.
A boy is a walk.
That is my favorite line.
I just think that is such an
amazingly concise and profound line
about gender, about identity
in just so few words.
A boy is not a body.
A boy is a walk.
Awareness of being in a female
body is a tinge of regret.
A body is a piecemeal accumulation.
I've thrown in a bunch of phrases
from all across your poems at you
about what the body
is and the tension
between the body and identity.
Can you talk about that
and your concept of it?
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: Yeah, I mean
I think that a lot of my work is
about trying to work through those
sets of questions around the body
and identity and how we know who
we are, like how we know ourselves,
how we recognize ourselves,
where we feel comfortable,
where we don't feel
comfortable and why.
And, you know, part of it is
really a kind of a thinking
through in poetry maybe but
a kind of forwarding maybe
or not forwarding but a thinking
through of Du Bois's notion
of double consciousness but, you
know, not only as it pertains
to blackness but as it
pertains being a human.
I was actually writing about
this today in this essay
that I just finished about how we
know ourselves is really predicated
on how others encounter us.
And sometimes that encounter is like
legible, like sometimes you know,
they're kind of like, hi, you know,
friend, I recognize you, I see you,
you know, in that way and
sometimes it's confusing
and sometimes it's hostile and
sometimes it wrong, you know,
the interpretation of
oneself, but we as people,
as human beings aren't
free from that encounter.
And that encounter becomes,
I think, and I don't know
if Du Bois says this but this is
what I believe, it becomes a part
of who you are, all of those
encounters become a part
of who you believe yourself to be.
And so then in some ways
authenticity becomes really kind
of a difficult notion
or something or problem
or is the most authentic self,
a kind of person who has all
of these different perceptions
of oneself incorporated
into their bodies, like maybe
that's the most authentic self.
>> Ron Charles: Can anyone do that?
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: No,
I mean, it makes you crazy.
That's why a lot of
this speaking is crazy.
It's like mad speech
in some way, you know,
because like it actually
does make you unable
to articulate who you are.
How do we know when we're
making our own choices?
So all of these things
I think are questions
that I'm grappling
with in those passages.
Some of those moments,
I was practicing,
when I wrote "Discipline," I
was often practicing in a kind
of writing where you write
on the verge of sleep.
So I would like take naps and
I would write with friends
and so we had this
writing group in Brooklyn
and we would all get together and
write and I would be like lying
on the floor and everyone else was
like around the table, you know,
writing their longform
prose or whatever.
And I would be sleeping
or kind of like --
And as soon as I would kind if
almost fall asleep, I would get up
and write down the language
that would occur to me.
>> Ron Charles: Was
this to reach some sort
of surreal or subconscious?
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: I guess so.
Yeah. It's often the strangest --
There's something about that moment.
I mean, you know, for the folks
in the room who are writers,
you probably experience this
where you're about to fall asleep,
like legitimately going
to bed, and you're in bed
and then something comes to you
and you think, ah, that's good,
I have to write that down.
And, you know, if you don't,
you'll never remember it.
If you write it down, it's
often really, really good.
It's like there's something
about that space, I think,
in one's imagination when you're
loosened from thinking in a way,
where you can get to another
kind of truth, I think.
You didn't ask me about that, but --
>> Ron Charles: No.
It's fascinating.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: Some of that
was written in that like state
or like, you know, Alice Notley
talks about writing "The Descent
of Alette," she put herself
in a trance and write, right?
Yeah, it's kind of --
I wish I could do that.
I wish I could put
myself in a trance
but there's a similar
something about that moment.
>> Ron Charles: Did you
ever experiment with drugs
to reach a state like that?
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: You know what?
I have experimented with drugs
but usually am just high.
I'm not writing anything.
I'm just like this isn't working.
I don't do that.
>> Ron Charles: Okay.
Will you read this poem on page 55?
>> Dawn Lundy Martin:
Yes, of course.
It's not the word "body"
that's the problem.
It's the physical thingness
of it, the hump.
For thousands of years
there lies behind the race,
one dreary unrelieved
monotonous chapter of ignorance,
nakedness, superstition, savagery.
When we encounter the
savage, we are in reverie.
This is precision joy,
concomitant stroking.
Are you me?
Is this our jackal face?
Oh, I love it.
I love us.
Let me make a comparison, the jackal
face akin to my father beating me
with a soup spoon I'm so unruly.
>> Ron Charles: What's
your reaction, your hmmm?
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: You know,
there are a bunch of poems in "Life
in a Box" and also in "Good Stock."
I mean, I think this is a gesture
that I make in "Discipline" too
where the time expanse
is really, really vast.
So that and there are, you
know, the kind of entry --
I'm going to break this poem down
for you, actually, because the entry
to this poem is that I was
doing a kind of classroom talk
at Columbia University and the
students were talking about whether
or not -- This is like something
that only would happen
at a graduate seminar.
They were talking about whether or
not you could still use the word
"body" in a poem, you know.
>> Ron Charles: Like
it was something --
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: So that sort
of [inaudible] it's not the word.
>> Ron Charles: Because it was
so suspect or so contaminated?
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: Yeah,
it was kind of like, oh,
we know everyone's doing this
thing where they're like talking
about the body or like
it's like a moment,
it's like a trending or something.
The body is trending in poetry.
Can we still use the body?
And so it begins there.
And then, you know, so it's the
physical thingness of it, the hump,
and so then I started to think
about in this moment I was borrowing
from 19th century, 18th
century like scientific racism,
like that middle part
is borrowed text.
It's actual text from, you know,
someone claiming that
this is science.
For thousands of years there
lies behind the race one dreary
unrelieved monotonous chapter of
ignorance, nakedness, superstition,
and savagery as a way of thinking
about how certain bodies
are narrated through history
and then it just gets really
base at the end, like, you know,
what is my body, what do I think
about when I think about my body?
My body feels pain, I know
that for a fact, you know.
I know the physical kind
of experiences of the body.
You know, I can spit from this body.
I can urinate from this body.
Things like that.
And then it becomes about, it kind
of gets, goes really big towards
like history and then it gets
really particular towards my own
personal experience.
>> Ron Charles: It starts
very abstract and intellectual
and then becomes very
physical and emotional?
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: Yeah.
>> Ron Charles: That's what made
your poem work, though, right?
I mean, if it stayed
in that top level,
it'd be very a very arrogant poem.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: Then
it would be dissertation.
>> Ron Charles: Exactly.
A very arrogant poem indeed.
Remember that section "Beloved"
where a baby shrugs a preacher
and says, in this here place we
flesh, flesh that weeps, laughs,
flesh that dancing on
bare feet in grass.
Love it. Love it hard.
She's speaking to people whose
bodies have been so hated
for so long for so many generations
but they need to be taught how
to love their bodies again.
When you say the word of the body is
not the problem, it's the thingness
of it, that's a poem that speaks
to Black people in a different way
than it speaks to White people,
people that are in the hegemony,
as you call it, people
who are outside of it.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin:
I think that's true.
My good friend Ronaldo Wilson
has a poem called "Poems
of the Black Object," and, you know,
kind of a similar gesture to speak
from an I speaker that you
are calling a black object
and that moment from
between [inaudible] talk
about also makes me think of
Fred Mouton [assumed spelling].
He has this lecture
that he gives where he's
like quoting Hortense Spillers
about like about, you know,
to be a black body at a particular
point in history was to really be
like a, was to really be a kind of
flesh, to be flesh in some ways,
because the flesh, the meat
of it, the flesh of it,
the what I'm calling
like the hump of it,
what Ronaldo calls the objectness of
it, the thingness of it, you know,
are kind of all in
conversation with each other.
And I think we see that, we see that
narrative from slavery kind of still
in our contemporary moment about,
you know, there was that thing.
Did you see this thing
-- I saw this thing.
I was glimpsing at Facebook
today and there was this nursing,
new nursing textbook that
was put out by a publisher,
I can't remember the name, and
it was talking about the ways
in which different
races experience pain.
This is in 2017.
So and it broke it down.
It's like this is how White
people experience pain.
This is how Black people,
this is the way Native
people experience pain.
You know, it was, you know, and
of course, they had to apologize.
But I don't even know how that
made it into the textbook.
Like how many people did
that have to go by in order
to make it into the textbook?
So like those narratives, you
know, of the particularities
of particular kinds of bodies,
flesh, how they become narrated
as things or whatever, you
know, it's a continuous
and diffuse kind of, the academic
in me would say discursive thing
that happens still in
this contemporary moment.
We still have those
resonances [inaudible].
>> Ron Charles: You once
said, one of most core beliefs
about what it means to be is that
if you experience trauma and I think
that in some ways the Black
experience is a kind of trauma
that it's difficult to be cohesive.
That impossibility of being cohesive
makes it hard for me to rewrite
that I over and over and over
again is a very slippery thing.
First of all, the parenthetical
statement is just devastating.
The Black experience
is a kind of trauma?
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: Yeah,
you know, or, you know,
it's also like the
relationship between or it's kind
of like melancholy or something
or melancholia or something.
I think about it as a kind of
trauma because, like we were talking
about before, like there's no
way to really speak one's self.
So there is -- So the one
way I think about trauma is
that like pain it has
like no language.
So when you're in the moment of
experiencing something severe,
whether it be psychological
or physical,
you literally cannot speak it.
Right? It's hard to
speak after the fact.
And so if you think about the
Black experience in America
like along those lines,
like what is it that is able
to give it the language
that it deserves in order
to really be able to speak it.
Like how do you speak the, like, you
know, a whole, however many years,
however many years of, you know,
historical and contiguous, you know,
disenfranchisement
from the human race.
It's too, you know, so I think
that when I say that about trauma,
like that's not really thinking
about but that's I think
that writing and art is so important
and that's why that language
that you referenced early about the
circling around and the circling
around I think that together we
writers and artists are doing
that work, kind of circling around
this thing, trying to get closer
to it, really and all of
our different, you know,
formal enterprises,
genre enterprises,
and together somehow the layering
of those meanings will get
somehow closer to the thing
and hopefully transform
the world that we live in.
Like that's the hope, I think,
you know, that the hope is
that transforming culture
and art and working
in these fields can be a kind of
social justice work that happening,
you know, kind of insidiously.
And hopefully it will take
a long time for the regime,
the current regime
especially, to catch on to it.
You know, like if we were
in Chile, they would know.
They would be like,
throw the poets in jail.
Throw the poets in jail
first, the visual artists
and the journalists,
get them all in there.
Then we can really start
to do our work, you know.
We don't need them
contributing to what people think.
>> Ron Charles: Are you hopeful?
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: Am I hopeful?
Oh, God. Are you?
I don't know.
>> Ron Charles: I'm
starting to not be.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: Yeah.
>> Ron Charles: I'm thinking
of the essays [inaudible]
has written recently.
It really sounds like he's, you
know, kind of throwing in the towel.
It just seems like what's
happened after Obama is
such a counter-reaction,
like it's hard to be hopeful.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: You know what
makes me hopeful is reading history.
You know? I think that
when I look at, you know,
countries that have been through
fascism, kind of countries
that have experience genocided,
people who have lost so much in war,
and how people kind of come out
of the other side of that better.
>> Ron Charles: So you look
at the great arc of time?
>> Dawn Lundy Martin:
Look at the big arc.
That's the thing that gives me hope.
That's right.
Yeah.
>> Ron Charles: To have a
long enough perspective.
Tell us about "Perpetuus."
Am I pronouncing that name right?
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: Perpetuus.
>> Ron Charles: This
is your own character?
We see Perpetuus in "Good
Stock Strange Blood."
Where is that pad.
Number nine.
Who is this character?
There's a little paragraph
about Perpetuus.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: Okay.
Once I wrote into a being an
imagined figure named Perpetuus
whose name is Latin for
continuous, entire, universal.
Perpetuus is necessarily
liberated from gender
and without attachment
to skin or color.
She, it's like a slash between the s
and the h. S/he is only reflection.
S/he must be called to
arrive and when s/he arrives,
s/he alters the being of
the one who calls her forth
and they become what they
have perceived in Perpetuus.
What is the Black body
but an aching tone?
Perpetuus is untethered from the
Black experience here on Earth
but has an outer core that is
as dark as tree in dead night.
Refusal to adhere to
ontology as fissure or rip
in the fictional coherence
of culture, America, order.
To build instead a sonic
register against any resistance
to a white flag against which
fists, male, aggresses a liberation.
Perpetuus.
>> Ron Charles: What --
>> Dawn Lundy Martin:
Perpetuus is the character.
So I wrote this libretto for --
Part of this book is from a libretto
that I wrote for a global
arts collective called How you
[inaudible] African and we
had this 50-minute video opera
in the Whitney Biennial
a couple of years ago
and then there was a whole drama
around whether or not we should pull
or keep it in the Whitney Biennial
in order to critique the kind
of [inaudible] of that
particular year of the biennial.
This happened recently too.
It keeps happening at the
Whitney Biennial, right.
There are some protests against kind
of how things have been included.
Anyway, so I wrote this libretto
that had three distinct characters.
And those characters, one was very
tethered and really debilitated
by their experience in
the racialized body.
There's one mad character whose
body has many arches and windows.
I imagined that character to
be borne out of the head of,
there's a play by Adrienne Kennedy.
Do you guys know this playwright?
Adrienne Kennedy has a play
called "Funny House of a Negro,"
which is almost un-stageable and
her protagonist Sarah goes mad
because she has a Black father.
That a real reduction of the play.
You're not sure if she
dies at the end or not.
But the character that
I imagined being born
out of her head is the one with many
arches and windows because it has
to be a kind of mutation but
Perpetuus, who is like, you know,
everything at the same time
is really like the voice
of like future reason in the work.
You know, like this, you know,
we don't, it's untethered.
She's, you know, both and
nothing at the same time.
>> Ron Charles: Male,
female, white, black.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: Yeah, exactly.
>> Ron Charles: All colors.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: Everything.
So and exist in this kind of
like future state of knowing.
So in the libretto, Perpetuus comes
in as everyone is kind of like,
you know, one person is
talking, you know, crazy talk.
Another figure is like, you
know, I'm dying, you know.
They won't let me go.
They have me.
They won't let me go.
And then Perpetuus is
like, we are not of them,
kind of singing this
other song, you know,
of some kind of future
possibility for beingness.
That sounds like actually --
It sounds like I wrote
that on drugs but I didn't.
>> Ron Charles: No.
No. It sounds like a real vision
of hopefulness, doesn't it?
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: It is
kind of a vision of hopefulness.
Yeah.
>> Ron Charles: When you
think of the anti-Catholic
and anti-Irish sentiment in
this country that's now gone,
pretty much, it is kind of
a model of what could happen
with other repressed groups someday.
Do you think?
Am I putting --
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: That's true.
>> Ron Charles: Does that
sound incredibly naive?
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: I
mean, we could circle back
around to hating Catholics
and the Irish.
Who knows what's going to happen.
>> Ron Charles: That's true.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin:
You know, I mean --
>> Ron Charles: Bring that back?
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: If you
think who would [inaudible].
Yeah, I agree that there may
be some possibility for change.
I also believe in kind of change
on the infinitesimal level,
like I think that when change,
sometimes you can't see change
happening because it's happening,
you know, kind of grassroots, small
communities, in our relationships
with people, and our
relationships with each other,
how we talk to people
on the plane, you know.
I feel like after the after the
election, White people are like,
who are like progressives
are so nice to me.
I was on a plane, I was
like this woman is so nice.
This is amazing.
I know, yeah, we have to interact.
>> Ron Charles: Like
we're overcompensating?
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: Right.
Right. Well, also I think maybe
that's true but I think what's nice
about it is that like yeah,
we have to interact as humans,
like we can no longer kind of
afford to, you know, be in our own,
you know, cocoons and silos
as much as we might like to.
>> Ron Charles: Can you tell me
about the Third Wave Foundation?
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: Oh,
the Third Wave Foundation.
>> Ron Charles: Speaking
of hopefulness.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: Yeah,
when I was a baby poet,
before I was really, I hadn't
published many poems by then.
I was working in philanthropy
in New York
and working the feminist
movement in a way or wanting to.
And I started an organization
called The Third Wave Foundation
which was a young feminist activists
foundation with three friends:
Rebecca Walker, the writer who's
Alice Walker's daughter and --
I hope she's not watching because
this is the first thing I say about,
like Alice Walker's daughter,
and my friend Catherine Gund,
and Amy Richards who's a writer
and Catherine Gund is a filmmaker.
And so we all got together
and started this organization.
We really wanted to --
We were extremely hopeful in that
we thought we could, the four of us,
that we could save feminism
by getting young people
really excited about it.
And we had this real
debate really about whether
or not we should use the word
"feminism" and I was like, you know,
we have to use the word "feminism"
if we're going to save feminism
or else what's the point.
And they were like, no,
we could use another word.
I said that makes no sense.
So yeah, that was the goal
was to kind of refresh
and reinvent feminism because
like young people and we wanted it
to be a kind of multi-gendered
feminism
so that young people would get
excited about women's issues,
excited about gender issues in
a way where when we would go
to college campuses they were really
in critique of the word and the kind
of legacy of feminism, especially
as it had to do with race.
So and they had like, you know,
backlashy-type stereotypes
about what it meant
to be a feminist.
And so we wanted to be
like look, we're normal.
We're fairly attractive people.
You know, it's fine.
You know, you're going to be okay
if you believe in gender equity.
It's, you know, like
that kind of thing.
>> Ron Charles: It's
a hopeful thing.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin:
It was a hopeful thing.
>> Ron Charles: Is
it still going on?
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: It is.
It's smaller now but we were, you
know, so we were around for 20 years
in a big way and we gave
away millions of dollars
to young activist organizations
all across the country
and we still give away
money but we do exist.
We're still a national foundation
but now we're a donor advised fund.
Yeah. I mean, that's like a
very, that's like suddenly I got
like really like, you know,
like philanthropy talk
because we're a donor-advised fund.
>> Ron Charles: In one
of your poems you say,
reviewers want these
poems to be more hopeful.
Obviously, you meant
that in a funny way.
But and the poems are often dark.
But the fact that you're writing
them, the fact that they're
so powerful, the fact that they
disorient us, it is a hopeful act
that you would do that,
that you would publish them,
that we would read them.
Those are hopeful impulses.
People who give up don't bother
to write or publish poetry, right?
I mean, you just wouldn't care.
If you don't care,
you don't critique.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: That's true.
It depends on the --
Yeah, I think --
For me, I think that the act
of writing is a hopeful act.
You know, even if the content
of the poems sometimes leans toward
our [inaudible] darkest tendencies,
you know, I do think that
that active critique,
that active attempting to get close
to something or represent, I guess,
in a twisted way the reality in
which we live our experiences,
our experiences as gendered
people, that, yeah, that's hopeful.
You know, if I write
about, you know,
my first book which is more
explicitly about sexual trauma,
I guess the first two books,
you know, one hopeful thing is
that when the work enters
the world and, you know,
I think it's fairly abstract
writing in some ways sometimes
but sometimes it really connects
with people and young woman come
up to me and it connects them
in a really visceral way,
so that feels hopeful to kind
of connect with other people
around a set of experiences and
they feel like they're not so alone
in the world and I feel like
I'm not alone in the world.
That's pretty hopeful.
>> Ron Charles: That is.
That's the best thing.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin:
Yeah, absolutely.
>> Ron Charles: It's been
fascinating to talk to you tonight.
Thank you so much for coming.
I really appreciate it.
>> Dawn Lundy Martin: Thank you.
Thank you for your questions.
[ Applause ]
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