AL FILREIS:
I am Al Filreis and this is Poem Talk at the Writers House where I have the pleasure of convening three friends in the world of poetry and poetics to collaborate on a close, but not too close reading of a poem. We'll talk, maybe even disagree a bit and perhaps open up the verse to a few new possibilities. And we hope gain for a poem that interests us, some new readers and listeners. And I say listeners because poem talk poems are available in recordings made by the poets themselves as part of our PennSound archive writing.upenn.edu/pennsound.

Today, I'm joined here in Philadelphia at the Kelly Writers House in our Arts Cafe by Amber Rose Johnson, poet, critic, scholar, hailing from her beloved Providence, Rhode Island. Just to be clear, Providence, Rhode Island, but currently a Philadelphian doctoral student in English and Africana studies here at Penn whose work explores the intersections between experimental poetics, performance and critical theory throughout the Black diaspora, whose editorial projects include the exhibition catalog for 'Colored People Time' at the Institute of Contemporary Art, ICA here in Philadelphia, and the catalog for 'Great Force' at the Institute of Contemporary Art Enrichment, and whose writing has been featured in Bohm and elsewhere, and who I'm so delighted to say co-teaches with me, the open online course called 'ModPo'. 

And by Yolanda Wisher, the Philadelphia based poet, singer, educator and curator who is author of among other works, 'Monk Eats an Afro', who in 2016-17 served as the third poet laureate of Philadelphia. Yay! Winner of the Leeway Foundation's Transformation Award for her commitment to social change, who performs a mix of poetry and song with her band, The Afro Eaters and at Philadelphia Contemporary, has been curator of spoken word and producer of the podcast Love Johns, a mixtape. 

And by Daniel Bergmann, a student of literature, art history and other subjects who has earned a degree at Harvard University, where he gave a commencement address and was featured on CBS Sunday Morning, who has served as a community TA in the open online course on modern and contemporary poetry called 'ModPo', and who believes, as he has said often, that forming interpretive communities of learners is, to use his phrase, "not impossible". The voice you will hear today, speaking Dan's words or some of Dan's words, belongs to the filmmaker Michael Bergmann, who is sitting nearby now with a letter board onto which Dan will spell his thoughts. Amber Rose Johnson, it's good to see you.

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
Good to see you.

AL FILREIS:
Are we on a scale of 1 to 10 excitement about talking about this work that I haven't even mentioned yet?

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
Ten.

AL FILREIS:
Ten. Really? Fantastic. Yolanda, always good to see you.

YOLANDA WISHER:
You too.

AL FILREIS:
You're very busy. So can you say one thing in that busy thing, that set of projects, one thing that you want everybody to know that you're doing right now, project.

YOLANDA WISHER:
I'm working on this awesome project called 'Consensus' with Trapeta Mayson, and it is involving surveying Black women poets in Philadelphia, gathering them in memorializing them.

AL FILREIS:
Wow. And Trapeta it should be said, as of the moment we're recording this, but not for too much longer, is the current poet laureate and a really great person. Dan Bergmann, welcome back to the Writers House. Do you have any idea how many times you've been here, Dan?

MICHAEL BERGMANN:
No, but everyone was important.

AL FILREIS:
You're so sweet.

MICHAEL BERGMANN:
And it's great to talk about this poem in this company.

AL FILREIS:
Thanks, Dan. It's great to have you guys back. Well, today we four have gathered here to talk about a poem performance piece by Jayne Cortez entitled 'She Got He Got'. It was performed live at the Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy, New York, on October 23rd, 2010. Backing Cortez on drums is Denardo Coleman. Here for our podcast will be listening to the audio of the performance on a show page at Jacket2 magazine where we post on Poem Talk. We will post video recording, which is also available on YouTube. So here now is Jayne Cortez performing, 'She Got He Got'.

(PLAYS RECORDING) 

(RHYTHMIC DRUMMING)

JAYNE CORTEZ: She got, she got hot. Got happy, got hot. Got thrilled, got hot. Got degreed, got hot. Got silly, got hot. Got possessive, got hot. Got disappointed, got hot. Got hurt, got hot. Got nurtured, got hot. Got bitter, got hot. Got drunk, got hot. Got drugged, got hot. Got rastered, got hot. Got pregnant, got hot. Got rejected, got hot. Got indifferent, got hot. Got lost, got hot. Got born again, got hot again. Got political again, got hot again. Got academically ambitious again, got hot again. She got hot, hot, hot, hot again. Got to be a hot skeleton in the latest hot fashion. Got to be a hot feminist turning into a hot cultural investigative gadfly. Got hot. Got hot. She got hot. She got hot. She got hot and got like a hot exile flying into alcoholic tantrums on hot buses. Got hot. Got hot. Got hot. She got hot, she got sad. She got hot, she got crazy. She got hot, she got athletic. She got hot, she got impatient. She got hot, she got used. She got hot, she got hot without sweat. She got hot without heat. She got hot like a hot young volcano. Got hot. Got hot. Got hot like a hot old bubbling crater. Got hot. She got hot and got to screaming, "Rescue me!" She got hot and got to shouting, "Open the door, Richard!" She got hot, hot, hot. She got hot, hot, hot. She got hot and got bound to a sewing machine. She got hot and got glued to a cash register. She got hot and got tied to a computer. She got hot and got stuck on the global assembly line. She got hot. She got hot. She got aggressive, she got hot. She got bored, she got hot. She got frigid, she got hot. She got harassed, she got hot. She got depressed, she got hot. She got angry, she got hot. She got hot and so much alone and hot. And so inwardly focused and hot. And numb and hot, and raw and hot. And so unprepared to be so hot. And so limited and hot. And so dominated by the thought of being so hot. All because a certain person didn’t say, "I will love you forever baby, don't be so hot." She got hot, hot, hot.

He got, he got, he got happy before he got cold. He got fed before he got cold. He got excited before he got cold. He got broken-hearted and warlike and then he got cold. He got cold. Got self-righteous, got cold. Got distorted, got cold. Got authoritative, got cold. Got cold and got to going berserk in the workplace. Got cold and got to pimping in the projects. Got cold and got to screaming for revenge. Got cold and got to handing out punishments. Got cold and got to setting up situations that would fail. Got cold, got frustrated, got no recognition. Got cold, got high. Got cold, got forgotten. Got cold like a cold mercenary. Got cold like a cold hyper-fastidious hotel manager. Got cold like a cold militarized supervisor of clerks. He got cold like a cold political hustler in the street. Got cold like a cold over-the-hill CIA agent. He got cold, cold, cold. He got cold without having ever imagined that he’d be so cold and wooden and cold and untropical and cold and plastic and cold and mute and cold and ferocious and cold and rigid and cold, while watching the sunshine and cold, while kissing himself in the mirror and cold and removed and cold and swollen and cold and dependent on being so cold. He got cold. He got cold. He got cold and got to screaming, "It’s a man’s world." He got cold and got to hip hopping like a peacock. He got cold and got to hollering, "I’m a macho man. I'm a macho man." He got cold and glued to a subway booth. Got cold and got tied to a department of sanitation. Got cold and got pinned to a patrol car. Got cold and got taped to a bar stool. Got cold and got engaged to a pawn shop. Got cold and got married to a racetrack. Got critically cold. Got artistically cold. Got miscellaneously cold. Got cold and so outwardly focused. And cold and mean and cold and greedy and cold and selfish and cold and so concerned about appearing to be so cold. All because somebody, somebody stole his lollipop. And no one could chip through the ice to say "I'll love you forever baby, don't be so cold." He got cold, cold, cold. He got cold. 

(APPLAUSE) Thank you so much for coming out here tonight. 

(RECORDING ENDS)

AL FILREIS:
I wanna start by asking about the word hot. This is an amazing performance because it creates so much variability, like all great poems or all great performances. So I just want all of us to think about the variable synonyms for hot. What are some things that hot is here? Amber Rose, first. Hot. What's it mean?

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
Motivated.

AL FILREIS:
Motivated. Yolanda?

YOLANDA WISHER:
Sexy.

AL FILREIS:
Sexy. I mean, clearly. Dan, what's the synonym for hot here?

MICHAEL BERGMANN:
Dan says dangerous.

AL FILREIS:
Dangerous. Amber Rose, comment on dangerous. Does that work for you?

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
I like dangerous. Yeah, I like dangerous because even within dangerous, there's that same kind of you can flip a coin for its meaning or the kind of its connotation. So dangerous could be alluring in kind of like a sexy way. Dangerous could be untouchable, but dangerous could also be a kind of negative categorizing. So depending on the context, I feel like within that one word is a slew of meanings.

AL FILREIS:
Yolanda, is there a relationship between, you said I think the word was sexy, sexy and angry, which is also sometimes a connotation for hot, like hot under the collar.

YOLANDA WISHER:
Oh yeah, yeah. To get hot. I also thought about hot like of the moment, like being hot in the charts. But it's all...

AL FILREIS:
Trendy.

YOLANDA WISHER:
Trendy.

AL FILREIS:
Peaking.

YOLANDA WISHER:
Yeah, but it's momentary. It's very time based and signals something that's not very lasting. It's just a momentary state.

AL FILREIS:
Let's turn to cold and do the same thing. It's very different. It's supposedly an opposite, but it's very different. And I guess I'm weirdly moving to already to an idea that I'm putting out there that even though the poem is perfectly symmetric, we've got lots from the, for the pronoun she, she and then halfway through we turn to he. He is associated with cold, she with hot. So it sounds like it's symmetric but I don't think hot and cold necessarily are symmetrical or antonymics or maybe that's where we should go next. Dan, what's a synonym for cold, the way it's working in this poem?

MICHAEL BERGMANN:
I want to go with the absence of heat.

AL FILREIS:
The absence of heat. OK, that works, too, as an antonym for hot. Amber Rose, another one?

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
Cold, I was appreciating what Yolanda said about hot being time based because cold seems like something that solidifies, a hardening that lasts, a state that one remains in once you get to that place. But hardening is the synonym I wanna offer.

AL FILREIS:
Hardening emotionally, intellectually, et cetera.

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
Physically.

AL FILREIS:
Mhm. Yolanda, cold.

YOLANDA WISHER:
I guess that word that she used earlier, frigid, emotionless, distant.

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
Mute is another really good one.

AL FILREIS:
Yeah. Can you find that context for that anywhere?

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
Cold and wooden. Cold and untropical. Cold and plastic. Cold and mute. Cold and ferocious. Cold and rigid. I think untropical is really funny.

AL FILREIS:
That's, yeah, that's perfect. Yeah. Except it gets complicated, people. So maybe all three of you can respond to this one, starting with Yolanda. Got cold and got pinned to a patrol car. So that would suggest that police brutality is, or we're assuming that in the context here, has something to do with this person being cold as in unfeeling or not expressing love or wow, what do we do with that?

YOLANDA WISHER:
You know, I started thinking about the relationship between hot and cold, and sometimes you're hot, sometimes you're cold. It's kind of the roll of the dice.

AL FILREIS:
Bad luck.

YOLANDA WISHER:
Yeah. So cold being kind of just a bad turn of fate here. You know, your loss in that moment.

AL FILREIS:
Wow. Dan, what are your thoughts?

MICHAEL BERGMANN:
It might not have happened if someone had told him, "Baby I'll love you forever. Don't be so cold." I also feel the two parts are not equal, so much more about her. Maybe because by now, we're all just tired of hearing about men.

AL FILREIS:
Amber Rose, Dan just said two things. I'd love for you to pick one and respond. The first thing he said referred to, you know, if there had been love expressed, if the thing that wasn't said got said, maybe he wouldn't be finding himself cold on his luck and pinned against a police car. And the second thing is Dan agrees with me that it's asymmetrical and this is really about she or her. Pick either.

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
Yeah, I'm gonna jump on the first comment. Maybe he wouldn't be cold if someone had said, "I will love you forever ", cause that's a line that we haven't talked about when we've talked about this poem before. And I was thinking about the role of care and what the poem might be trying to suggest that care can do when it's present and what it can feel like when care is absent, which is that care and unconditional love maybe makes possible the opportunity for us to step outside of binaries and to actually see and apprehend and hear and experience one another outside of just hot and cold. That care is something that kind of works the in between. But without that care, we end up in these kind of binaries where we're not really paying attention. It's just hot and cold.

AL FILREIS:
That's really amazing. Yolanda, I would love to hear your response to this. I mean, Amber Rose Johnson is basically saying not only is it not binaries and not symmetrical, but it's not about being hot or cold. It's about some relationship that depends on finding someplace between hot and cold. That sounds so loving and moderate and so cool.

YOLANDA WISHER:
And Buddhist a little bit too. Like, just be neutral. Like it's not being not hot nor cold. And that those moments of if somebody had or if only are moments that disrupt that the kind of cruel balance of fate, right? You know, I think they're different too. The one with the she is if only if somebody has said, "I will love you forever baby." The other one, the he is if only somebody hadn't stole his lollipop or something like that. And I kind of saw them as both moments of trauma that disrupt life or set you on a different course, you know, and introduce that if only or if.

AL FILREIS:
Dan, we seem to be in a mode where you put out an idea and we respond, I love this, so let's do it again. Dan, what are your other thoughts here?

MICHAEL BERGMANN:
I think it's important, says Dan, that the two sections follow each other and they don't alternate. But I think when we look back on it, we tend to think about it as if the two histories were interwoven. Cortez has done a wonderful job of presenting them separately with his cold history contextualized by her hot one. But our narrative drive is so strong that we put them together, at least I do. Does either of you do that too?

AL FILREIS:
So you're reading from a statement that Dan wrote before coming here today. Can you read the first two sentences again from that passage?

MICHAEL BERGMANN:
Dan says, "I think it's important that the two sections follow each other and they don't alternate. But I think when we look back on it, we tend to think about it as if the two histories were interwoven."

AL FILREIS:
That's great listening, Dan Bergmann. That's a great listening. Amber Rose, a response to that, other than to say, yeah, that's got to be right.

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
Yeah. I mean, I'm thinking about what is afforded or what is revealed if we don't do that alternating, so if we don't take it as. Well in this section, I can compare this section to this other section on kind of a one for one line by line. So what's afforded if we don't do that? Because I think partially the binary does lead me to read it comparatively. But if I tried to resist that, maybe I get a more caring reading actually of these two figures or the two gender binaries and how they're sort of constructed. And maybe it's that they're not... The point of the poem is not to say women are this and men are this or folks who use she are this and folks who use he are this but rather is like maybe more interested in the fact that no matter what a person is doing, they end up being viewed the same way. And that's true across a binary split. So that's like the meta above the meta.

AL FILREIS:
This is meta-meta because not only is it non-binaristic for the reasons Dan has suggested, but also more basically I suggested earlier it would seem to be a 50/50 thing. We let the woman, you know, have her say about hot, feeling hot, we set the man and then, you know, it's performed by a woman with her son, Denardo Coleman on drums. That's complicated. We'll get there. But in fact, the title Yolanda is 'She Got He Got', and one of the things they have in common is being "got". They share this. That's non-binaristic, right? So I guess I'm asking Yolanda and then Dan to turn to this problem of "got", because it's one thing to be cold, it's another thing to get cold. It's one thing to be drunk. It's another thing to be said that you have got drunk, got drunk, got arrested, got pregnant, you got pregnant. So do something with got.

YOLANDA WISHER:
Or even to get got, right? Which can mean to be like murdered, to be killed, to be tricked. I think in that way, when I think about to get got in how much a word like got can do. It says something about possession and a sense of…a yearning for possession that here is not possible or is in some way contested, right? That these are folks the she and the he are dispossessed of something their bodies. I think that word "somebody" comes up a lot too. But, yeah, I get a sense of not being in full possession of oneself or at least being possessed by other circumstances.

AL FILREIS:
So if we've been gotten in so many ways, after a while all we are is a being that's been gotten, it's been gotten in a non-definitive or non-consistent ways. We're all over the place and we're each all over the place. Dan, what are your thoughts about "got"?

MICHAEL BERGMANN:
Dan says I love Amber Rose's interpretation. Looking at it that way, I suddenly see that "got" can also mean understood, that she understood all these things and... (CROSSTALK) Yes. And the poem is much more compassionate, says Dan, than, for instance "There It Is" or some of her other angrier poems. And that goes with Amber Rose's reading too.

AL FILREIS:
Amber Rose, let's turn to the performance. So because we've been talking about it as if it's, you know, words. And I mean, there's nothing wrong with what we've done. It is pretty amazing, actually, this caring reading that's emerging that we haven't really done before. But now I add the performance to all this. How does it change our view or enhance what we've been saying? And we can add the drum, the percussion to this, if you like. It's clearly a performance. We could hear from the applause at the end. I think it might have been her encore, actually, at this particular performance or her last piece in the set. So they were applauding the whole presence of this extraordinary person. So what do you think about the performance?

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
Yeah, I mean, the performance is brilliant and is such a joy to listen to... There's so much that Jayne Cortez does with her voice. There's so much sarcasm and so much play that's revealed. Something that I'm thinking about with the drums, actually, I was listening this time, especially to the sort of the discordance. So she's not always kind of right on the beat. The drums are doing different things at various points, but at some points the drums are on like a really steady beat and she's like just missing that beat just behind it or just ahead of it. And it keeps you from just allowing it to be a groove that you can kind of snap to. There's always something that you're like, oh, the rhythm is about to sort of switch up. And so even though, yeah, she doesn't allow it to be a sort of passive listening, you got to sort of stay active. I wanna say one last thing, which is that, and maybe someone else will be interested in this. I was thinking with the sort of disruption with the rhythm about the disruption of causality that's happening in the writing. Because of the repetition of "got", the cause like this happened because of this no longer really quite holds true. And so I see that happening in the rhythm in the same way that is happening in the language.

AL FILREIS:
Yolanda, I'm gonna try out an over reading and you tell me if it's too much. We have, and Amber Rose's point about the non-synchronicity of perhaps at times of the voice and drum. We have a drum that's not quite always in sync with what the speaker is saying. What the speaker is saying is that there's this he out there that's cold and she is hot and she's the performer and we have a drummer who happens to be her son. So is it over reading to say that this is relevant, that there is a tension, percussive tension and that that is what's being enacted in the poem and that that is completely part of the meaning of the thing as a performance and as a poem? Over reading?

YOLANDA WISHER:
Maybe a tad. I wouldn't necessarily bind it to the meaning of the poem, the performance and the meaning. I think that there's something about the fact that the she is a she who's also speaking and that the drummer does not have the voice. In fact, she's hot, she’s hot. The mic is hot, right? She's hot on the mic, right? 

AL FILREIS:
Another hot.

YOLANDA WISHER:
But I also think there's a tension between what Amber Rose was describing the rhythmic tension, there's… It felt also like almost a generational tension in terms of the kind of music, like the beat that he was playing felt to me like he's playing a hip hop beat. That's very much 80s hip hop, you know, and somebody could rhyme over that. But the way that Rakim would rhyme over that beat would be totally different. And Jayne Cortez is not rhyming, right? She's not doing that. But there's almost in some sense that the first half of that poem feels very much like hip hop. And I was sitting here and I was like, I'm getting the head nod. Something shifts, though, with the he, and I'd wanna listen to it again and again to hear what that shift is, 'cause it felt like we left hip hop and we went into a different kind of music by the end.

AL FILREIS:
So you're going with my reading enough to suggest generational difference musically and otherwise. And of course, this is mother and son, there's an automatic generational difference. Whether there's a tension or not is none of our business ultimately. But you perform, you perform in front of a band and there are people related to you in the band, so there is something personal about this, right? This is a particularly amazing document, this video. You wanna add to that?

YOLANDA WISHER:
Yeah, 'cause there's listening going on. I think there's the listening that happens anywhere in a band. But I think, you know, especially because my partner is in the band and he plays the bass, I'm hearing the notes that he's playing probably a little louder than most. And maybe he's also hearing my singing voice. There's another conversation going on between us.

AL FILREIS:
There's a conversation. There's a word that musicians use.

YOLANDA WISHER:
Right, right. And there's the music conversation, but there's also an unspoken conversation of spirit, soul, energy that's going on too. And you see that in the video. That's what I was really taken by, was that moment at the end when she looks back at him and they give each other the look and she's like, you know, good job, you did good, that was good.

AL FILREIS:
Does he, I mean, your partner go cold in the performance, and what's the look then?

YOLANDA WISHER:
Oh, no. He's always hot in the performance. It's always a place of heat, honestly.

AL FILREIS:
I think Denardo Coleman here and more overreading, then I want to turn to Dan, more overreading, but I just can't help but think of it. How could he be cold when he is the son of the performer, right? And the son of a free jazz legend? 

YOLANDA WISHER:
Yeah. 

AL FILREIS:
And it's really hot. And he is sweating. So...

YOLANDA WISHER:
That too.

AL FILREIS:
He's hot.

YOLANDA WISHER:
He's putting work in. Yeah, yeah. No, you see the labor of the performance, that's something I noted too. Right from the beginning you see that this is the end of the set, right? He's already put in a good, maybe 30 minutes behind. And there's a way in which he's hotter than her in that respect. You know, just physically she looks much more tame and calm at that moment at the end of the session.

AL FILREIS:
Yeah. Dan, one of the great pleasures of having you here is that for most people, if they wanna say something, it's in their head and I have to intuit. But for you, I know when you wanna say something in advance, so you've got a lot on your mind. Michael, what are some of the things that Daniel is saying?

MICHAEL BERGMANN:
Well, Dan says that he thinks the music is really important in terms of the way she serves up this difficult material. And he created a very short text to speech file for you about that.

AL FILREIS:
OK. Yeah, we'd love to hear that.

MICHAEL BERGMANN:
If it's OK to play it.

AL FILREIS:
Oh, yes, it is.

MICHAEL BERGMANN:
See what happens.

(PLAYS VIDEO)

SPEAKER:
First of all, she uses rhythm to contain her rage and she uses music to give her audience permission to enjoy her rage, to feel empowered by her rage. To feel empowered within her rage. To feel happy because of her rage. To feel safe within her rage. To feel relieved by virtue of her rage.

(RECORDING ENDS)

AL FILREIS:
Oh, man, you're killing us. OK. I want to invite Ambrose and Yolanda to respond to Dan's intervention there about rage.

YOLANDA WISHER:
Just to uplift the rage in Jayne Cortez's poetry and not to demonize it to, you know, to make it something that's strange and shouldn't be there, but is a thing of beauty and purpose. Yeah. I really love that reading that. And also to invite other people into the joy of your rage. That edge of joy that rage can have. I think that's powerful. That's amazing.

AL FILREIS:
Amber Rose, what do you think about all that?

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
Yeah, I really love that and I love Dan's use of the word rage, because rage is so often read as like uncontrollable, outlandish, totally, you know. And I think Jayne Cortez is expressing rage. And I hadn't even read rage into this. But as soon as it was said, it's like, yeah, I mean, rage over the conditions, right? Rage over this binary, even existing. Why else would she be writing this poem? Why else would she have her son sweating on these drums if not to express this rage? But the idea that the rhythm is a container, that the rhythm makes it possible to engage with, makes it possible to find pleasure in, makes it possible to experience this rage as something that's informative, that's enjoyable, that's pleasurable, that's like really, really rich and complicated and something that makes other things possible is, yeah, stellar reading.

AL FILREIS:
Yeah. We are talking about art or art form, music form, but form that contains but not contains in the sense of delimits or prevents. Contains meaning makes possible. (CROSSTALK) Yeah. Right. So rage is not beyond form, breaking out of form. This is a formal piece. Dan, I wanna ask you a somewhat personal question. I'm sure you've said something really important and maybe Michael will convey that to us, but it's a somewhat personal question. When we talked about this piece for a poem talk, you volunteered instantly to come to this maybe because you would love to be on PoemTalk, period. And the last time you were here, we did a PoemTalk on Larry Eigner. And Eigner had severe limitations. He could only use one, I think one finger of one hand to type. And here you are talking about rage in containment and rage in art. I mean, you have described your own emergence from the darkness of not being able to communicate, starting with your parents, showing you some of the great art sculpture and painting and so forth. I would love to hear your thoughts on your personal relationship to this idea of rage being contained and expressing itself.

MICHAEL BERGMANN:
Well, first of all, I can't speak usefully, but I live in sound. And I loved listening to this performance. Also, it's oddly comforting. Please forgive me for saying this, that people who can talk get into trouble too.

AL FILREIS:
(CHUCKLES) Oh, you're great, Dan. I'd like to invite Amber Rose and Yolanda to respond to what Dan just said, if you want to. Thank you, Dan.

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
Yeah, I love "I live in sound." And, yeah, I'm thinking about just that sense of living in or being consumed within a world of sound and what sound makes possible outside of the page. Like, if we were to just read this poem, I think I would have a totally different experience than if I had the drums, if I had Jayne Cortez's specific voice and her specific intonations and tricks that she does. So, yeah, in response, I'm just thinking about what a gift it is to live in the sound of this poem.

AL FILREIS:
A gift. Yeah, totally. Yolanda?

YOLANDA WISHER:
Yeah. Living in sound for me reminded me of the Ntozake poem 'I Live in Music'. And, you know, something about, like, here on C# street. Just the ability Jayne Cortez has to translate sound and repetition into meaning, I think is incredibly powerful.

AL FILREIS:
Yeah. Dan?

MICHAEL BERGMANN:
Dan says, I would love to hear the two of you perform it. You'd perform it completely differently, but it would be amazing.

YOLANDA WISHER:
Oh, that'd be fun. (LAUGHS)

AL FILREIS:
I think we better schedule that. We better put that on the calendar. Well, we all could spend more time talking about this piece, but what I'd like to do somewhat arbitrarily is ask each of you for a final thought, something that you came here today wanting to say but haven't had a chance to yet. So everybody's looking down. So, Amber Rose.

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
Yeah, I'll take it. (LAUGHS)

AL FILREIS:
OK. You're so game.

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
Yeah. I mean, I don't know that I actually have a profound final thought. But I guess I'm still meditating on care and how caring to listening to one another. Living in the world of each other's sound. Listening to one another and carefully attending, outside of trying to quickly categorize or like box in someone's behavior, someone's demeanor, someone's reaction, to say, well, it's this or it's that. If we let go of the this or that, how can we like how can we be more caring and how we view one another and engage with one another? And then in return, what does that make possible for how we move through the world if I'm not preoccupied? I think there's a section in both where, yeah, she is so worried about being so dominated by the thought of being hot. And he is so aware of appearing to be cold, right? So some of this is about how we're seen by others. And so if we get rid of those binaries from the outside, what does it make possible for how we can walk through the world differently within our own selves? So care is the name of the game. Care outside of binaries. That's my final thought.

AL FILREIS:
Love that. Thanks for restating that 'cause I think it's perfect at the end to restate that. It's a complicated idea here. Yolanda, final thought?

YOLANDA WISHER:
Yeah. As I reread the poem, I kept thinking about how it seems to move through time, perhaps in the life of a person or a body. And the last thing I thought of when I thought about the word hot was she got hot in thinking about the relationship between mother and son. At that point in their lives, I was thinking about menopause. And that for me made me think about the she moving through time in the same way that in Danez Smith's 'Alternate Ways of Looking at a Black Boy', the boy moves from being, you know, younger to older. And I wondered if there was a way to read this poem that way, along with that idea of this kind of conversation between generations.

AL FILREIS:
Beautiful. Thank you. Dan Bergmann, final thought?

MICHAEL BERGMANN:
My final thought is a question for Amber Rose and a question for Yolanda. May I ask?

AL FILREIS:
Please.

MICHAEL BERGMANN:
They bracket the range of possible interpretations of the poem. The question for Amber Rose is how did you get to this wonderful, caring reading in the context of your work on English as a language of colonization?

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
Dan with the fire questions. Dan. This is the Dan show. 

(CROSSTALK)

MICHAEL BERGMANN:
This is dissertation defense. Answer the question.

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
This is the Dan Show. OK. Should we hear Yolanda's question?

AL FILREIS:
Did Dan put his finger on the issue?

(CROSS TALK)

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
Care! Dan! That's what I'm trying to figure out, Dan. OK, well. OK, so my thinking about care really especially comes from Christina Sharpe as much of my thinking about things does. But Christina, who writes about ordinary notes of care, and I'm thinking especially about her text 'In the Wake: On Blackness and Being'. But she uses a line from another scholar, Saidiya Hartman, who's come to the Arts Cafe before, who says care is the antidote to violence. And Christina meditates a lot on what ordinary acts of care can do. Not necessarily the most extravagant thing, but just care as listening, care as paying attention. When someone is changing, when something is happening in someone's world, to just pay attention. And she helps me think about care as something that brings forth radical possibilities. And because of it, has me trying to read for small acts of care in ordinary context.

AL FILREIS:
Great question. Great answer.

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
Yeah. Thanks for the question.

AL FILREIS:
OK. What's the question for Yolanda? Can't wait.

MICHAEL BERGMANN:
You spoke about your partner on the bass in the band, and I want to ask you, in the language of your infinitely soft and sensual sonnet with the cooking lexicon, what do you feel Cortez is cooking up? And is his coldness a dessert like a gelato or something infinitely sadder? 

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON: Oh! 

MICHAEL BERGMANN: He's done his homework. (LAUGHS)

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON: Good research!

YOLANDA WISHER:
Wow. Oh, yeah. This is a different kind of cooking. This poem, this Jayne Cortez poem is a little bit of a different kind of cooking. But there is a sense of what Amber Rose was talking about is there's sense of care in the poem that you're referencing 'sonnet w/cooking lexicon'. It's the story of how I met my partner kind of told through the language of food, and it does generate its own kind of heat in terms of just the mix of our two families, you know, intersecting. And I feel like that's where heat happens and it happens in this Jayne Cortez poem too, an intersection of sorts. So maybe not so much that these she and the he are following each other, but maybe they're crossing in some way.

AL FILREIS:
Great question. Great answer. Michael, what's Dan saying?

MICHAEL BERGMANN:
He's just trying to get ahead to the gathering paradise. (LAUGHS)

AL FILREIS:
Oh, OK. OK. Alright. Well, my final thought is to refer to a little known essay by Sigmund Freud in which Freud typically tells you about an idea that's not his. It's an earlier idea, but it's the antithetical sense of primal words. And this is not true of all languages, but it is true of a lot of basic words and hot and cold are among them. So hot refers to heat. Heat is actually also the absence of heat, right? So it depends on how cold it is outside and how hot and cold you are. And I think this poem does a wonderful job of making us think again against the expected binarism of the way women behave in a relationship, with the way men behave. The antithetical sense of primal words means that there's a lot of cold in hot. Like she's so hot that she's cold in the sense of forbidding, right? And he's so cold that he's hot sometimes. In fact, she's very attracted to the coldness after a while, the speaker is. And so, like, there are many lines that say this, but I'll just quote one. And cold while watching the sunshine, right? That is a classic instance of the antithetical sense of the primal word cold, because it's pretty hard, even in a January, a really chilly January sun, which is down on the horizon and you look at it and you derive some heat and also life, right? And the juices flow a little bit. Well, we like to end poem talk with gathering paradise. And you'd think after all these years I would know the gathering paradise part of the script, but...

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
It's when we spread wide our hands. (LAUGHS)

AL FILREIS:
To gather a little something poetically good. To hail or command someone or something going on in the poetry world or the art world or the music world. And I am gonna throw you people a curveball. Not only are you gonna do a gathering paradise recommendation of a book or a project or a poem or an artwork, but I'm gonna ask you as a second round to recommend a person, somebody that people should know about or somebody either who's very eminent or gone or somebody who's emerging. So we have two things to do. Amber Rose Johnson, you're first. So you're gonna tell us about a regular gathering paradise and a person.

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
OK. So I'm gonna start with a person first. But the person for sure is Bell Hooks on my mind.

AL FILREIS:
Bell Hooks who the record should show passed away yesterday maybe, or the day before.

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
The day before.

AL FILREIS:
So for the record, we are recording this in December 2021.

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
Yeah. Bell Hooks who has taught me especially a lot about love and a lot about care and a lot about binaries and their dangers and a lot about how to be hot and how to wield cold.

AL FILREIS:
Is that your person?

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
That's my person, my book, everything she's read. OK. 'All About Love' especially. But that's my person.

AL FILREIS:
So you did a work and a person.

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
Yeah.

AL FILREIS:
Perfect. OK. Yolanda Wisher.

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
I swiped that from Yolanda.

AL FILREIS:
You can second that and say Bell Hooks.

YOLANDA WISHER:
I'm gonna second it anyway and still throw another person up in here but I guess my person would be V Shayne Frederick. He's a collaborator of mine. He's a composer, singer and he's about to drop a single tomorrow, I think Saturday, a new single from his upcoming album, which is an exploration of the work of Nat King Cole. And he does all these great covers of Nat King Cole songs that you've never heard before. So he's the person that I've been thinking about. And the project would be something I'm gonna start working on over the winter break, doing some research on Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and I'm doing a project with Ruth Naomi Floyd and Diane Monroe, the violinist, and we're creating a piece about the life of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper called 'The Frances Suite', and it's gonna debut in May of next year with Intercultural Journeys. So that's something I'm working on looking forward to shaping.

AL FILREIS:
And where did Harper live?

YOLANDA WISHER:
Lived in Philadelphia. Spent some time in Philadelphia, right? And some other places, but definitely had a home here in Philadelphia and did a lot of abolitionist work here.

AL FILREIS:
Yes. Fantastic. Great. Dan Bergmann, gather some paradise.

MICHAEL BERGMANN:
I have recently discovered a book by my grandfather, Martin Bergmann, called "The Unconscious in Shakespeare's Plays", which I thoroughly recommend.

AL FILREIS:
Wait, Dan's grandfather was a Shakespearean?

MICHAEL BERGMANN:
Among other things.

YOLANDA WHISPER:
This makes (CROSSTALK).

AL FILREIS:
What else was he? This is Michael speaking. Now, what else was he?

MICHAEL BERGMANN:
He was a teacher of psychoanalysts, a major teacher of psychoanalysts in New York.

AL FILREIS:
Wow. I'm glad I mentioned Freud. So that was the person. What about...

MICHAEL BERGMANN:
No, that was the book.

AL FILREIS:
That was the book. OK. Dan, who's the person?

MICHAEL BERGMANN:
The book. The person is my friend Elizabeth Bonker, who is becoming a major advocate for people with non-speaking autism who spell to make their place in the world.

AL FILREIS:
Fantastic. Great recommendation. OK, so my gathering paradise. The texts, the non-person recommendation. I was challenged two PoemTalks ago by one of our poem talkers. Why don't we ever talk about novels? Well, we don't. I mean, I said at the time snarkily, how would we talk about a novel in a PoemTalk? The whole thing is geared another way. And the person said, take a passage. OK, so maybe we'll do that. But I thought I would compensate a little bit by giving novels their due. I wanna recommend three super long novels that are also kind of gnostic and blew me away and are just incredibly non-rational works. And these are my favorite three long books. One is, of course, Samuel Delaney's 'Dahlgren', maybe the best novel I ever read, ever. It's, I don't know, a thousand pages or something like that. It's just crazy violent, oh my gosh, dystopian thing. Dahlgren, d-a-h-l-g-r-e-n. You should buy a copy. My second is John Barth's 'Giles Goat-Boy'. Forget trying to explain what that book is, but it's coming of age of this Harry Potter meets dystopian fiction. And the third is Paul Auster's '4 3 2 1', which is a relatively new book, also about 1,200 pages. And in that one, Auster writes four possible autobiographies, four possible stories of his coming of age. So these three novels are all very experimental narratively. And one of the '4 3 2 1', one of the lives that Auster narrates is more or less his a prehistory to his writing. Another one. I don't wanna spoil it too much kind of stops suddenly. The person dies. Sorry, I just blew that. And it's really fascinating in all three of them go through the radical 60s and wow. So I recommend that, 'Dahlgren', 'Giles Goat-Boy' and '4 3 2 1'. 

And the person that I'd recommend is in the room, and that's Dan Bergmann. I wanna shout out to Dan, as you can see, having listened or watch this totally remarkable person who has a degree from Harvard and is now in the process, I don't mind, you know, talk about cutting to the chase, don't mind saying is thinking what's next? What is the next thing? And I don't wanna say what I think the next thing could be or should be. I just wanna say that it could be absolutely anything. Anybody, any fans of PoemTalk out there who have ideas having listened to Dan's brilliance and Dan is sort of spelling away, he's got something to say, contact me. I wanna take recommendations, 'cause I feel I'm an informal advisor of Dan Bergmann. What should Dan Bergmann do? So what do you think should happen? And I'm so excited about that future, Dan. And so you are my person. Does Dan wanna say something in response to that?

MICHAEL BERGMANN:
Dan says, I learned all this from keeping the right company, so I hope I can stay in touch with these two poets.

AL FILREIS:
Oh man, that's just fabulous. Thank you, Dan. Well, that is all the hip hopping like a peacock we have time for on Poem Talk today. PoemTalk at the Writers House is a collaboration of the Center for Programs and Contemporary Writing and the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania and the Poetry Foundation, poetryfoundation.org. Thanks so much to my guests, Amber Rose Johnson, Dan Bergmann and Yolanda Wisher, and to poem talks directors and engineers today, Zach Carduner, who's been handling the video, and Andrew DePass, who's been handling the audio. Thank you both. And to PoemTalk's editor, the same amazing Zach Carduner, a shout out to Nathan and Elizabeth Leight for their very generous support of Poem Talk. In our next episode, Kevin Platt, Eliot D'Silva, and Matvei Yankelevich join me to talk about two poems by Eugene Ostashevsky and I hope you'll join us for that or another episode of Poem Talk.