Post 020: Post-Pride

on authenticity, rage, and broadening

[ID: Two June Skies: Yesterday’s on ferry to the Rockaways at sunset; a few weeks ago on the way to Mass MoCA, with cables lines, trees, and mountains]

There are two days left in June, which means it’s almost the end of so-called Pride Month™. This 2025 edition has had the usual ups and downs—in temperatures and in sentiments.

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A few days into the month, I finally saw Oh, Mary during Cole Escola’s final weeks in the show. Thanks to Michael waiting in the early morning rush line, we got to see Cole (pre-Tony) float in that iconic dress in a true feat of writing and physicality. I’ve seen maybe one show in the last five years and I’m so glad to have seen this one. How comforting it was to be squarely in the realm of the absurd for ninety minutes. The show felt like it was simultaneously deflating and inflating: poking holes at the constructed seriousness of history and gender while pumping the characters (and audience) with laughing gas.

I left thinking about authenticity and how so often the folks most marginalized and least believed have it in spades. Mary’s true desires of cabaret are mocked precisely because she expresses them, contrasting her husband who hides his wants. Arguably, the hypocritical backlash to Mary’s authenticity can be extended to anti-queer and anti-trans rhetoric especially.

In “Out Home Out West,”¹ Cole reflects:

“I don’t think they hate me. Life is basically not very fair, and some people like to make up their own little rules. I think they believe that if they follow all their rules, nothing bad will happen to them. So when they see someone who is not following their rules and doing just fine, it makes them scared that their rules don’t really matter. And when people get scared, they get mad.”

Indeed, this Pride Month and every other month, there are plenty of people mad and scared. Rule-followers of all kinds are holding tight to the fantasy of their own authority. I think of lawyer Chase Strangio taking an Oh, Mary Playbill into the Supreme Court to remind himself that he was “also doing a performance;” “channeling people who inspire” in “those spaces that are meant to be so serious, but are in fact so absurd.” (One of the many setbacks this month was the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Skrimetti that ruled that Tennessee’s ban of gender-affirming care for youth “does not illegally discriminate against individuals on the basis of sex or transgender status,” allowing “Tennessee, and any other states that may choose to follow its discriminatory lead, to ban medically-necessary health care for minors.”)

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Later that week, we hosted our June exquisites with a sweet lineup of Providence poets. This months marks three years of the series Em and I are so genuinely proud of. I feel so lucky to have witnessed (and paid!) almost 200 queer and trans poets together.

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I also read at Hive Mind Books as part of a reading titled Queer Rage, organized by Jennifer MacKenzie. In preparation for the reading, I looked through my archive hoping to find my most enraged poems and found very few.

So, I wrote a new poem, one of those you finish on the train to the reading. It consisted of six six-line stanzas, which I delighted in reading as one of six readers performing on the sixth day of the sixth month. I won’t share all of it here, but it was a small opening to talk about the rage of Pride (“our / allocated rage month, set aside just / for us and the corporations that love / is love us”), of masculinity (“FATHERS OFTEN USE TOO MUCH FORCE, Jenny / says — and that force becomes exam / -ple suffocating lineage we foll / ow or don’t — what room was there for you — did / you occupy it or fill it with some / thing else”), and of Covid denial (“every nostril, every / chin feels like betrayal”).

I continue to think about the shape of rage, its form and use. How does it relate to pride? To fear? To just simply anger?

Kevin Gotkin’s recent Crip News reflects on this moment well and includes some invaluable links and readings:

It’s queer endurance month for those trying to honor the Mad Trans Black origins of Pride while navigating the present realities of ‘rainbow capitalism.’

Pride Month is an occasion to get with your people, cast off the shame too many of us learned as kids, and demonstrate the difference disability mutual aid can make in queer spaces. It’s a chance to link up with queer organizing that addresses the global imperialist co-optation of Pride.

Pride could be a time for vibrant political education. That’s why it stings when organizers of the annual WorldPride festival (who once worried it was becoming an "orgy of pinkwashing”) spent more time encouraging trans people to stay home than educating the public about the crucial role of disability protections for access to trans healthcare.

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That first weekend, I also produced an edition of Drag History Hour with the iconically-named Bertha Vanayshun. One of the highlights was an act by DJ Aimee Amour which was a tribute to the trans electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos (who is still active!). The number incorporated a BBC interview with Wendy from 1970, where she was in full boy-drag, mutton chops and all. Wendy’s work shaped the sound of dance music, which is to say shaped the sound of the (queer) dance floor for decades.

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This Summer also marks the fifth anniversary of The People’s Saturday School. This month was also the third annual reunion, the day after which I traveled to Mass MoCA on what is now also a yearly pilgrimage with my friend varun. We went on a guided “ephemeral” tour of the temporary exhibitions, including Jeffrey Gibson’s “POWER FULL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT.” Gibson’s spaces at Mass MoCA evoke a church, a club, and a library. They are marked by literal platforms (which for me recall Felix Gonzalez-Torres) which are also symbolic (the artist has programmed a an ongoing series of performance activations featuring other queer and Indigenous artists in the space). Walking through on the tour, I was struck by the power artists have to say-the-thing directly and in all-caps like the title. One cannot engage with the work except in the terms it sets—one where queer, two-spirit, and Indigenous people are present and powerful.

Installation view of Jeffrey Gibson: POWER FULL BECAUSE WE'RE DIFFERENT, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (November 3, 2024 – May 2025) Courtesy of the artist, made with MASS MoCA. Photo: Tony Luong. [ID: A large darkened gallery with six screens, two platforms and three multicolored hanging garments. ]

Here’s one detail with sound advice I’m still thinking of:

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Five years ago, we were also listening to Lorde’s Solar Power (“when the heat comes, something takes ahold”) and now we’re taking in her latest Virgin. The X-ray cover—literally revealing—is accompanied by lyrics which speak to what in interviews she’s described as her “gender broadening.” Indeed, the opening track “Hammer” includes the lyrics “Some days I’m a woman / Some days I’m a man” and “I'm ready to feel like I don't have the answers.”

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In these vignettes from my month, I am seeing the recurring questions of queerness, questions of authenticity, of transparency, of ritual. Where do we broaden, where do we bend? How do we deploy our desires and what do we make known to others? Who is listening to and seeing us? These are the questions that will take us into the post—into the after—where there may continue to be pride, but also rage and wrath and and and . . .

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Upcoming

• This Thursday (7/3), exquisites is back at Aberdeen Community Garden with a lush summer lineup:

• Em and I are also be reading with exquisites at the NYC Poetry Fest Blackbird Stage on Sunday, July 13th at 2 pm with the wonderful Aishvarya Arora and Chae(lee) Dalton, who led our virtual workshops earlier this year. Take the ferry and say hi!

1. H/T to Leo Herrera, author of POST for posting.

Post 019: Post-Barbra

On the reign of her parade (Or, as she sings in Sadie, Sadie: all day the records play)

Deborah Kass, Gold Barbra (The Jewish Jackie Series), 1992. [ID: A large gold field after Warhol’s Gold Marilyn surrounds Barbra Streisand in profile with red lips and blue eyeshadow.]

I don’t know when exactly the collecting of this star’s records was born, but it must be at least ten years at this point. I probably stumbled upon her face in the local Goodwill, among the bottom-shelf records that were all a dollar. But, I must be honest and say my first exposure to her was likewise second-hand, via one Rachel Berry on Glee, which I watched Live on Fox when it aired. (I know, I know.) In the 2009 finale of Season One, Rachael, played by Lea Michele, defiantly belts “Don’t Rain on My Parade” from Funny Girl, the Broadway show that starred Barbra Streisand in 1964 (and Lea herself in 2022).

Over the last several weeks, I’ve been listening to my collection of Barbra records: 38 and counting, which means I own the majority of her six-decade discography which consists of 37 studio albums, 12 compilations, 11 live albums and 15 soundtracks.

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In the Summer of 1967, 135,000 people gathered in Central Park to hear Barbra. The back of the vinyl from the performance (which begins with applause, to which she says “I haven’t done anything yet!”) notes the residue left by the crowd, which “took the NY Sanitation Department 4 Days to collect the 5 tons of flotsam and jetsam¹ strewn about.” The notes continue, sharing that “[a]mong the remains, more exotic items included empty vintage champagne bottles, a Scrabble set, a Russian-English dictionary, a half-eaten Hebrew National Salami, assorted empty wine bottles representing 8 foreign countries, a Sterling silver champagne bucket, and upper plate, a jar of quail eggs, an 8-day alarm clock, a Merry Widow bra and a black, pleated mini skirt!”

Indeed, this assortment feels like an accurate description for Barbra’s sweeping, lasting sensibilities: it’s a mixed bag, it’s a mashup, it’s international, it’s impressive and it takes a long time to get through. Her first three albums, simply titled The Barbra Streisand Album², The Second Barbra Streisand Album³, and The Third Album,⁴ were released between February 1963 and 1964, when she was 21. The Second Barbra Streisand Album reached #2 on the charts and included “Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home,” which last year was the inspiration for my exhibition with Maggie Wrigley at Bullet Space.⁵

Born Barbara, she changed her name to Barbra when she began her career as a teenager. This dropping of the “a” reminds me of Warhol—who also dropped the “a” of his birth name Warhola, which he could too ethnic. (Barbra’s gesture to keep her last name⁶ was the opposite of Andy’s choice, of course.) Indeed, her early albums include My Name Is Barbra (1965), My Name is Barbra, Two (also 1965), Je m’appelle Barbra (1966), Simply Barbra (1967), and Barbra Joan Streisand (1971). These titles emphasize what seems like one of the driving factors of her career: her singularity. Many times, you are listening not because of the song, but because she is the one singing it. Moreover, many of these recordings, even if they are reinterpretations of songs written by others and for other contexts, end up being fascinating reflections of biography and her specific positionally. I think of charming self-referential moments, like the ad-lib of her birthday on “I’m Five/A Kid Again” on My Name Is Barbra, which features a picture of five-year old Barbra on the cover taken by her brother. Other moments reveal self-awareness, like in a skit between her and a producer at to the beginning of The Broadway Album, where, cueing up a cover of Sondheim’s “Putting It Together,” Barbra scoffs at the producer’s hesitation about the material. “No one’s going to buy it . . . No one in Middle America, anyway,” they say, but Barbra disagrees, though does concede “Advancing art is easy . . . Financing it is not!” Barbra has the last laugh, of course, as the album went on to hit #1 on the Billboard charts and earn her a Grammy for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.

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Of course, over the last 60 years, she’s become a larger-than-life public figure who has, for better and worse, made her points of view known. She’s supported and fundraised for Democrats ranging from McGovern⁷ to both Clintons, along with issues ranging from Prop 8 to Ukraine. She’s also (disappointingly, disgustingly) been a long-time Zionist and supporter of “Israel,”⁸ performing at a 2011 concert for the IDF.

The edges show in the music, too.

She dedicates 1969’s What About Today “to the young people who push against indifference, shout down mediocrity, demand a better future, and who write and sing the songs of today,” offering tepid covers of “With A Little Help from My Friends” (released two years prior) and Paul Simon’s “Punky’s Dilemma” (released the year before). Her strength has not usually been contemporary covers—I think she’s best when reviving across time.

In 1987’s One Voice, hosted during the Reagan Era at her Malibu home to fundraise for Democratic causes, she jokes about the ticket price for her show: “I’ve spent more than a few sleepless nights wondering what I could possibly do that would be worth $5,000⁹ . . . then I figured out that I would be singing about 3,924 notes and that comes to a little over a dollar a note.” Later, she “Aren’t we all the same, really? When a mother holds her baby, her joy is the same no matter what country she lives in. Lovers are lovers no matter under what government they make love. We all inhabit this tiny planet and, if we are to survive, it will have to be together or not at all. We must recognize we are all just people… who need people.” At the end of the concert, in the concert, after “Happy Days,” she doubles down with “America the Beautiful,” encouraging the well-financed audience to join her.

The vinyl insert for 2018’s Walls includes pictures of Barbra in her garden alongside a gray-scale image of an anonymous hand gripping a wire fence. She notes she’s “been especially moved by the millions of young people in the United States and around the world who have found their collective voice and are demanding to be heard. They are more interested in building bridges than walls. They are the very definition of hope. They’re on my mind…and I dedicate this album to them.” The first song, of course, is “What’s On My Mind,” which includes the lyrics (co-written by Barbra): “Sometimes my eyes wants to cry / How did we come to this divide? / Is this God's creation? / One for all, but millions left behind / That's what's on my mind.”

The album continues with a mashup of “Imagine” and “What a Wonderful World,” a gratuitous rendition of “What the World Needs Now” and ends with “Happy Days Are Here Again.” She notes that while she’s performed this standard “at least 100 times,” on this album she wanted to “present a symphonic version . . . that could express my sadness about the state of the country.” She continues: “As a woman, I would have been so proud to call Hillary Clinton my president . . . I believe there is a better road to take for our magnificent country. And history has shown us that when we are resilient in the face of adversity, truth prevails . . . I hope that in the not-so-distant future, I’ll be able to sing [Happy Days] the way FDR used it as his 1932 . . . to celebrate the times with optimism.”

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I choose not to get stuck in the rain of the sad, liberal, Zionist, millionaire reality/delusion of Barbra because, as she says in Funny Girl there are “a thousand jokes.” And indeed, for me, Barbra is best in her joking, which she always claims on her terms. When she started going on the Tonight Show in the 1960’s, even Groucho Marx found her funny. Who else would release a themed album called Wet¹⁰ with “Splish Splash” and “Kiss Me In The Rain?” Who else would release multiple Christmas albums and sing with earnestness and zeal? Who else would open a concert with “Sing” from Sesame Street and release a duet with Kermit the Frog¹¹? Who else would be credited with the finger cymbals on a TV special called Barbra Streisand and Other Musical Instruments? Who else would not only include pictures of her dogs on more than one album but clone them?¹²

Timing is key with delivering a joke or a note, and perhaps enough good timings make timelessness. There are few with as many decades of making and with such an iconic persona as Barbra. Dolly and Liza are among the few that similarly meet her stature. It’s too simple to reduce Barbra to the humor, of course. In the titular song from Funny Girl, she sings: “That’s me I just keep them in stitches / doubled in half / and though I may be all wrong for a guy / I’m good for a laugh.” Looking at Barbra, in all of her limitations, she is good for more than a laugh. She is large! She contains multitudes! She has reshaped the role of the popular singer, or at the very least made a unique version of it for herself. Barbra knows how to get what she wants—she’ll march her band out, she’ll beat her drum. She simply has to! Behind the winks is a brilliance, and behind the character and absurdity there must be some Taurean groundedness. I love the bits and that’s where I see Barbra’s self-awareness and autobiography—and maybe that’s the best gift from this complex star that takes up so much room on my shelf.

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Upcoming

• This month’s Long Poem Support Group is Hart Crane’s The Bridge, guest facilitated by the great Cyrée Jarelle Johnson (check out his Substack here). Join us tomorrow (Tuesday, May 27th) on Discord!

• Our season of exquisites at Aberdeen continues on June 5th with a shining lineup:

• On June 6th, I’m excited to be reading with some old and new friends at Hive Mind Books:

1. I had to look this up: “Flotsam refers to debris floating on the water surface, often wreckage from a shipwreck or accidentally lost cargo, while jetsam is cargo that was deliberately thrown overboard from a ship in distress, usually to lighten its load or to prevent sinking.”

2. “When it came time to title the album, Streisand declared, “I can’t stand those other made-up titles.” She chose The Barbra Streisand Album as the title, after rejecting one of Columbia’s suggestions: Sweet and Saucy Streisand. ("Sounds like a barbeque sauce, ya know?")” (Barbra Streisand Archives.)

3. She told a reporter: “My new album is called The Second Barbra Streisand Album, because that's just what it is. Why should I give it some fancy name that no one remembers anyway?”

4. She told the Columbia Records art department, “It’s my third album, so let’s just call it what it is: The Third Album. I guess I like straight-forward titles even though the songs are less than straight-forward songs.”

5. My exhibition text-poem read: “Of course Barbra opens and closes her second album with the Arden and Mercer standard: Free and easy, that’s my style, she croons, the lyrics then claiming impermanence as a lifestyle lackadaisical -- indeed, we embrace home’s ephemerality, relish in how hat-dropping quickly it can congeal; sometimes needing not much more than people, than a doormat or a placemat, than a feeling: practiced imperfect and by accumulation, gathering, neighboring -- it is that magic that contains the potential and the danger of the feeling, the practice, the idea of simultaneously: fireplaces can comfort and burn :: red-lined cities cut grass, install cold benches with divides; markets and municipalities and mayors conspire with land/lords to tease tenants, play fast and loose with rent-hikes and destabilizing evictions, shrugging as if it isn’t always systemic nod on-purpose // who affords a home? what kind, and where? // dangers are in the stories, the images, the songs, of home too -- establishing a home is sometimes just colonialism, building buildings is sometimes just gentrification -- you want your home to be where someone else’s was, that your desires are more important than the desires of others -- and the images, always the images, like the glossy ones in magazines where there is apparently no dust and nothing out of place because a gendered, raced body labored just out of frame and just in time for the shoot or for the gathering, hidden in the pixels and half-tones -- and the songs, all of the songs that occupy home metaphors that construct, manifest-destiny and migrate -- which does not let pale Barbra off the hook free or easy (though it is a slightly different tune when sung by Sammy just a few years later) // home is as much a mist of ideas as it is a set of specificities and objects, first and last names on records or letters or petitions or guests books, patterns of iron gates, diagonals, phone lines, the framed drawing that hangs above your couch and features on your video calls, the ephemera from and of friends, the place you draw or photograph again and again because in more ways than ones you know it, you live there: or here, perhaps, in this city, in this building, in this time of genocide and fascism and neoliberalism all of which reject collective ideas of home in favor of individualized ones, which deploy language against people, all of which no one should have to or want to inhabit”

6. In a recent interview, she comments on people mispronouncing her last name (It’s Strei-sand not zand): “It’s the funniest thing to me that people still can’t seem to get my name right,” she said. “Even today, I had to correct my new assistant.”

7. Live Concert at the Forum in 1972 grossed over $300,000 but the McGovern campaign only received about $18,000 after expenses.

8. Omar Sharif’s involvement in Funny Girl apparently angered the Egyptian government because of Barbra’s support of Israel.

9. About $14,500 today adjusted for inflation.

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11. “Rainbow Connection” in 2021’s Release Me 2, originally intended for Wet.

12. There’s so much to say about this. It recalls the recent episode from Season 2 of Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal and this essay by Joseph Osmundson in Orion (“To clone her beloved dog, Streisand used ViaGen Pets, “America’s Pet Cloning Experts.” The company’s tagline: “Lasting Love. The worldwide leader in cloning the animals we love.” Online, ViaGen lists its prices: “The total cost of dog cloning is $50,000, paid in two equal installments”).

Post 018: Post-Poetry

On Gil & Giovanni

[ID: Vintage New Yorker by J. B. Handelsman depicting a mustached, be-speckled man wearing a sandwich board sign reading: “I Am A Poet / I Celebrate Myself and Sing Myself / For A Nominal Consideration, I Will Celebrate and Sing You”]

National Poetry Month¹ is one of my preferred pre-sanctioned affinity months (save, of course, for the “National” of it all). I often introduce myself as a “poet first,” and poems and poets are a significant part of how I make sense of the world. Even though the power of poetry this month—or any of the other 11—can be overstated (as it is not immune from the same traps of all creative industries, guilty of the usual silos, commodification, and violences), there is real impact of poets and poems past and present to be part of (un-televised) revolutions and connections.

This April, I’ve been reading Vallejo’s Trilce for the Long Poem Support Group, hearing RFK’s obscene comments saying that autistic people kids will “never write a poem,”² and, earlier today, I had the pleasure of launching the 2025 No, Dear first chapbook series Record Record, at the also-so-nice-they-named-it-twice gem Kissa Kissa. As part of my ongoing vinyl archiving, I’ve also been listening to recordings of Nikki Giovanni and Gil-Scott Heron.

Last March, I was set to support a program with Nikki Giovanni in celebration of the film Going to Mars. A few days before the program, the filmmakers withdrew in solidarity with Palestine. Last December, of course, Nikki Giovanni became an ancestor.

Earlier this year, I stumbled upon 1971’s Truth Is On Its Way at a vinyl sale. The record draws primarily from Giovanni’s collections Black Feelings, Black Talk, and Black Judgement, and features the New York Community Choir under the direction of Benny Diggs. The opening track combines the standard “Peace Be Still” with her poem “Great Pax Whitey.” It continues to feel present: “And america was born / Where war became peace / And genocide patriotism.”

Side A ends with “Ego Tripping,” a poem I first read in a Cave Canem workshop with Marwa Helal, and which became the (humble) jumping off point for my poem “(telling).” Especially with poems like “Ego Tripping,” it’s clear that the emergence of hip hop in the 1980s was in the lineage of poets like Giovanni, even if misogyny makes other names—like Gil Scott-Heron—more commonly cited.

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Saeed Jones of Vibe Check ends every episode with a poem. On an episode earlier this month, in response to the absurd publicity stunt of Blue Origin’s “Taking Up Space” mission, chose Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon.” Featured on the record Small Talk at 125th and Lenox (1970), the poem scoffs at the disconnect between the well-funded Apollo missions and the earthly realities of racist inequity.³ Gil was inspired by Eldridge Cleaver’s assertion that the space program was a distraction from the issues of the United States, an argument that continues to feel true in the present, as do the poem’s lines about medical debt, rent increases, and food prices. Gil was 21 years old when the record, his first, was released, one year before Giovanni’s Truth is On Its Way.

Part of my collection now includes the compilation record The Mind of Gil Scott-Heron (1978). It features the poem “H2O Gate Blues,” where Gil says:

Richard Daley, imperial Napoleonic Mayor of Chicago
Who took over from Al Capone and
Continues to implement the same tactics;
George Wallace; Lester Maddawg⁴
Strom Thurmond; Ronald Reagan
An almost endless list
That won't be missed
When at last America is purged

It feels easy to replace these names with current mayors, cops, and presents who won’t also won’t be missed.

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A year before Gil’s death in 2011, he was set to perform in Tel Aviv. Pro-Palestinian activists called him out, and he cancelled the performance.

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Back to Going to Mars (which is available to stream on Max). The film, which artfully combines archival and recent footage from readings and interviews (including her iconic conversation with James Baldwin that aired in 1971 on Soul!, the same year Truth Is On Its Way was released), is structured around her poem “Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (We’re Going to Mars).” In the poem, and in front of podiums in the film, Giovanni talks about her interest in space travel and argues that NASA needs to send Black folks (Black woman especially, she notes, including on stage at AfroPunk) to space. She contends “The trip to mars can only be understood through Black Americans . . . When we go to Mars . . . it’s the same thing . . . it’s Middle Passage,” writing that “NASA needs to call Black America” and ask:

How did you calm your fears . . . How were you able to decide you were human even when everything said you were not . . . How did you find comfort in the face of the improbable to make the world you came to your world . . . How was your soul able to look back and wonder

And they will tell them what to do: To successfully go to Mars and back you will need a song . . .

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In the documentary, and in this 2014 interview, Giovanni even talks about her experience with the now-unavailable Supersonic Travel (SST) that she rode to attend a friend’s funeral:

In terms of me imagining things, that’s why I want NASA to send a bunch of writers, like 10 of us, so that we could go sit down and have some wine and daydream in Antarctica. I won’t get to Mars. I would love to get to Mars. And I’ve been very fortunate because the old SST, which you’re too young to remember, supersonic transport, I was able to take that a couple of times, which goes up to 80,000 ft. So you do get to see the curve of the earth. And that was totally, totally fascinating to me. I would love to go to Mars. And I think that they need to send old ladies.

I wonder how far we are from a space mission with poets and if would ever be unattached to maniacal billionaires.

I wonder if Gayle King thought about Nikki, or Gil. Did she have time between the fear and the Katy Perry of it all?

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Billionaire Jeff Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000. His fiancée Lauren Sánchez was one of the passengers “taking up space.”

Another billionaire, Elon Musk, is obsessed with Mars travel. Musk was born in South Africa in 1971, where the apartheid his family benefited from would not have ended until he was in his early 20s.⁵

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On my shelf

1971 means Nikki Giovanni’s Truth Is On Its Way.

1971 means Roberta Flack’s Quiet Fire.

1971 means Carole King’s Tapestry.

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The film briefly touches on Giovanni’s criticism of the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s, which she clarified in a 2024 interview:

I wasn’t against the boycott movement. I was not pro-apartheid. Yeah, I saw that, I’ve seen the film three times, so I saw that. And I think that what might have been misunderstood was that I thought: You clean your own backyard. And we saw people—and it’s their right, it’s their life—and they were complaining about a situation in South Africa. I never saw them complaining about the situation in Haiti. And Papa Doc and Baby Doc were some of the worst people who ever walked this earth.

And so I thought, Why are we worried about another country when we’re living in a country that is destroying or trying to destroy us? And so that was my position. And a lot of people didn’t like it. But my job is not to be liked by a lot of people. My job is to tell the truth as I see it.

I mean, we look right now at Ukraine, or we look at what’s happening with Israel and the Palestinians, and nobody can be in favor of any of that. Either way—not in favor of the Russians, or in favor of what Israel is doing because all of these people, mostly women and children now, being killed. There’s no way to be in favor of that, but we still have fourteen-year-old Black boys... and we have a woman, Breonna Taylor, who was in her bed who got shot by a cop, and they don’t even want to call him guilty. Or we get the Sandy Hook. I mean, it’s so many of them; I could go on.

Indeed, nobody can be in favor of any of that.

***

A few weeks following her death, I stumbled upon the voice of Nikki Giovanni on the rental car radio during a long drive. I don’t remember the station or the host or what city we were passing through. What I remember is that she talked about teaching (which she did at Virginia Tech for 35 years) and about a preference for early-morning classes, when her students were still half-dreaming.

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Recent/Upcoming

• The second part of my interview with alexa dexa is now up on Futch Magazine. (Here’s Part 1 in case you missed it!).

• There’s two exquisites events coming up soon! Our monthly reading at Aberdeen Community Garden on May 1st:

  

  And this special program celebrating the work of Irena Kelpfisz at The Bureau (and YouTube Live!) on May 4th, featuring Ariel Goldberg, Clairette Atri Mizrahi, and Ayaz Orme Muratoglu.

  

1. This is a somewhat recent designation, started by the Academy of American Poets in 1996.

2. See this Mother Jones coverage with autistic poet Elizabeth McClellan for more.

3. Not to mention the mission was basically just a commercial for commercial space travel, which, according to the website require a deposit of $150,000. See also Summer of Soul (2021), where those gathered at the Harlem Cultural Festival in 1969 expressed similar sentiments to the concurrent moon landing.

4. Lester Maddox was the segregationist Governor of Georgia from 1967-1971, who called MLK Jr. an “enemy of the people” and ran unsuccessfully for president in 1976.

5. More here from the Guardian: “The making of Elon Musk: how did his childhood in apartheid South Africa shape him?

Post 017: Post-somewhere

on names and places

[ID: An afternoon sidewalk photograph full of lines in concrete and brick, featuring a deep blue door and a curved window covering making shadows on the building. ]

I’ve been thinking a lot about somewhere. Look: even that sentence’s awkward grammar points to the stickiness of the concept.

We’ve been forced to watch the president point violently at many somewheres. In January, the Gulf that should be called Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl (the Aztec deity of the seas) or nahá (Mayan for “great water”) but has been “of Mexico” since 1550 is suddenly renamed: “of America.” The companies whose CEOs got the good seats at the inaugurations capitulated with the change; the Associated Press’s refusal resulted in one of their reporters being blocked from an Oval Office event.

The president has pointed at Greenland with threats to annex (Usha Vance is now set to visit in time for the National dogsled race); pointed at Canada with threats to make a 51st state along with obscene flip-flop tariffs. In one of many theatrical Oval Office meetings these last few months, Zelenskyy asked the vice president whether he’s been to Ukraine to see the destruction, to which the vice president responded he’d “watched and seen the stories,” as if that was the same thing.

And, just last week, a group of 261 Venezuelan migrants alleged to be gang members were sent to a somewhere—to a prison in El Salvador.

***
I recently finished Somebody Somewhere (2022-24) on Max, a tender series whose title points to the everydayness of its characters and its Midwestern location, which for many just represents another some/elsewhere. Behind this, however, is a placemaking and storytelling driven by specificity—the show is set in Manhattan, Kansas (real-life population 53,682 as of 2023; compared to Manhattan, New York which is 1.6 million), and inspired by the life of Bridget Everett, who plays the lead role of Sam.

****

I’ve been cataloging my record collection this year, slowly and alphabetically. A few weeks ago, I spun Nana Grizol’s South Somewhere Else (2020), a record whose titular song begins “It was assumed that the South was a thing that took place somewhere else.” A whole region not just was somewhere else, it occured somewhere else. The song continues to describe all of the “dangerous narrative[s]” and “haunting imperatives[s]” of their upbringing, where “Jim Crow geographies” and “white liberal logics” seeped into all of their familiar architectures. “We weren’t noticing where the power was held,” they sing, and commit to “multiracial resistance to greedful ambitions.”

Later in the record, the band writes about another “somewhere:” Tacoma Center Detention Center in Washington, where “buses carry unnamed inmates to unnamed jails on unnamed roads.” Gizol minces no words in calling it for what it is “a euphemistic package for apartheid / a billion dollars earned in someone else’s blood / a manufactured answer to a xenophonic question.”

The prison opened in 2004 and has been the site of several inmate hunger strikes, including in 2014 and in 2020. Washington State has passed laws banning private detention facilities and the prison is expected to close this year when GEO Group’s contract with ICE expires.

***

Just a few days ago in my record archiving journey, I also stumbled upon Dolly Parton’s cover of “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” on her iconic 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs (1980). The song was written in 1948 by Woody Guthrie, who was responding to a plane crash that killed 28 migrants who were being deported to Mexico. Guthrie was struck by the fact that newspaper and radio coverage of the crash did not name the victims and instead simply referred to them as “deportees.” (The Fresno Bee did list a few names, though incorrectly.) The poem Guthrie wrote in response included symbolic names—Rosalita, Jesús, María—later set to music by Martin Hoffman and popularized by Pete Seeger years later.

Of course, with Guthrie and Seeger and Parton, it is worth interrogating the impact of these white folk singers singing about non-white deportees. What is the impact of names merely symbolic?

***

More than 75 years after the Los Gatos plane crash, the US Government is not providing a list of names of the Venezuelan immigrants it is currently trying to deport, not to mention not disclosing evidence of their connection to the gang Tren de Aragua. Many families are left to recognize their loved ones from videos from the government of El Salvador. (NPR)

***

I’ve been re-reading Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas (2017) in preparation for this month’s Long Poem Support Group (this Tuesday on Discord, guest facilitated by e.jin). In “38” (also shared by Jimena Lucero during her exquisites workshop), she writes:

The word Minnesota comes from mni, which means water; and sota, which means turbid.

Synonyms to turbid include muddy, unclear, cloudy, confused, and smoky.

Everything is the language we use.

Everything is in the names, too, whose misspellings and re-namings are a kind of muddying, a kind of clouding that make systems of power and histories of violence clear like potable water.

***

Of course, it is all connected. Racial capitalism, eugenics, and colonialism require the dehumanization of bodies, it also requires spaces to be stripped of their specificity and of their original tenders. The original names of Gulfs or rivers or cities are too much of a reminder of their original stewards, so it’s easier to just change it. From Brooklyn, the South and the Midwest are far-off somewheres that might as well be one blurry thing. Who cares if you’ve been to Minnesota or Manhattan or Ukraine. We’ve seen the propaganda paintings and posts and those give you as good a sense as you need of those places. All migrants are violent and less-than-human, doesn’t matter what specific lesser country they come from or what number they get in detention.

And what of the reclamation? There’s a reason why moments and social movement chants are full of names, as are land acknowledgements, as fraught as those are too. Does naming, real and symbolic, go far enough?

***

It makes sense to long for somewhere, for else. So many of our spaces fail to meet our needs and so we look others.

What of that space that has not been built? (Really not been built or imagined, without any of the colonial delusion.) What can we make possible there?

***

Currently Reading:

• Michael Genese’s blooming newsletter The Minor 9th: Every Small Tipping Point — with a new post, “The Land Shifts” certainly worth a read post-Spring equinox and as a potent seed for hope and rigor

• Joselia Rebekah Hughes’s Substack Black_Sapce’d, which just released an urgent, wandering, and also musical essay “Tap the Pain To Say…”

• Renee Gladman’s big-small, poetry-fiction, meta-eulogy TOAF, via Lara Mimosa Montes’s wonderful Writing on Writing Book Club

• More of Dean Spade’s Love in a Fucked Up World! Here is another of many underlined sentences:

We can be caring and compassionate towards ourselves, understanding that transformation is gradual, that we came by our old coping mechanisms honestly and we’re not bad for having relied on them.

Recent/Upcoming

• My interview with alexa dexa, “space to be a while” is now live on Futch Magazine! I’m so excited to share this conversation (in two parts!) that was such a joy to have with alexa last summer.

• I am DJing another party with Celebrate 845 this Monday (3/24) on Zoom! Free, with donations going to their PPE Hubs—come dance!

  

  [ID: Aqua flyer surrounded by yellow flowers with a disco ball in many purples at the center, detailing volume two of a virtual dance party hosted by DJ Queer Shoulders and Celebrate 845 on March 24th at 7 pm EST]

• Next month, exquisites is back at Aberdeen Community Garden with a sweet lineup of poets:

  

  [ID: Pale green save the date flier with playful purple blob, yellow squiggle, and orange burst surrounded by teal and black text with the lineup and details of exquisite’s April reading at Aberdeen]

• Also next month, I’m supporting and the opening DJ for No, Dear’s upcoming Spring Fundraiser at Enoch’s! Join us for readings by Eileen Myles, Shira Erlichman, Jive Poetic, and t’ai freedom ford—and if you can’t look through our silent auction for some goodies.

[ID a green caption with a flower and text in lighter green with details of No, Dear’s Spring Celebration and Fundraiser.]

Until somewhere,

d

Post 016: Post-Love

& friendship & love

Earlier this month, I went to a packed talk at the Word is Change in Bed Stuy. Dean Spade was in conversation with Morgan Bassichis about his new book Love in a Fucked Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together. I was seated front row, between two dears. Writing this, I’m recalling both of them emphasizing that things are bad bad, and, that in some ways, they will worsen. It seems like an obvious thing, but still a useful one in countering numbness, disbelief, and gaslighting. In the conversation, Dean said something to the effect of liberation is feeling it all. (Chapter One’s epigraph is from Marsha P. Johnson: “I’m not saying it don’t hurt to be awake in this world. But stay awake my darlings.”) It has been, to quote one of Morgan’s projects, an Odd Year. The stakes keep rising, which is why the work of relating and being in relationships is so urgent. We need to be together better because we need to be together.

The talk, unlike most, required masks and featured a UV and air purifier in the space. Leading up to the event, I had been following some online discourse expressing disappointment about some gaps in mitigation that took place during a previous stop. The call-out, admittedly, was activating. Dean ended up addressing some of the concerns in a way that, for me (though not for some), took accountability and named the real challenges of organizing a tour and of the very wide gap between where we are (the majority of spaces being maskless, lacking purification, lacking language to name the realities of gathering and possibilities of mitigation) and where we could (and need to) be.

I asked Dean about this at the end, in part in a gesture of gratitude and recognition as a fellow event organizer. He talked about beginning this book because of isolation, years before the pandemic. He named the challenges of working with such a range of venues and talked about learnings along the way leading to adaptations. One part of his answer continues to stick with me. He said that sometimes compounded rejection can make people rigid, which I found to be such a profound naming of some of the dynamics present in the online call-outs. I am still reflecting on the compounded rejections I and so many of us face and the often-difficult instances where that results in rigidity.

Just recently, Robert Kennedy Jr. was confirmed as Health Secretary. The latest People’s CDC Report does not look good. The dangers of his beliefs and the policies they may result in cannot be underestimated. Mask and demand masked spaces! Support masked and cleaner-air spaces (another shoutout to A.I.R. NYC and their events calendar!) Access is love! Masking is love!

---

A few days ago was a the so-called holiday of Valentine’s Day. Growing up, I knew it as el día del amor y amistad—the day of love and friendship. (I saw a chalk sign I wish I had a picture of outside of a car repair shop that said “amor y amistad” and below it “today!”) What I love about that coupling (over neoliberal galentine’s etc) is not just that it expands what is celebrated, but, for me, underscores that friendship is love and vice versa. I was glad to spend the weekend connecting both with lovers and friends.

In the book, Dean writes about the “romance myth” which insists that a committed romantic relationship is the most important kind of relationship and fantasizes about a “one true love” that lasts forever. This myth results not only in us undervaluing the full expanse of relationships that can be meaningful, but has us fall back on gestures of scarcity and disposability. Reading, I recognized how solidly I have unlearned relationship hierarchies, while recognizing other patterns or tendencies that remain in-progress. What I appreciate about Dean’s book is that throughout, he is asserting the structural context that seeps into our most intimate relationships, especially in political spaces and as political people. I’m still processing (and finishing) the book and may keep sharing reflections.

For now, I’ll end with a passage from the first chapter:

We are working to recover a broader range of potential responses to the world, beyond programmed reactions. Although I’ve been taught by society to feel shame and self-hatred in the daily indignities of the workplace or family, I can recover my ability to feel rage, greif, and incitement to action instead. Though I am programmed to try to dominate others, I can choose instead to expand my capacity for collaboration and humility. We can move out of autopilot reactions that have become habitual through repetition, and instead respond to situations and people in ways that are more aligned with our real beliefs and purpose. The point of this healing, then, is to increase our capacities to feel and do new things that make our lives more on purpose.

Coming up:

• I’m excited to partner with Celebrate 845 for a virtual dance party next Monday, February 27th. Link will be here the day of the party, and donations support their PPE Distribution work—let’s dance! Furiously! These times are hard!

• This month’s Long Poem Support Group pick is Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Join us next on the Discord Tuesday to discuss with guest facilitator MC Hyland.

• Our third and final Virtual Winter Workshop with is coming up on Thursday, March 6th with the lovely Jimena Lucero. Join us!

With love,

d