AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

The Poetry Magazine Podcast: Douglas Kearney and Cindy Juyoung Ok on Scrabble, Spite, and “Dintelligibility”

(If you notice a mistake in the transcript, please let us know by emailing [email protected].)

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Douglas Kearney: (RECORDING PLAYS)

let me worry over burning, over
drowning, how molasses blood loiters

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Welcome to the Poetry Magazine Podcast. I'm Cindy Juyoung OK, Feeling loud of heart about bringing the poetry and poetics of our guests to you. I'm chatting with Douglas Kearney, who joins from Saint Paul, Minnesota. In Doug's first book, Fear, Some, published in 2006 by Red Hen Press, there's a poem called “Alameda Street,” about “brown boys,” to whom the poem is dedicated. It includes the lines, “We throw rocks at garages/making no dents/We all just/trying to leave/a mark.” His poems not only leave marks, but make marks that have never been dreamed up before, of original shapes and sizes, of startling decibel changes and echoes. And his poems, his performances, they've made other kinds of marks that aren't visible. Not on garages, but on generations of psyches and bodies, On those of us who have been lucky enough to encounter eight books of poetry, prose, libretti, and so many more performances. Today we're talking about spite, the strange, maybe even solely human emotion. Because Doug has an incredible essay on the feeling in the July/August issue of Poetry for a new series called “Hard Feelings.” Doug, welcome to the podcast.

Douglas Kearney: Thank you so much, Cindy, for that fantastic introduction. And, I'm so happy to be sitting here with you.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: So, Poetry magazine has this new series called “Hard Feelings.” How did it come to be that you were paired with the emotion spite?

Douglas Kearney: There's something really like self-destructive about spite. It's the willingness to kind of harm oneself, if the idea is that another person gets harmed too. And I've been playing Scrabble with a friend of mine as an app, right?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Kit!

Douglas Kearney: Yeah. So Kit (LAUGHS) and something that I realized was a really rich and essential part of our game. Like it was essential, it was necessary (LAUGHS) component of our games was spite. And it was a part of our friendship that we were able to express in this space that didn't bleed over into other parts of our friendship. So, as I was playing Scrabble, I really just realized, "Oh, wait a second. Oh, my gosh, this is where to locate spite.”

(BOTH LAUGH)

Douglas Kearney: I was just like, "What is spite?" Like, how is spite manifested as this kind of space of intimacy and friendship? Like you have like this,

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right.

Douglas Kearney: you know, your this is how we this is how we act with each other. But in this context, when we're playing this game, there's like this whole separate path that our friendship can take.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: So the destruct…

Douglas Kearney: Where, not only. No, go ahead.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: The destruction is only limited to that one part of your relationship? There's no other part of your friendship where you have that kind of defending and building or anti-building?

Douglas Kearney: Absolutely. Absolutely. And what's wild is that, it's almost like we expect. Like we're supposed to be spiteful (LAUGHS) when we play Scrabble. Like, it's not even just like it's OK. It's kind of like, "Hey, what's going on? You have not, like, wrecked my chances to get a really good word by putting that shit letter there.”

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Douglas Kearney: Right? You know. Like, what's going on? Is everything OK? (LAUGHS) You know. So, it becomes like spite in some way is a sort of generative. Because you're making all of these additional sorts of feelings layered on to other feelings. And, you know, why I wouldn't walk around saying like, "Alright, you know, what we need to do as humans is be more spiteful towards each other." Like, that's not what (LAUGHS) I'm saying at all. But like, as a kind of emotional carnival, (LAUGHS) like an emotional inversion in the sense of carnivals and carnival structures, right? Like spite, I think is actually quite rich when contained in a very specific context.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And I think it's an unsavory feeling people don't like to admit to having. And so to

Douglas Kearney: Yeah!

Cindy Juyoung Ok: to use Scrabble as an example, it maybe showcases how it scales up, and what else is kind of behind that impulse.

Douglas Kearney: No, absolutely, absolutely. Like people don't like admitting that they're spiteful unless it's a kind of a self-negging or kind of a humble brag about like, "Oh yeah, oh, no. Well, you know, I'm just really spiteful, right?" (LAUGHS) But it's also like to call oneself spiteful and name themselves spiteful at some level, there's almost like a preening aspect to it. It's almost like, "I'm gonna give this exquisite negative emotion." And it comes from, I think what's interesting about this, and you know, it's a scarcity that comes from excess. It's like there's so much that we have, you know, at the moment of spite, that you're willing to take less in order to hurt more. And so, it's this really weird dynamic blend of excess and scarcity of possession and lack, of joy and anger, right? It's there, or envy. It's all mixed up in there. And it's like this blending flavor that has, you know, all of these notes, (LAUGHS) you know, notes of rage, notes of

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Douglas Kearney: delight at the

Cindy Juyoung Ok: It’s layered.

Douglas Kearney: fact that you manage to spite. Yes, it's layered. It's levels to it. You know (LAUGHS) like like that kind of a thing.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: What's interesting about it, too, is that, it is not a self-sustaining emotion. If it's almost like it's gonna be easier for me to pull someone down, than for me to lift up or, you know, whatever. And so, we might as well just both be down. (LAUGHS)

Douglas Kearney: Yeah, yeah.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right?

Douglas Kearney: You know, like we don't tend to extend the spite, like once the game ends, you know, we might say something like, "What the hell word was that?" Like, “what, how dare you?" (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah and it's a form of connection.

Douglas Kearney: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It's oftentimes, I kind of figure out. I'm like, "OK, yeah. I don't think there's anything, you know, she can do with this part of the board." I think the way it's locked up, you know. And then she'll just like, put down some ridiculous ass word and like, (LAUGHS) it's not even like when you play in person and you can try to bluff the other person. Like there was, OK, so there was gonna be another story about spite in this essay about spite and Scrabble. But you know, I didn't like these essays are really condensed and very tight and concentrated. Which I think is great. But, I had another friend, a friend in the poetry community, and he was playing Scrabble a lot in one of the early apps. So, he was playing a lot. And he played with what I describe in the essay as kind of like, you know, math. There was like a math version of it where he would just automatically put down letters that he knew formed words that were allowed in Scrabble. And I was playing I was like, "Dang, what does that mean?" Like, what does that word mean? He'd be like, "I don't know. I just know it counts." And he was like getting me like that. So, I was like, "Oh, OK. He doesn't know." So, he had been trouncing me, right? And the way I caught up was a great deal of spite because (LAUGHS) I said like, "He's using all these words and he doesn't look them up, you know, to know what they mean. I might be able to bluff this dude." (LAUGHS) So, I would put down something. And, you know, for people who don't know, like in Scrabble, if you think your opponent puts down a word that's not a word, you can challenge it. And if you're wrong, and they put down a real word you like, lose those points, right? So, I was like, it's a risk to challenge somebody's word. So, I just started making up words.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Douglas Kearney: I would just like, dead ass just, power through. He would say, "What does that mean?" I say, "Oh, it's like a type of marsupial from Madagascar."

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Wow, it's a game of invention.

Douglas Kearney: (LAUGHS) You know? And he just kind of like, look, you could see it on his face. Like he's like, "I don't. Maybe. OK, cool." Now, you can't do that with the app we play on now. Like, it actually won't let you put down words that aren't words. Like, it just won't let you.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, they took out the psychological warfare of it all.

Douglas Kearney: Exactly. Exactly. So, you have to find your spite in other ways. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Envy and anger and joy. Spite is related to and cast within this context of rapid and intense emotions that feel very adult, but also feel very connected to childhood?

Douglas Kearney: Absolutely. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Were there games in your childhood home? Did you grow up playing games?

Douglas Kearney: Yeah, yeah. Like, I was fortunate that sometimes things that I enjoyed, that my brother and I enjoyed intersected with things that my mother enjoyed. My mother and father, you know, we grew up all, we were all in the same house. But when it came to kind of like games or something, that was definitely a thing that my mother was generally more interested in. She and my aunt BJ would play Scrabble. And I remember watching them play and it was just this incredible thing, and, the first time I played with them and won, it was like, you know, it was like …

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Douglas Kearney: Goliath has been brought down.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: You're ready for the world?

Douglas Kearney: Yeah, right? I was like, "Who else wants some, you know?"

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Douglas Kearney: Yeah, exactly. That was a rite of passage.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: No one can say anything to me!

Douglas Kearney: Exactly. And now I retire from playing Scrabble forever as the reigning champion. But yeah, you know. So, one of the other things my mother enjoyed us having was an Atari 2600. So we played video games with friends and things like that. And now I think, you know, the video games have gotten much more complex so that you can have different sort of relationships to spite in video games. Like, I still have like my old Xbox 360, and my son and I and my daughter sometimes too. But my son and I will play Halo, you know. We'll play like a death match in Halo. And he's so much better than I. His reflexes,

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Douglas Kearney: and hand-eye coordination. There's so much better than mine. So, when we're playing, you know, I will intentionally just make it so that he hates playing (LAUGHS) Like by being spiteful, you know. Like just snatching away all the gravity of his victories by being utterly ridiculous, out of spite. And sometimes in ways that he wins even more quickly. But I know, I know how to push the buttons of what would be satisfying for him and turning it into this sort of aggravating victory, and that's 100% spite. You know, the kinds of things you could do out of spite with some of the video games we had as kids is like, not tell somebody how to play, how to control the game. Like not kind of point.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: The codes!

Douglas Kearney:  Oh, you have, yeah, like you got to press this button while you're pushing down on this joystick. Like you don't tell them that. And that's a kind of a, that's like low-hanging fruit spite, right?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Was it in the 80s that you were starting to play video games?

Douglas Kearney: Oh yeah. I grew up in the 80s. Like, when we would go outside, one of the ways that spike manifested for me, you know, in, you know, outside of like a video game context was, you know, we had a basketball hoop set up in our yard. And the, a lot of the fellows from the neighborhood, you know, they would come on by, you know, we play 21 or whatever. I was generally the youngest and the smallest. But what I realized I could do was even if I could not sort of like defensively block a shot from a bigger person, I would literally take my dirty, filthy hands, and just hold them in front of the person's face, not touching them, but making out of spidery motions (LAUGHS) with my fingers.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Little spell.

Douglas Kearney: Yeah, like a little spell of filth and like, pestilence. And they would just (LAUGHS) want to sit there. "Get your hands on my face, man!" I'm like, "You know, not touching you, you know, not... I'm playing defense." And that was spite. That was pure spite because I know it was just disconcerting

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right.

Douglas Kearney: And it was not a strategy (LAUGHS) that was like, that I had seen on a lot of the playgrounds, right? But I was just sort of like, "I'm gonna do this one because you might still make the shot, but again, you're going to hate every single time you see me coming. You're going to hate that I'm there." (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Did being the youngest and smallest in the neighborhood also affect you in terms of language? Like were you always learning a lot and speaking at kind of a more, you know, you were communicating with these older kids?

Douglas Kearney: Mmm. So, I remember one of the things that my brother was proud of about me is that I was reading, I don't know what grade level I was reading at which, but I knew I was a good reader. And so one day he... my mother collected like Stephen King books. I still have a... She passed away in 1995. I still have a lot of her old hardcovers. But he went outside once with one of her books and the next youngest person I think was two years older than me, two years older than I. And he was like, "Hey, read this like and read it out loud." And, you know, person was reading it like, he did fine, you know. It was (LAUGHS) you know, a little bit of, a little bit of hesitation, a little bit of halting every now and then. But then he was like, "Doug, come over." And I was like, "What?" I was like, "Yeah." And he was like, "You read this," and I read that part, or a part next to it. And I read it, you know, relatively smoothly. And like, he was like, "See? Haha, my brother can read better than you can." (LAUGHS) And like, later on, you know, that wasn't terribly helpful with this guy (LAUGHS) I think that...

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Grounds for spite.

Douglas Kearney: Yeah. Grounds for spite, and spite that manifest with fists, right? So, like,

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah.

Douglas Kearney: but, you know, I picked up a lot of stuff. I did speak differently (LAUGHS) from a lot of the people in the neighborhood. Even though I could pick that up. And I was code-shifting into what my mother would have taught called street talk. You know, I could do it. But my default at that time was something that sounded like a, you know, six or five-year-old radio DJ (LAUGHS) or a …

Cindy Juyoung Ok: A baby poet.

Douglas Kearney: top 40 host.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Ready to perform.

Douglas Kearney: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But but also this kind of like, you know, just a very sort of like, I remember going to the barber shop once and the barber asked me, you know, "How much you want cut?" And I was like, "Like, 7/8." (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Douglas Kearney: And I just remember the entire, you know, barbershop falling out. He said, "Somebody go grab me my slide ruler." You know, like it was just this kind of thing. So, yeah. So, I think that, you know, being younger, you know, spending a lot of time in conversation with my mother, you know, who could code-shift like a boss. And, the fact that most of the kids in our neighborhood were older than I was and closer to being my brother's age and therefore kind of closer to being his friends. Like a lot of times I tried to avoid hanging out with them too much because if they got bored, it was likely that I was going to end up in some kind of painful situation.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: With a target.

Douglas Kearney: Yeah, yeah. You know. Smallest. They said I talked smack, like sarcasm, on some shit like that. So, I was like, you know, I'm going to stay inside, I think (LAUGHS) you know. You know. I'm gonna stay inside just so nobody gets any ideas. And so, yeah. So, I think that that, you know, that also changed the sort of relationship, particularly around like language acquisition and just like language usage.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And public space.

Douglas Kearney: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I mean like, you know, there's a virtuosity to being up on the vernacular and like, you know, and knowing how to use the terms. I mean, I remember, you know, people used to say, "Oh, man, you coming up sho, right?" And I remember at some point I was talking, I said, "Yes, because you're coming up short." And it was just like the most ridiculous thing (LAUGHS) you ever. It was like, you know, it was like playing a tender love ballad on a kazoo. It was utterly (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Douglas Kearney: ridiculous.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Wrong place.

Douglas Kearney: Yeah!

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Wrong time.

Douglas Kearney: This is not the voice for that.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Too many letters

Douglas Kearney: Too many letters.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: No R, no T.

Douglas Kearney: Exactly. You know, they're supposed to disappear. They're supposed to be gone. You're supposed to relax those out. So, yeah. So, I think that a lot of it was a combination of those different things.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Well, your books have always sort of examined in different ways and genuine and very intrigued ways, this project of the US, of America, the foundation of slavery, the Middle Passage, and the, you know, kind of unceasing torture of Black people directly by the state, or contracted by the state, and also the collateral that that takes in other subjugated people. So you've mentioned Japanese internment, attacks on sick people, and you're also interested in the US project abroad, colonialism and the bombing, and the self-deception. And it's, I find it's difficult when you're inside something like this country to understand it like you're a fish, how can you describe water? So, when as a child, was it when you started to understand the US as a system or as a place?

Douglas Kearney: Oh, that's such a great question. So, I think before I understood the US as a place, I began to understand that there were … so many geographies that were somehow associated. And what I now know is that one of the earliest experiences I had with what we could talk about in terms of geopolitics, or whatever, was the notion of an African diaspora. I didn't have that language at the time, but when I was in kindergarten. I say like kindergarten through the time I was about seven or eight, when I would ride with my father, he had this eight-track of Harry Belafonte songs. And so I'm hearing all these place names, you know. (SINGS) “I love Juanita, my sweetheart from Venezuela.” Or like, you know, (SINGS) “My heart is down. I had to turn it around. My head is turning around. Had to leave a little girl in Kingston Town.” So, there's all these names, right? And I know what Harry Belafonte looks like. And at the time, I'm not certain about when are all of these places in the same place? When have we moved beyond that? You know, like when is he doing something outside of the Caribbean as, you know, I came to know it. Because, you know, on that same eight track, he you know, he sang “Danny Boy,” right? He sang “Hava Nagila” like so like, I knew there were things. I was just like, "What is this whole world that he's in?" At the same time, you know, my mother, like if we went to a football game or, you know, a little league baseball game and they did the Pledge of Allegiance, she would say, “with liberty and justice for some.” And I was just like, "Wait, what? No, that's not the words. Liberty, justice for all." And then she would tell me something about like, why that actually isn't. What our country does. So, you know, so I began, when you don't feel like you fit in with something, you try to learn it so that you can fit in and, you know, later, like very late in life, I mean, I'm talking about in the last two or three years, I was diagnosed with ADHD. So, that kind of neurodiverse, or as us, or as my friend [FRIEND’S NAME] calls it, “neuro spicy” relationship to normativity means you are trying to learn how to appear like a quote-unquote, "Normal person."

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Assimilation.

Douglas Kearney: And yeah, you're doing this kind of constant assimilation. You know, I have friends who have similar neurodiverse experiences, or perhaps they're autistic and talking about masking, and I, you know, for the last maybe 15 years, I've been calling it mirroring before I understood about masking or those sorts of things. So, I think to reproduce a Southern California living, you know, Black kid of age ten (LAUGHS) like I had done like certain measures of study, whether it was from watching movies or really listening to the way that people talked or looking at the way people moved and rehearsing that. Like rehearsing it, and being able to try to do it and carry it off. That there was just a kind of a bit of distance between me, and just folks doing shit. And so, I think that that kind of primed me to understand that one could be inside a place. You know, be socially other. I mean, I knew, I knew about, like, you know, the aspirations of white supremacy, you know, by the time I was four. Like, I knew about generational continuous harm, right? At the hands of white folks. Of people who look like me and people who look like just like BIPOC folks, right? So, I understood that.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And your mom having the thought to change the lyrics shows, you know, what else she was sort of changing

Douglas Kearney: Yeah, yes.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: and pointing out.

Douglas Kearney: She was hardcore about that kind of thing. And my father was more playful about it. So, like, I feel like my poetry really sort of blends their two, both of their approaches, to thinking about race and racism. At the same time, like, like we went to, you know, an ELCA Lutheran Church. Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. We were the only Black family in that church. Our neighborhood was mixed, but our part of the neighborhood was mostly Black, and like, that was home. But I oftentimes kind of grapple with what it meant to kind of say, "Well, when I believe I'm going to heaven, I'm going with this group of people." (LAUGHS) You know. But like, living here on Earth, this is where we live. And I know that was something that my mother like sort of struggled with. I think that she would have taken us to a different church except, you know, my father had gotten really involved in that church at that point. You know, both of my parents are Black. Like, you know, my father had gotten really, you know, he was very social butterfly type of dude. And so, he got really involved in that church. So, I think that when she felt the most like we need to kind of get out of this spot was when we had all become so interwoven into it that this was a sociality for us. And so, I think that she sometimes felt that she wished she had pulled us out earlier, that we found a Black church, a Black Lutheran church, you know. And I mean, at first, you know, you're four. So, you are like, "Oh, we are supposed to be quiet. OK." You're adapting to whatever rules are on the table, or you're rejecting those rules. You're building some kind of relationship to those rules. But then there was this other layer when it really clicked for me. It's like, "Wait, we're the only people who look like that." What does that mean? And that was just a big part of my growing up in that environment.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: So, was that in Southern California?

Douglas Kearney: So, it's in Altadena, which is, I mean, I guess you could call it a suburb of Los Angeles. But it was nestled right in the San Gabriel foothills. And, it was a really remarkable place to grow up. I mean, now one of the most famous, you know, aspects of it is, you know Octavia Butler lived there.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Classic.

Douglas Kearney: Yeah, right? And so, like the things that I think about regarding Altadena that I feel kind of connect to my current writing, and connect to my writing for a really long time as first just the strange juxtapositions. Like you could see a person on a horse like in front of a liquor store while like a low rider was also in front of the same liquor store. (LAUGHS) And like and for that not to be in what would be considered, you know, anybody who lives in a rural space. If I was talking about, well, you know, Altadena was rural.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Douglas Kearney: They'd laugh at my ass. But like, that kind of juxtaposition in a place that still felt at some level connected to an urban environment, especially as coded, when we say urban, that's been important. Just that kind of juxtaposition. And the other thing that I think has been very important is that sort of geographically. So, Octavia Butler has this thing called “Radio Imagination.” And the way I've always picked that up and run with it has been when we were driving, let's say we drive my grandmother's house down Altadena Drive, we're again nestled in the foothills. So like, you might be listening to one radio station, let's say it's an oldieS station. And then when you pass this section, like Raza radio would like, jump in. And so, you kind of go from this like, (SINGS) “My girl.” You go from like a Temptations song or a Four Tops song, and then you hear like some Raza music, you know. Like you hear some ranchera or something like that. And then you hear like a news thing. So, you're kind of constantly changing on a dime just based upon where you are.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Interaction.

Douglas Kearney: Exactly. And like, in the neighborhoods like, you know, Pasadena and Altadena and Glendale, that kind of area of Southern California, have really large populations of Armenian folks. So you'd like be driving down, you're seeing a lot of signs in English, but then you're sort of seeing these sort of Cyrillic influenced signs that would kind of be what the visual referent was for this space and for this place. And then maybe you're seeing something in Mandarin, or you're seeing things in Spanish. And so, it was constantly a sort of blurring and overlapping of different registers of diction, different languages, different styles, different tones.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: So, an early poem of yours starts with the KKK rally in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 2001. And obviously, you and your family live there now. Did you have a connection to Saint Paul at the time of that rally, or that writing, or was it just a coincidence?

Douglas Kearney: So, funny story. There is a Lutheran, sort of seminary college out here called Concordia. And the Twin Cities, Minnesota, generally, I jokingly call like the Lutheran Mecca. (LAUGHS) Like so many of the people from my church congregation are from here, from Minnesota. So, there was this kind of interesting connection between where I grew up and as I was going through high school, I could tell because people would say it like, "Oh, you know, do you think that Doug might want to go to Concordia?" You know, like, "Do you think he might want to join the seminary?" And (LAUGHS) you know, because, you know, I would do I would sometimes do youth sermons. You know, I was writing and I was doing speech contests. So, I was decent at delivering a sermon.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Testimony.

Douglas Kearney: Yeah, right? But I did not have that interest. So, what's hilarious now is I live very close to Concordia (LAUGHS) University. So, I didn't necessarily have family in the Twin Cities. We lived here first from 1999 to 2001 with my wife, Nicole. Nicole was going to grad school at the U. So, we live here for a couple of years, went back to Los Angeles, you know, like the Los Angeles metropolitan area. In fact, started back at Altadena, my pop’s house. And, we would think about places where we might want to go to find work or live, and we would kind of constantly put the Twin Cities on the list of like the five-city list that we were like, “Oh, you know, where might we like to live?” And so, when the opportunity to work here happened for 2018, we took it, you know, and I was able to get the job to be back. But at that time of the rally, it was literally, I think within two weeks of when we were going to move back to California. So, like we were packing.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right. And before your kids, you and your wife.

Douglas Kearney: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Just the two of us.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Wow. Your latest poetry collection, Sho, which we were just mentioning the origins of, came out in 2021 from Wave Books. Could we hear a poem from it? Would you read for us?

Douglas Kearney: Sure. What would you like to hear?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Um “Sand Fire (or The Pool, 2016)” could be interesting, but I think we're flexible.

Douglas Kearney: Alright we’ll do.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: If you have something.

Douglas Kearney: Oh no, I think since we just mentioned a time that I didn't have kids, it might be fun to read something from that, that really involves, in the real event, it involved both of my kids, but the poem focuses on my daughter.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Beautiful.

Douglas Kearney: Alright. So I'll pull that out. Alright.

(READS POEM)

“Sand Fire (or The Pool, 2016)”

          chlorine and smoke lit our eyes
since it was, we swam while fire made
a boxer's ear of sky
                    sweet, let go the side:
                    you'll be fine—you dove
your violet ring from deepest cool—
                    let me worry, while my Karo blood,
slick guts: just how it is—
          know how far the burning by
how small those first responders fly
at soot-bruised afternoon skin—
          my guts crack slick knuckles
Metformin putting work in deep—
          your catch at, "how'd it start?"—
          I've told you yellow weather lights the litter,
oil spatters, common saltwort—
                    don't breathe outside for days—
copters ring around and spill
to slow the 'flower—
          you goggle water and what “fire's gonna” eat eat
                    sweet yes o though not ours this time because—
          let me worry over burning, over
drowning, how molasses blood loiters,
how we go below what just
                    happens—
    hold your breath and
deeper deeper till you
                    daughter, daughter come up clutching
                    what is under
                    come back striking
                        what's above.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Your performance of your own poems is extraordinarily insistent. It's active. It's original. And, I'm really in awe of artists whose art is connected to the body in that way, and also to the period of your life. Because I always think, you know, I have to say, I think my poetry is mostly on the page. And I get great relief to think about when I'm dead, my words can be read, and in a way, it's a small immortality, but there's an immortality. Even if I'm alive and someone reads it, I didn't need to be alive for them to read it. And for you. Yeah, whereas your poetry is on the page, but it's also off the page. It asks what a page is. It demands that the concept of a page sort of dismantle. So, what is the relationship between your very unmistakeable live performances and the way your work lives in paper-bound form? Does your mortality as an artist play a part?

Douglas Kearney: I would definitely say I'm interested in what it means to create something that could kind of put you in a space with other people, even if you're not actually there, right? I think there's something beautiful about that. I think of publishing books as sort of telepathy, but also time travel, right? Like this book connects a reader to something that I might have spent a long time thinking about in a completely different place and completely different time. And they're getting a version, a stylized version of what thinking about that thing was like for me. I think that in the live context, there are ways in which, in the past, my reading style, you know, has been described to me, and I realized that it's kind of a double-edged sword, where people feel like they can't like, them reading the poems on the page isn't enough. Like, it's like it's not going to be the experience. But I feel sometimes like people are actually saying to me, and this might be what they really mean, that like, I wouldn't have gotten this poem without hearing you read it. And, you know, like the performer side of me is like, "Awesome. Hells yeah. Uh-huh."

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Douglas Kearney: And the writer side, right, the writer side is like, "But I work..."

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Rude.

Douglas Kearney: "...so hard. That's so rude." And the performer’s like, "Yeah, suck it writer. Haha nobody cares about you."

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I would be on the writers' side because I think actually it's the opposite. It's a totally different experience to hear you read it. But also the poems often ask the reader to meet it halfway.

Douglas Kearney: Yeah, yeah.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I have to make a choice. When I look at something that is, as you call it, di-intelligible, I think?

Douglas Kearney: Oh, yeah. Dis-intelligible. Yeah.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Dis-intelligible. It's not necessarily easy to know where my eye should go. And so, I'm making that choice. I'm involved in the reading in the making, and that is its own experience, which is also miraculous in the way that your readings can be.

Douglas Kearney: Thank you. Thank you. And I screwed up its dintelligible. I forgot that

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Dintelligible.

Douglas Kearney: Yeah I forgot that the prefix is din.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah I was like.

Douglas Kearney: Yeah it’s dintelligble. Like that becomes... I appreciate that. And I mean like, the next collection is full of these, you know, collages of poems. So, you know, using actual digital imageries of texts, movie posters. You know, things like logos, texts from old books, signage, any sort of writing that I feel like has a texture, still maintains a relationship to the idea of writing. And then I download those images, or take screencaps, and then I kind of compose these collages out of them, several of which, you know, were published in Poetry magazine. Like one, I can think of the titles “Wolves.” And those to me like are, literally, I'm not going to read those aloud. I'm not going to do it because I actually think that if I tried to do the kind of live reading style that I tend to do with the, with my poetry, I think it would actually work against the poem. I think trying to capture the multiple textures of the texts of the lettering, which I would feel kind of bound to do, like, you know, the voice of Futura is not the same as the voice of Garamond, right? You know. So, for me, I would just kind of dissolve into this kind of like Tasmanian devil sounding like a loud-like type of thing. (IMITATES TAZMANIAN DEVIL)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: As only you can.

Douglas Kearney: As only I can, But then like, you know, I think then the jig is truly up. Like people would be like, “Wait a second!” Right? (LAUGHS) Like, “These aren't even frickin’ words! Like what the hell?” So yeah, so, that has become a kind of a space where I'm asking questions about dintelligibility, right? Like, when are we legible or illegible? When is it signal and when it is noise, and to whom and in what contexts?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Well, you've often distinguished between two kinds of poems that you write. One is written on Microsoft Word, the other one is often using Adobe InDesign or doing the collages, and the text becomes material for like an image. And of course, using InDesign is way rarer in poetry and in part because I think uh very few poets know how to use the very complicated Adobe format. But your first book, Fear, Some, has Microsoft Word poems. Sho interestingly sort of circles back and also features Microsoft Word poems. It sounds like now you're moving into InDesign poems. So, is that something that kind of swings back and forth for you? Is each book surprising the last?

Douglas Kearney: That's a really great question. With Fear, Some there were probably 6 out of, I think 35 poems that were really using InDesign to compose them. And at that point it probably would have been like QuarkXPress, right? Which InDesign replaced. So, that one, and so after that the Black Automaton had more and they were at this point kind of taking on a particular kind of visual grammar. So, those kind of became sort of calling cards of my style. Like you open up a journal and if you saw a poem like that...

Cindy Juyoung Ok: It's recognizable.

Douglas Kearney: Yeah. And this is something that I've been told. This wasn't sort of like a thing that I was staking anything upon. It's just like, "Oh, yeah, that's a Douglas Kearney poem." What began to happen is the number of what I would call at that time performative typography poems, because those are the InDesign poems, the number of those are starting to swell with each book. By the time we get to Patter, a part of what I'm doing with those approaches is seeing can I write what somebody would consider a lyric poem using those techniques? Patter is also where I began, you know, at some level, I was continuing the kind of visual grammar that I developed for the Black Automaton, but I was also trying other things, like a poem as a word search, a poem as two forms that were filled out. By the time I got to Buck Studies, the fourth poetry collection, I had lots of these kinds of typographic experiments. Probably close to half of the book. With Sho, and I'm glad, you know, you kind of tie it to Fear, Some because in some ways I do feel like Sho is a sort of a spiritual successor. It felt less like a kind of an elaboration of things I was doing on this progress, and sort of like a reset. And for me, it was actually, you know, I don't wanna exaggerate, but it was a source of a little bit of anxiousness because here was a poem without what people would recognize as the performative typography. This was a book of poems that you could make on Microsoft Word, as you called it. Yeah, these were Microsoft Word poems. And almost everybody who's ever reviewed it has made that observation, right, like?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: As a departure or something.

Douglas Kearney: As a departure, right? And so like, but that also takes us back to what you're talking about earlier in terms of like reading versus performance, not versus but reading and performance, and how this next book is one that to perform it is going to be in some ways...

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Impossible.

Douglas Kearney: Intentionally impossible. So, what's going to happen next? How am I going to do things with this book? And so this kind of like it's not a refusal or denial or a recanting, but it's just like, "I'm doing this now. Let's see what happens." Right?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: It's more additive. It's more additive. It's surprising to yourself, to critical expectation. It's that 180 is about finding a new way. And it makes sense to me because you work in different arts, right? You write poetry, you write essays. You also write librettos for operas. The textural material of an opera, and music.

Douglas Kearney: Yeah. I mean, I make beats. I do improvisational vocals with a lot of musicians. Davu Seru, David Strange, MoniQue Dorsey, Val Jeanty, Natasha Diggs, like, these are folks who I've had opportunities to do musical performance with. You know that just as an exercise in listening, it's this remarkable chance to, as MoniQue would say, sort of take responsibility every now and then for the conversation. Like, you're not soloing, you're in a conversation now. You are responsible for this part of it. And that to me is a really rich sort of a thing. And it's kind of the relationship that I would like to have with my readers. Like, "OK, you're responsible for your reading of this poem, right?" That doesn't mean that there's going to be some punitive thing that happens. It's just like, "Don't look at me,” right? (LAUGHS) “Don't look at me. Look at the poem." There's an anxiety there because the reader wants to get it right. They don't want to misunderstand.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: They don't want to be on the outside of the joke or the meaning.

Douglas Kearney: Exactly. Exactly. And they don't want to harm the object or misunderstand the poet, right? So, there's their personal anxiety about what it's gonna say about them, and that's there. But then there's also the kind of like, "Oh, if I get this wrong, what does it mean to the poet?"

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Wanting to caretake the writer.

Douglas Kearney: Yeah. I mean, you know, there's, there's something lovely about that. When you tell people, “No, really, I mean it. I'm not being courteous, just being courteous. Like, make yourself at home. Like, for real. Get whatever you want out of the refrigerator. Like, do that,” right? You know, like that I find can be having that attitude and that intention as I create these things helps me create the visual possibility because I know that I mean it, and I know that I'm doing things now even more robustly than years ago. That it's really true. You can start this poem anywhere.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: There are no directions.

Douglas Kearney: Yeah. No directions.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: It reminds me of the fact that the word libretto comes from that Latin root, liber. And it's very interesting because it means, “Book,” but it can also mean, “free.”

Douglas Kearney: Mmm hmmm. Mmm hmmm. Mmm hmmm. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And what is the role that music and that this lack of direction, you know, including these collaborations, working with Val Jeanty on this album, what's the relationship for you between books and freedom?

Douglas Kearney: Oh, wow. I mean, well, you know, in Afrodiasporic traditions like reading and literacy has oftentimes been connected to a mode of freedom. What's interesting to me is that, books, dor me and my practice, what I think about most of all is that books act as a kind of an archive, or when I'm feeling particularly spiky, like a sort of documentation or file on me. Like once I write something, and it's published, I am a human in the world who has uttered these things, or written these things publicly. And so now I have to live in the world with that being available to other people. And, you know, and as I was talking about earlier, like most of the ways I tried to socialize as a kid was how to not be conspicuous, how to be and say the thing that would make me appear the most normal, and the poems, and perhaps even more so now, the live performances, these are spaces that absolutely frustrate that impulse. Like I've said, some really wild shit at readings, not because I'm just trying to be provocative, but because I'm being in the moment and actually saying the thing that crosses my mind. And that's not some sort of like, you know, (DEEPENS VOICE) "This is against," you know, “thinking about like, you know, like other snowflakes.”

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Douglas Kearney: “And this ain’t woke.” It’s not that, like, it’s not saying saying what's on my mind in the sense of that. It's saying what's on my mind in the sense of actually being more interested, not in being an edgelord right? But to live with a particular kind of risk because of an anxiety around risk that I grew up with. I feel like I'm still a member of a sociality. I am accountable for the things I say. And in fact, in some ways I feel even more accountable for the things I say in a performance than what I say when I'm just in my house. You know in a performance, especially in probably the last six or seven years, there's just less masking or mirroring happening in those spaces. I'm less interested in the part of the poetry reading that is a professionalizing aspect, right? And you know, like, I'm not … shit, I got a job (LAUGHS) you know, like, so I'm not throwing shade on that as an impulse there. But for me, it's been a really interesting thing, trying to understand what the relationship between a poetry reading, and in part what they are there to do, and commerce like, you know, on the one hand, I'm like, if people are much more excited about me reading the book aloud, then they're less interested in buying the book. And so, I've given what I consider really good readings and been told they were really good readings, but they don't necessarily turn people toward the book. So that kind of professionalization aspect of it or the sort of this exchange doesn't always track for me in a way that I think encourages me to treat that as a space where I need to make sure I'm taking care of the audience in a particular way, I'm presenting myself in a particular kind of way. And I think also, you know, like I know the poems, you know, not memorized, but in the sense if I open up, "Oh, I know it's going to happen. I'm gonna do these things. This is going to be what happens.” What I don't know is what's going to happen between me and the audience. And so, during the poetry reading, the thing I'm interested in most of all nowadays is like, what happens between me and the audience when I'm not reading a poem.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: The silence.

Douglas Kearney: Yeah. What happens when we're all in the same space?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: The banter.

Douglas Kearney: The banter. Exactly. And that to me is really exciting.

(RECORDING OF FODDER PLAYS WITH DOUGLAS KEARNEY SPEAKING AND MUSIC PLAYING)

What I have been made to do, I was made to. To a need, I am myself instrumental. To be played.

Douglas Kearney: It's like, what does it mean when I do something that's utterly unreasonable in a space that I share with a bunch of people? What is that? What's happening there?

(RECORDING OF FODDER PLAYS WITH DOUGLAS KEARNEY SPEAKING AND MUSIC)

Vernacular. Ha ha ha. Literal. Ha ha ha. Autothespian. Ha ha ha. I is a actor and never a actor. I agree, it's complex, but my itness demands it. Was I a simple machine?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: You mentioned not being provocative in your performances, you know, for the sake of it. And being present, having things come to you. It reminds me of the album you made with Val Jeanty, Fodder. You recorded Fodder live. And there's a track titled, “I'm Here to Help.” Was that sort of an example of that presence where things are coming up for you, and you're exploring them out loud?

Douglas Kearney: Yeah, yeah. Like it was like pretty much anything that happens in my banter at one point is completely improvised in the sense of like, you know, I'm just up there. And what I'm actually trying to do is reproduce the associative space that I'm in when I'm writing a poem, but I'm trying to make that part of the performance.

(RECORDING OF FODDER PLAYS)

Um the uh, subtitle to this is, after Charlottesville, but before it too shit.

Douglas Kearney: And so, you know, like sometimes, you know, you get on a tear and like, you know, I'm up in Portland, I was up in Portland at that point. And, you know, Portland is one of those sort of places where it is associated with farther left politics. But it is also a place where like, you know, segregation or Black people not being allowed to live there for a really long time is as much a part of its history. And so there's a kind of a feeling like, "OK, how much of that is in this room?" Like the audience members in this room, how long have they lived here? How much of that is a part of their active memory? Are they pushing back on it or what? So like to be in a space like that, doing kind of a performance, all of that begins to kind of churn and entangle.

(RECORDING OF FODDER PLAYS)

And this references, after Charlottesville happened, I got a call from a friend who isn't Black. Um, and called and said, "I want to interview you about Charlottesville." (LAUGHS) Because, apparently when white supremacy happens, white people totally bypassed the expert in their mirror and in their houses, and look for a Black person to find out about what the fuck is going on in their heads!

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And whatever's happening between you and them, but also between them and each other, between them and themselves, their responses, that is something that everyone remembers from that night. And it's just those of you who are in that room. And that's what makes it so

Douglas Kearney: Yes!

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Both ephemeral and sort of permanent in being impossible to recapture.

Douglas Kearney: No, I love that observation. Yeah, it's not all centered around me. It is centered around this kind of exchange. And we're all doing some kind of exchange. Like, you know, if you're sitting next to somebody, and they laugh at a part that you're like, I don't know if that was funny. Suddenly there's this sort of anxiousness. Like, am I sitting next to somebody who has like, who has bad feelings.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Tension.

Douglas Kearney: Or like. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so that becomes that tension I think can sort of saturate the room in ways that I find productive. Like discomfort is more productive than comfort. And this isn't like saying like artists should starve or, you know, like, but I think that we have to do more. Like just, like somatically. We're uncomfortable when your emotional response to something doesn't seem consistent with the intellectual response. Well, now you got some shit. You've got to think like, "Why? Why was that funny to me? What was that?” And I think that that's so much more interesting to me to leave an audience thinking about their relationship to a particular sort of subject matter more than they're thinking about, "Man, that last poem was great." Like that part, you know, I appreciate that. I like when people like my work, but I am more interested in the questions that people ask themselves as stimulated by my work.

(RECORDING FROM FODDER PLAYS)

Now, clearly, we're in Portland and you're at (LAUGHS FROM CROWD) at a poetry event featuring swarthy people. So, you'd probably never do this. So, I shouldn't have to say this, but you know, this is going on a record, so this isn't for you. This is in perpetuity, right? So, don't, don’t take this personally (LAUGHS) because most of you, like I said, like like you would never do this. But please, if you're playing this record in the future and I wish I could assume that when this record is pressed next year and comes out next year, this would be totally, you know, obsolete advice. (SINGS) But America keeps on giving. It just keeps on giving. Who's going to be in a cage next? Look at the fucking mirror. The reason we're in this problem, one of the reasons, is because other motherfuckers were brought here to do your fucking work for you. So, when you ask somebody to think for you, it's kind of continuing a tradition. So, let's stop that.

Douglas Kearney: Through that entanglement. Sometimes where I end up is a site of hurt that becomes a site of anger, or a site of feeling isolated, that becomes a site of anger. And so, that, that intro with the little song, you know, (SINGS) “Who's gonna be in cages next?” Like, that's literally, what it occurred to me to do at that point. To make it like, you know, super overwrought. (LAUGHS) Like there are two basic things that we have. There's banter and then there are bits, bits just using the kind of language of comedy. A bit is like a thing that I've done before that I know has a certain effect and I use that again. But all the bits tend to happen from one particular site of banter in front of a live audience, and then it just becomes a thing that I do, one of the things I could do when I introduced that poem. But this wasn't a situation in which I was doing a bit. I think the bit part would have been like, "Oh, but you know, not you, Portland. No, no, not you. Like we're talking about other people." That part's a bit. But everything after that was just kind of like being in Portland (LAUGHS) on that night.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: On the podcast, we have this question into the void. So this is a question some poet offered out into the world not knowing who it would go to, just as you'll offer yours without knowing the question’s receiver. And we have a great question to close out from Donika Kelly, DK to DK.

Douglas Kearney: Oh my gosh!

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Douglas Kearney: And oh, Donika is so fucking good

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHTS)

Douglas Kearney: OK. Yeah. Alright. Yeah. DK DK.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah. DK DK. She's got a good question for you.

Douglas Kearney: OK.

Donika Kelly: Hey, this is Donika Kelly. One of the things that I'm interested in is how do you, poet I don't know, think about tenderness in the work?

Douglas Kearney: Tenderness in the work, is what I oftentimes want to place in direct tension with disruption, With destabilization, With moments of a particular kind of rhetorical or affective violence that can take place in the work. Tenderness can presage a moment like that, or sometimes it operates in the wake of that kind of moment. In a world that we cannot control. Why is it more tender, more care to give people the illusion that things can be static and stable and that kind of thing? So, I think that's sort of how tenderness works. It's not so much that I want to make people kind of go up and down, up and down, up and down. Like it's not that.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: You're interested in facing reality!

Douglas Kearney: I'm interested in facing reality. I'm interested in what it means to be able to maintain one's balance in disruptive, you know, uh tense environments and passages and moments, because that's kind of what we have to do, or else our insistence on our comfort is weaponized as a means, and a reason and a rationale to destroy other humans. Like Black culture. We recognize that the first crime most Black people commit in a white space is making white people uncomfortable by the fact of our existence. That's why it's escalated so quickly to death, or death by proxy. There is no reason why—

Cindy Juyoung Ok: It's discomfort.

Douglas Kearney: Because it's the discomfort. I don't want this person around me. My pursuit of comfort is actually more important than their life. And so for me pursuing comfort, I feel like that will kill us all.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right. It's life and death.

Douglas Kearney: It's life and death. It is how can I function in discomfort in a way that's sustainable and not toxic? Like I'm not just about weathering this shit. I'm talking about maintaining your balance. It becomes a kind of a dance almost with turbulence. But how do we maintain and sustain ourselves even in that kind of environment? Tenderness, in that way, then means like I've got you. This is a poem. Like I've got you. I wrote these things with—

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Trust.

Douglas Kearney: Yeah. I wrote this with intentionality. I wrote this with care. But I also wrote this knowing there are certain things that a poem can't do in the same way that there are certain things you know, love can't actually take care of. That to me becomes a sort of space of tenderness. That I want to make it possible for people to survive, and thrive, in a space of aliveness with the disruptive, with the terrifying, not as catharsis, but as the weather itself.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I think it's so true that comfort and love are both examples of feelings that get put on a pedestal.

Douglas Kearney: Mmm hmm.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And are used in white supremacist culture in quite murderous ways.

Douglas Kearney: Absolutely.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And, the idea of tenderness you have it reminds me of the of the boy saying “short,” right? There's a tenderness in that disruption and the lessons being learned in that moment about what language is and how it communicates with people, and what the limits are as well between “short,” between “sho.”

Douglas Kearney: Yeah. No, thank you. That's beautifully observant. Thank you.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Thank you so much for coming on, and for sharing so much about your work. I'm very excited about your next book and the way that it sounds like it's kind of questioning a lot that's come before as well as adding to it.

Douglas Kearney: Thank you so much, Cindy. That means a lot.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: A clamor of a thanks to Douglas Kearney. Doug has published eight books of poetry, essays, and libretti. Today, we heard from his latest collection, Sho, the poem “Sand Fire (or The Pool, 2016)” was featured with permission from Doug and Wave Books. Thanks to Val Jeanty, Doug's collaborator and Fonograf Editions, which published the album Fodder, recorded live in Portland in 2019. You can read “On Spite: Folly Comes Daily” in the July/August issue of Poetry in print and online. If you're not yet a subscriber to the magazine, there's a special rate for podcast listeners. For a limited time, you can get a full year of the magazine for $20. Ten book-length issues for just $20. Visit poetrymagazine.org/podcastoffer to subscribe. That's poetrymagazine.org/podcastoffer. This show is produced by Rachel James. The music in this episode came from Reservoir, Alabaster dePlume, John McCowan, Rob Mazurek, and Irreversible Entanglements. Until next time, with love for all the youngest kids on the block, and for the reign of Atari 2600. Thanks for listening.