You fight. I fight. Keep fighting not to get stuck in the brown paper bag.
Art and expression dovetail with the necessity of gathering.
Poets are all of us — poet and not poet.
These ideas all come from conversations with Dustin Prestridge, Kimiko Hahn, and Marisol Baca, three poets who are part of a spoken-word and jazz album, The Poets are Gathering, released in October 2020 by saxophonist Benjamin Boone and featuring an ensemble of talented writers and musicians.
One of the album’s many themes, vocalized by the poets and reinforced by Boone and his collaborators’ musical endurance, is society’s ability to envision and fight for change. The album is an embodiment of what it means to “dovetail,” to fit together with others pieces, and to gather, all of us, “poet and not poet,” because qualities of being human should be forgiveness and togetherness. Fight to “not get stuck” and to forgive, to hopefully heal as a society. The Poets are Gathering provides a possible starting point.
In the spirit of the collective conversation among poets and musicians on the album, I interviewed Prestridge, Hahn, and Baca individually, and then attempted to weave their thoughts together.
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Kirk Alvaro Lua: How was the process in working with Benjamin Boone and the session musicians? Have you read your poetry before with another group of musicians? If so, what made this collaboration different?
Marisol Baca: When Juan Felipe Herrera asked me to join him at the studio, I went. Any time Juan Felipe suggests something, I’m all ears. I know that there is going to be something special in it. I hadn’t met Benjamin or the musicians that work with him. I came with a poem from my book, “Tremor,” and read it at the end of a long day of recording. Benjamin was enthusiastic to hear the poem and we got a couple of takes.
Lua: What was it about your poem “Spiral” that you felt merged so well with jazz? Was the poem selection a joint effort?
Baca: Really, it felt amazing going into that room and performing “Spiral.” We had a wonderful cosmic connection and they are top-notch musicians, so I gave it my all and it was magical.
I am in awe of Benjamin’s kindness and enthusiasm. I have read with him and the other musicians for a few projects that connect music with poetry. “Spiral” is about connection, the feminine source of power, solutions that are often overlooked, and I think that it is a connective piece that feels like it belongs alongside the other poems on the album. The music pulls the interstellar, tree-root qualities out of the poem.
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Lua: The performance of your poem “Deconstruction of Idols” is one of the tracks on the album that felt like it could have been improvised. Was it? If so, did the process help support this merging freedom of poetry and jazz? And if not, what was it about the poem that you felt could have woven so well with jazz?
Dustin Prestridge: Nope. I showed up with a backpack full of words. Benjamin and I are neighbors. We talked about our favorite John Coltrane albums, and I brought him a chapbook. I don’t know how he managed all these people. I get emotional, so I tried to keep it solid. I’m used to recording in closets.
Lua: The music and your performance vocally felt like The Stooges’ Fun House, an album that is loose, exciting with risk, and volatile. Are you a fan? And is this a vibe you were aiming for?
Prestridge: Thank you for the compliment. It is definitely a compliment that our performance is being heard or set side-by-side with Fun House. In fact, I received a contract from Henry Rollins, famous for his career in music, and now his publishing too. We were going to go to Germany and shit. I was proud to be published by him and be alongside those he had published — Iggy Pop, Henry Miller, Hubert Selby Jr. I’m proud of that. And I’m proud to be heard with Boone and his ensemble in the same vein as Fun House, period.
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Lua: “These Current Events” is positioned as the last poem to finish out The Poets are Gathering, and what a fitting conclusion. What was the process like for you, and was your collaborative performance’s placement as the record’s closer a team decision or a surprise?
Kimiko Hahn: I don’t have a lot of experience collaborating with musicians. So, for starters, it was an honor and delight. I am very pleased that “These Current Events” spoke to Benjamin so intensely. Regarding
placement, no, I didn’t know until some time after the recording that the poem would close the album. That was a very happy surprise.
Lua: What was it about your chosen poem that you felt would compliment the ensamble’s jazz, and vice versa? Were there other poems you may have considered?
Hahn: I think the themes of progressive change, art, and expression dovetail with the other poems. They dovetail with the necessity of gathering, in the sense of joining with other people, other voices. There may have been other poems considered, but I am especially politically direct in “These Current Events.” I wrote it at a time when I was more discursive — and this mode worked well with the freeing spirit of jazz.
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Lua, speaking with Baca: The album has many recurring themes: social and political awareness, circular histories, and change. These themes, to me, strongly appear in your poem and in Kimiko Hahn’s poem. The connections appeared in your lines:
It is a movement
the circles inside the corpus of a great tree.
And also in the line:
Spiral is not spire.
And in Kimiko’s lines:
Dress in silk to undress.
And:
That we must switch off all the lamps and overheads.
Open the shade to the natural night with its artificial lights.
I like this idea, that our histories are not linear or “spire,” but circular like “spiral.” There is room for us as a society to change, but are our changes old recycled habits in disguise? And what connections do you see in Hahn’s poem and performance with your own?
Baca: In Hahn’s lines, I see a moving through the self-reflective process of dealing with the devastating qualities of our world. The specific moments of experience that pull us down until we say that there is no hope:
I can pick the paper up any week and find so much sorrow it is difficult to believe there are solutions.
And then the ending where Hahn’s speaker picks up the sheaves of paper and decides:
If I turn to sheaves of paper … it is only to revive the heartbeat of contentment, the heartbeat of commitment. I
know poetry cannot save, but it feeds the gut that is able.
To me, this is hopeful for a solution. It is a wonderful poem that looks unapologetically at the sources of pain and injustice we feel. It asks what the poet can or can’t do. My poem tries to name a source of power, maybe name something that often seems hidden, but isn’t.
I don’t know if our society is capable of change. I think in the poem “Spiral,” the speaker is clinging to and uncovering old knowledge and trying to speak to it as an alternative. I imagine her putting her foot to the door and walking back into a room to explain what she has witnessed. I guess that’s optimism.
The two poems show how poetry can be a way through to making or imagining change. I love that Hahn’s work starts with forgetting the ideology and it shows us just how we love to distract ourselves:
Play, play.
We shut out the current events of the afternoon.
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Lua, speaking with Prestridge: There is some intertextuality between your poem and Marisol Baca’s poem. Both have the theme of cycles, yours dealing with unlucky cycles with repetitive results. Your poem says:
Our parents as junkies, cousins flunkies.
And:
Drunk parents are what I see my friends becoming.
Baca’s poem suggests, “Spiral is not spire,” that our histoires are not linear, but rather cycles; they are circular, good or bad. This reminds me of West Side Story’s “Gee Officer Krupke!”:
It’s just our bringin’ upke that gets us outta hand. Our mothers all are junkies, our fathers all are drunks.
This is something the philosopher Slavoj Žižek might call “cynical ideology”:
The paradox here is, how can you know all this and still do it?
With the relation between your poem and Baca’s — and thinking of cycles as a recurring theme in pop culture — what chances do you think we have to change these cycles within our society? Can there be new results?
Prestridge: I love Marisol’s poem because it deals with cycles. I don’t mean this as a put-down for myself — she is more educated than me! — but I think education is how you break these cycles.
I don’t know. I think I’ve watched my family do the same defeating cycles over and over again. You can’t save everyone, so save your kids. Welfare, it can be defeating. One of my sons is now in college, and another graduated as a nurse and works with my wife. I’m proud of that. Walk and talk with your kids. Take them places. Education, education, education.
Writing saved me. Read books, change yourself. I changed my cycle. If you do, you can survive depression. You’ll survive it all.
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Lua, speaking with Hahn: Your poem and performance’s energy and flow and rhythm had me going back to Dustin Prestridge’s poem. Some of the phrasings he used:
I’ve listened to my mommy drunk all my life.
And:
Fuck yes, I’ve got some understanding.
I thought these paralleled your own word choices. Such as:
I can pick the paper up any day of the week and find so much sorrow it is difficult to believe there are solutions.
And:
I know poetry can not save but it fuels the gut that is able.
Society is doing the same thing but hoping for different results. New era, same old shit. Going through the motions, and knowing and accepting that our histories are cycles and change isn’t as fast as we’d like, or too late at best.
The poet Li-Young Lee once said:
Human suffering. I have come to accept that there will always be somebody killing somebody.
Is accepting our choices as a society a way for us to fuel our guts and enable us to take responsibility, which might lead to the breaking of old cycles and new change? And how do you see the connection between your own poem and Prestridge’s?
Hahn: I’m unpacking your questions a bit here. In my mind, accepting that “there will always be somebody killing somebody” doesn’t mean that we accept the same old shit. In fact, what does that mean, to accept “our choices as a society”? I mean, who is making the choices?
I am not the one gerrymandering. I am not the one taking postboxes off the corner so people can’t mail their ballot. It is true that I elect (or must live with) lawmakers who condone these acts. That places the onus on activists and voters. Also, I don’t see history as cycles, per se. Not circular. More like spiraling. We might spiral back to, say, conservatism, but this time around there is a fascist hue that even former Republicans cite and condemn.
I think that rejecting society’s choices and norms is a way to envision what life might be like with, for example, health care for all. Jobs and homes for all. Realization can be the first step toward change; then there must be actions to change the order. To change who is the ruling class — from billionaires to working people. This vision was once radical, even illegal. Now it’s common sense.
When I wrote “fuel the gut,” I meant that art, in and of itself, can’t feed or fight. But it can sustain us as we take progressive action.
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Lua, speaking with Baca: Right in the middle of the album, we have Juan Felipe Herrera reciting his poem and the album’s title track, “The Poets are Gathering.” It feels like an exciting storm of haunting chants amidst an optimistic, apocalyptic feel of evolution. Herrara repeats the mantra:
The poets are saying everything is changing!
But earlier on the album, Herrera performs “Poem by Poem,” a kind of calm before the storm, with a line that says:
you have a poem to offer
it is made of action—you must
search for it.
What was your experience first hearing Herrera’s mystifying performances? Who are “the poets” he’s summoning? And what action do you feel “the poets” are witnessing or influencing?
Baca: I don’t know if I felt that “Poem by Poem” was mystifying. I felt that “the poets” are those committed to their craft and understand the way that poetry lives and breathes witness and change. I also think that poets are all of us — poet and not poet — building a bridge of poems with our hearts and minds and hands and languages.
The poems are the real stories of those alive and dead. And those who are influencing society are all of us — poets — who write with love in our hearts for others. That’s what I feel with this poem. I can name many poets who are making change, but I don’t know if it’s about that. I think it is much larger than that.
Herrera’s poems have always been cosmically large and encompass the smallest, too. It’s about gathering, not singling out. The poems are action and commitment. It is the mass of our collective need for change. When listening to these poems together, I can’t help but feel and hear the drops of water and blood filling a larger cistern with a burst at the end. A call to act, write, be, speak, do what you need to do to connect to others and recognize that connection:
If it is your blood, it is made of nine drops. Honor them, watch them, stop them from falling.
“Poem by Poem” is the building, and “The Poets are Gathering” is the great manifestation. The witnessing of the continued work toward change.
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Lua, speaking with Prestridge: Juan Felipe Herrera’s “The Poets are Gathering” is an intense climax that is placed right in the middle of the album. It is a poem and performance that fights against the troubling cycles of lack of change in our society. Herrera’s “Poem by Poem” appears a few tracks earlier, with a line saying:
carry it taller than the city where you live.
With your own poem depicting the trouble with changing cycles in our own lives, in our cities, how do we carry this change and breaking of cycles taller than the cities where we live? What response did you have when listening to Herrera’s tracks?
Prestridge: You fight. I fought. I fought and got the girl I love, fought and got my home, my castle, with its bookshelf that holds all my books and that makes me happy.
When I got my contract from Henry Rollins, I thought I’d be out of depressing Fresno. I went to San Francisco and was homeless for a time, but I came back. I came back home. I love home. I thought I needed to get away, be away, but I didn’t.
And you read. You read people like Bill Shields and Charles Bukowski, and you keep fighting not to get stuck in the brown paper bag.
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Lua, speaking with Hahn: One of the standout performances for me on the album was Juan Felipe Herrera’s “The Poets are Gathering.” A performance and poem that echoes:
Impossible friendship and all its ingredients.
That echo, for me, originated from his earlier performance on the album in “Poem by Poem” where he lets go:
when the blood comes down
do not ask
if
it is your blood.
Two statements, when joined together, confess that impossible friendships are not so impossible and that all blood spilt is our common blood. What are your thoughts on Herrera’s poetry and performances on the album? What can you offer to their message?
Hahn: I love how the two poems have such different tones. One, a kind of gentle. The other, fierce. “The Poets are Gathering” especially speaks to me. It is so revolutionary, old style (1960s, 1970s) and new style (the new millenium). I mean, no matter the era, people need to gather, whether that is figuratively or literally.
Juan Felipe does two things at once: He describes what poets are doing all over the world (slyly including other figures and causes) and this, in turn, becomes a rallying cry: Poets of the World Unite! Forward Ever! The words engage the music, and vice versa. It’s truly radical.
What can I add? That wherever we are — on a stoop, on the street, in a backyard — and whoever we are, we can create ripples and waves.
Marisol Baca is Fresno’s former Poet Laureate. She’s the author of Tremor, a full-length collection of poems from Three Mile Harbor Press. Her work has been published in SPFLit Magazine, Narrative Northeast, Riverlit, Shadowed: An Anthology of Women Writers, The Acentos Review, and others. She was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and grew up around generations of family in an old adobe house. Her family later settled in Fresno, California. She received her MFA from Cornell University and won the Robert Chasen poetry award for her poem “Revelato.” Currently, she is an English professor at Fresno City College, and lives with her husband in a house in the center of town. She is working on her second book.
Dustin Prestridge was a rising star in the San Francisco poetry scene in the late 1990’s before a turn of unfortunate events altered that trajectory. His marvelous imported collection of poetry, Knuckle Deep, is available on Amazon.
Kimiko Hahn, a former president of the Poetry Society of America, is the author of ten books of poems, including: Foreign Bodies (W. W. Norton, 2020); Brain Fever (WWN, 2014), and Toxic Flora (WWN, 2010), both collections prompted by science; The Narrow Road to the Interior (WWN, 2006) a collection that takes its title from Bashō’s famous poetic journal; The Unbearable Heart (Kaya, 1996), which received an American Book Award; Earshot (Hanging Loose Press, 1992), which was awarded the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award. As part of her service to the CUNY community, she initiated a chapbook festival that became an annual event co-sponsored by major literary organizations. Since then, she has added chapbooks to her publication list: Write it!, Brittle Process, Brood, Ragged Evidence, A Field Guide to the Intractable, Boxes with Respect, The Cryptic Chamber, and Resplendent Slug. In 2017, she and Tamiko Beyer collaborated on the chapbook Dovetail.
Kirk Alvaro Lua is a Fresno State MFA poetry alumnus and a former poetry editor for The Normal School.
Photo of Dustin Prestridge by Stace Lyons; photo of Kimiko Hahn by Beowulf Sheehan