VS Presents: Roll Call

Breaking The Line: A Conversation About Black Visual Poetics

Transcription by Kristen Jeré

Danez Smith

Hey, this is Danez

Franny Choi

and this is Franny

Danez Smith

and you're listening to roll call a vs special series on the past, future and present of black poetry and poetics.

Franny Choi

Yes. This is the second episode in this six-part miniseries that will be airing, uhm, between seasons five and six VS. And yeah, Danez Do you wanna tell us about what this second episode is about?

Danez Smith

Yes, you are about to listen to Breaking the Line: A Conversation About Black Visual Poetics. With your host, Keith S. Wilson today, produced by Justin Zullo. Keith is gonna offer us a window into the world of the Black visual. So this is one a good one to you know, take a moment, close your eyes and imagine the wild possibilities of these poems as they play out on the page. But today play out in your ear with a couple of interviews and of course, with deep time with Keith and his amazing brain.

Franny Choi

Such a good brain,

Danez Smith

Such a good brain! Get ready for a truly wild and visionary conversation about the Black visual with Keith Wilson.

Franny Choi

Yay.

Keith S. Wilson
When you think of innovative black poetry, what do you envision? Maybe you think of the jazz influences of Yusef Komunyakaa. I love Komunyakaa. He's one of my favorite poets. If you haven't read Anna Dine, you should go find it. Or Gwendolyn Brooks. Maybe you've heard her read “We Real Cool” at the Poetry Foundation and love how she pronounces “We”. Or maybe you can't envision anything. And if that's the case, that's one of those shared let downs that the world is at least partially responsible for. Like if you manage to go your whole life without anyone ever letting you know about jazz. But I'm getting ahead of myself. My name is Keith S. Wilson. I'm a poet living through the transition between Chicago and Stanford as a Stegner Fellow of Poetry, and this is Breaking the Line: A Conversation About Black Visual Poetics.

So back to that question. When it comes to the sharing of Black poetry, my experience in class especially has largely been to think of Black innovation through its musicality—in poetry inspired by blues traditions, jazz traditions, and spoken word traditions. And of course, I agree. But I've also always felt Black excellence resists boundaries and that conversations tend toward them. What happens if we try, just for a moment, to talk about poems that look instead of sound a certain way? I'm talking about visual poems—a poem that uses visual elements as well as traditional poetic ones to express something.

One way I like to think about it: a visual poem uses things that the moment you read them aloud, are rendered totally invisible. The translation of them to the air loses something, or at the very least, changes something about them. So an example of a visual element is actually the line break. If you've ever been to a poetry reading, then looked up a poem afterwards, you may have been surprised to see what the poem actually looks like. Those line breaks are important. They're communicating something for that poem. But you have to see it, I guess, to believe it.

I haven't been writing visual poetry for my whole life, but I have been writing poetry for as long as I can remember. I think for me, all my interests in video games and photography, and art and graphic design, all just sort of mixed together when I make things. But that's just me. In this episode, I'm going to be talking with two Black poets [who are] writing work that pushes the boundaries of poetry. Poems that “Create a slippage between words and images,” as Alison C. Rollins puts it or, as you'll hear Sean Webster say, “Poems which break the line”.

I'm here looking at a poem, a visual poem, I think, called “A Song by Any Other Name” by the poet Alison C. Rollins. [Dreamy, meditation-like music begins to play softly in the background] The poem is a few orders of facsimile. It's a digital photograph of what appears to be a scan of a page from a book on songbirds [The sound of songbirds tweeting overlaps with the word “songbirds”]. The texture of the page is the effect you get from a copy—that sandy, slight gray, [that] anyone who has ever seen a Xerox of a teacher's handout would recognize. You can see the corner of the page curl slightly from the surface behind the poem, a little bit of shadow. At the top half of the page are songbirds and various poses—standing as if on the ground, or sometimes on a ghostly branch. About half of the birds are silhouettes only. You can see from the tiniest bits of paper, they've been cut out somehow. For me, I'm drawn to the voided birds—my eyes move in the snaking river they make across the page to the bottom half. And there, in the bottom half of the page, are two columns of a numbered list. This list appears to correspond to the numbered birds with the names of these birds. But many of these lines have been pasted over with new texts, printed on tiny rectangles of paper. Even though, physically, these pieces don't resemble birds, the missingness of the birds above make these words, the words added by the poet, feel to me, like birds.

[Music fades then stops]

Alison C. Rollins 

I don't view objects as kind of dead or passive things for me to do things to. I view them as collaborators. So just because it's a library book or an old book or something, it doesn't mean that it's just sitting there waiting for me to do things to it. I think it also has the means to collaborate with me.

Keith S. Wilson 

That's Alison.

Alison C. Rollins 

As a kid, I grew up in the era of World Books like I didn't have a computer in my home that had internet that was, you know, we had Dial Up [LAUGHS] at a point [Wilson begins laughing along], like, you know, I was used to going—you know, you went to the World Book, you looked for, if you were doing a research presentation on a country or something like, you went to that, you hoped it was up to date, and then you got your information; maybe it had a picture or some type of illustration. So that's, you know, the old school, analog method. And then, working as a librarian, a lot of those resource books become very old and outdated. So they're sitting on the shelves, dusty; no one wants to use them anymore. They're kind of considered—often they don't have politically correct information. And so, a lot of times, the resource materials in public libraries and institutional libraries literally never get touched. They literally just sit there, [LAUGHS] collecting dust for decades. And so, part of my excitement for the visual poems I've been making most recently, were like breathing new life and energy into these things that are kind of obsolete. Like they serve really zero to no purpose in terms of modern day access. Most people are utilizing their phones, or they're looking online for up to date information. So there's all these really rich materials and beautifully bound books with really cool illustrations and content that just don't get loved on.

Alison C. Rollins [In Spoken Word]

Alison C. Rollins [In Conversation]

The particular poem I read is the visuals from a pictorial dictionary. So it's this tradition of dictionaries that have a picture of something—it has a drawing of an apple, and then you learn the word for apple. And this particular one is a German to English one. So you're learning two languages as well as, like, the visual stimulus of an image. And so, I'm really curious about, like, the way we connect sound and also words—like letters that are symbols, are literally just pictures, to the thing that is also, like, removed from the thing.

Alison C. Rollins [In Spoken Word]

Alison C. Rollins [In Conversation]

I really enjoy playing with X-ACTO Knives, and so I cut out some of the birds [LAUGHS] and piecemealed black paper behind them ‘cause, I'm also interested in this like, there's always things missing or a slippage when we're using language or when we're presenting a visual—it's not the real thing. And so, I wanted to create these kind of black holes or portals often when you just kind of drop into nothingness, or there is no referential as they're supposed to be.

Alison C. Rollins [In Spoken Word]Alison C. Rollins [In Conversation]

Because it's referencing and has visuals of birds, [Soft sounds of nature begin to play in the background, birds can be heard tweeting along with several other animals. There’s the sound of a low mediation-like hum] I like to think of the reading or visual experience for that poem as a type of like flitting, like when birds wings are…like Hummingbirds—are kind of in place or not necessarily moving, but there's actual movement in place of the wingspan. And so, I think what I'm interested in is not necessarily controlling where the eyes go, but allowing for the eyes to move up and down, across/back, refer/back, refer/forward—like to get kind of lost in a maze of an experience rather than a straightforward pathway, if that makes sense.

Alison C. Rollins [In Spoken Word]

Alison C. Rollins [In Conversation]

So the driving experience is not going down the highway, straight, but is looking at the “off ramp”, getting back on, pulling to the side, coming back, reversing the car, moving—like it's interested in kind of flitting or moving without boundaries in a way that could be considered disorienting or not necessarily straightforward.

[Music slowly fades away]

Alison C. Rollins [In Conversation]

As poets, when we are constructing or writing a piece on the page, the poem actually does function as a type of score, [Soft, meditation like music begins playing] a musical score. So depending on where we have line breaks, depending on where we have in enjambment, depending on how we have situated the language, or words, or letters on the page, I do think that instructs readers to think about when they can take a breath. Both in terms of content, like the amount of content they're encountering, and also in terms of literally pausing [LAUGHS], in terms of their reading to give a little bit of breathing room before moving on to something else, a new idea or a new line.

[Music stops and a new beat begins, one that’s still soft but more experimental, with steady strumming sounds]

Keith S. Wilson

I'm looking at an untitled piece by Chaun Webster. The whitespace of a page, all the places where nothing is printed, is a quality we never hear, exactly, but this poem is swimming in it. And the typeface it's written in is almost swirling. There's a loop in the “W’s” that reminds me of waves. All the poem is italicized in a kind of urgency or struggle. And the top portion of the text has a number of single lines, minor stitches, that stand out on their own—first on the left side of the page, then the right, and so on, ending in a single word: water. The bottom half of the text is a single prose-like block—in contrast to the bottom third of the page, which is totally empty.

Chaun Webster 

First sight that I would say is, like a part of like, my, you know, upbringing and what brought me into a tradition of like, a Black word work, was the church. A lot of what I'm using is, like, certain kinds of sonic gestures. And so, like, repetition being something that I'm using a lot within the text as a means of trying to both return and to revisit, but like, with what Ashon Crowley talks about in Lonely Letters, a part of it is, like, utilizing the Black Pentecostal tradition of like, how Black folks have always had the ability to return to a site sonically and make it new, right, as a means of almost, like, as a process of study, you know? And so, what you see, you know, choirs doing on Sunday morning, is very much a part of my own kind of influence, right, like, is that people are able to sit and sing a verse that might last 15 minutes, you know, and somehow, all of that is not exhausting its own meaning. It's that kind of ability to stretch meaning in such a small space.

Chaun Webster [In Song/Spoken Word]

[Words echo and overlap]

[Verse repeats two times overlapping with Chaun Webster’s words in the following “Conversation”]

Chaun Webster [In Conversation]

Sometimes the abstraction is looking to disrupt a perceived linearity to space and time by its...super imposition of text. Sometimes, there is a way in which I am looking to go back again, and again to something that might sound the same. And yet, through its repetition, find something new and carve out another kind of space. And so, the repetition is a methodology for getting at something else, even though it might seem that I’m doing something that is the same.

Chaun Webster [In Spoken Word]

 [Meditation-like music begins as a low hum and steadily increases intensity to include an erratic, staccato techno beat] 

Chaun Webster [In Conversation]

Going back and thinking about, like, rhetorically, “What was happening there?” [Overlapping music slows down until you can only hear one “beat” at a time until completely stopping] Like, it left a really lasting mark on me, right? And so, even in terms of the practice, for instance, like speaking in tongues, right, like and so when I think about what I do with the superimposition of texts, like speaking in tongues is a kind of, like, what some folks would look at as a kind of “nonsense language” that folks are making as they're starting to, you know, let the Spirit take control of their, of their body, their mind, their mouth, right, and they're speaking a language that is unknown to them. And yet, you know, someone within the congregation might be able to interpret, like what's being said, and so, some people believe that that's the language that is actually spoken on Earth. Others believe that those are languages that might not necessarily even be spoken on Earth, they might be heavenly languages, but they are languages that themselves can be interpreted.

And a part of what I appreciate about that, even though I'm not necessarily someone that practices that any longer, but a part of what I appreciate about it is that it disrupts a particular kind of enlightenment rationality around how we think about hearing certain rules around language, right? And so, it's a giving over of oneself into what might be considered nonsense. Again, like, you know, with certain gestures visually in terms of like, super imposition, right? And like, what that might mean sonically, to me, like a part of where my mind goes is like, “Oh, well, that's a part of the practice of speaking in tongues”. So for me, those gestures have a site that like, started to like, really, for me, get me thinking about those things, right? Like that, to me is a sort of origin for how I start to think about certain gestures that I do visually. And so for me, not coming from a poetry like tradition formally, like, I think, opened me up to being able to say, “Okay, well, this is all…all of this shit is possible in poetry,” you know? Like none of this is locked in, in a particular kind of way, right? Like that, I can look to a broad body of, you know, so-called disciplines to be able to inform what I'm attempting to do within the work of poetry. And that, that I feel like, you know, poetry may do a little bit better, in some ways than other, you know, so-called disciplines—is that it's transgressive. It can be at least in its’ highest realization of its potential is very transgressive. You know? Transgressive of borders, right? But poetry itself, I think, when it realizes potential, it can do some things.

[A drum beat of multiple drums being struck in different intervals begins in the background of the following “Conversation”]

Chaun Webster [In Conversation]

In so many ways, I think, all poems are visual in that, in the West, in particular, we have a difficult time engaging with and seeing the visuality of text. There's a kind of assumed background that texts hold, and it becomes a kind of vehicle to get us to meaning. So, in so many ways, I tried to disrupt that. But yeah, I think this poem is disrupting, perhaps some of what we know in this familiar song through the repetition and sound, and some of that is taking place visually [word “visually” is repeated at the same time but in an alien-like voice]. However, I think that the abstraction is happening primarily somewhere else.

[Following words repeat four times as they overlap each other, each time increasing in volume. Dream beat also becomes faster and more intense] So what some of the attempt is to create through that kind of process of destruction, to create as we tear something apart.

[Drum beat abruptly stops. A few seconds later, a dreamy beat begins and plays in the background with the following “Conversation”]

Chaun Webster [In Conversation]

I'm interested in what do we do with the outer limits, right? Like how do we start to think about what exists outside of narrative, or what might possibly be able to exist outside of narrative and other ways of being, because our notions of being are wrapped up in a kind of destruction of a particular set of folks who exist outside of being, right, like the human as a category. There's a structural antagonism to anti-blackness, right, like, that is a founding logic, right, to the world—you know, into the gears of the world.

A part of what, you know, a number of like Afro pessimist thinkers would say about narrative, is that narrative is itself anti-black, because blackness does not fit within the precepts of narrative—that blackness doesn't have the possibility for a denouement or resolution, right? That, you know, within narrative, we have the structure of plenitude and then law, and then you have that kind of recuperative moment in terms of the denouement. And that for blackness, there is no denouement because there's not even the capacity for loss, right? And so, to be in that position, right? Like, if we agree for that to be true, right? Like, that's a basic assumption within this conversation, and specifically, it's something that I adhere to, right? Like, if that's the case, then the attempt to disrupt for me is about how to be angular and how to exist outside of narrative in some way, and how to speak outside of narrative. I don't know that what I'm attempting to do, would be able to, like, fall within the, like, “structure” of narrative, or at least that that would be too confining for what I'm wanting to do. And if I'm agreeing, or if I'm thinking about narrative itself as being anti-black, how do you break narrative? How do you break from the structure of narrative? I think that poetry is a space where that might be possible. I'm not sure. I don't know that I've landed on that. But so, I think that that's a part of what I'm talking about in terms of like, “What is the importance of breaking the line?” right? Like, I think that part of the importance is like, how do we start to break our assumptions with meaning itself? And I think that Black folks have a very, you know, not the only role, but an important role to play in it. And so, I think there's something quite unique to our relationship to this world. And so, I'm doing that work through poetry. [Beat ends abruptly] I think a lot of folks are doing that work in a number of different ways.

[Soft, nature sounds, over a dream-like beat, similar to earlier, begin to play in the background of the following “Conversation” and mesh with Alison C. Rollins Voice in the Conversation]

Alison C. Rollins

The more we can expand possibility on the page, ‘cause we're arguably kind of limited to the plain of the page, the more really cool things can happen. And I think just by virtue of like, being a Black, queer poet, I'm already, you know—Thomas Jefferson said, I'm not possible, so I don't really, you know, it's already kind of operating in the state of disbelief or anti, whatever, poetic establishment. So why not push the boundaries even further, or just blur the lines even more?

A lot of people have a lot of barriers to access in terms of encountering contemporary poetry, or a lot of people have particular hang ups in terms of worrying about getting the poem wrong, or incorrect, or they don't feel that they're “qualified” to speak about a poem. And so I think visual poetry just opens more doors, it opens more windows to readers and viewers, where they can find a way into the poem—they can find something to say or something interesting about it. And maybe that creates more access points, I think, than a traditional sonnet or a sestina or a villanelle. I think it's really disrupting and challenging and expanding the form in really interesting, visual ways.

I really do feel like we're always reading. Like, when I walk into a space or a room, I'm reading who else looks like me. What is the socioeconomic status of the people around me? Like, what streets did I park my car, like…we're always reading, intaking, processing, synthesizing, rejecting information. And so, I really do feel like, if we expand how we define reading, or like what that means, then suddenly, I think people are validated in a different way, or people feel a bit more free or loose in their own experience intaking art.

Keith S. Wilson 

Hi, it's Keith again, and this was Breaking the Line: A Conversation About Black Visual Poetics. I just wanted to say how grateful I am to have had an opportunity to talk with and listen to these brilliant poets: Alison C. Rollins, and Chaun Webster. And a reminder, we're listening to a visual medium. I urge everyone to check out the show notes of this podcast and see what each of these poets’ work looks like. Words don't do it justice.