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Anthony Reed on June Jordan ("In Memoriam: Martin Luther King, Jr.")
1.7k Plays2 years ago
Anthony Reed joins the podcast to discuss June Jordan's marvelous poem "In Memoriam: Martin Luther King, Jr."
Anthony is Professor of English and the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Professor of Fine Arts at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014) and Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production (Duke UP, 2021). With Vera Kutzinski, Anthony edited Langston Hughes in Context (Cambridge UP, 2022).
During the episode, I make reference to Anthony's article, "The Erotics of Mourning in Recent Experimental Black Poetry." We also listen to a recording of Jordan herself reading today's poem. Finally, you can find the transcript of Jordan's visit to Allen Ginsberg's class, during which she discusses "vertical rhythm," here.
Please remember to follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear—and subscribe to the newsletter to stay up to date on our plans.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast and Guest
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Close Readings podcast. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh. And today, it's my great pleasure to have Anthony Reed on the podcast. And the poem that Anthony has chosen for us to talk about today is a poem by June Jordan. And the poem is called In Memoriam, Martin Luther King, Jr.
00:00:28
Speaker
And I think we'll have some thoughts in a moment about the question of making that choice, choosing that poem for release on this day.
Anthony Reed's Academic Background
00:00:41
Speaker
But let me tell you a little bit about our guest first. Anthony Reed is a professor of English and the Norman L. and Rosalie J. Goldberg Professor of Fine Arts at Vanderbilt University.
00:00:54
Speaker
where he works on the intersections of contemporary black poetry and media, aesthetics and politics in the 20th and 21st centuries. He's the author of two monographs.
Exploring Anthony Reed's Work on Black Experimental Writing
00:01:06
Speaker
So his first book, Freedom Time,
00:01:09
Speaker
The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing, which came out from Johns Hopkins University Press in 2014, won the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the MLA for an outstanding scholarly study of Black American literature or culture. And I just have to say, I can see why it did. And it's a truly great book, and it's been important to me in my own work.
00:01:34
Speaker
More recently, Anthony published his second monograph, a book called Sound Works, Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production. That book was published by Duke University Press in 2021, and it's concerned with poetry and music in the Black Arts era.
00:01:54
Speaker
Even more recently than that, with his colleague Vera Kaczynski at Vanderbilt, Anthony has edited the volume, Langston Hughes in Context, published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. And for anyone interested in Hughes, that book will be an invaluable resource.
00:02:15
Speaker
I'm sure. Anthony also tells me that he has two other books underway, I believe. So one on Black lyric theory, and maybe we can come back at some point in this episode to talk about what lyric theory is and what Black lyric theory might be.
00:02:36
Speaker
and the other on black effective solidarities and dissonances across the diaspora. These both sound like fascinating projects to me and the poetry studies world will be very eager to receive them.
00:02:51
Speaker
So I first became immersed in Anthony's work several years ago when I was working on an article of my own, which was about the role whiteness had played in the formation of lyric subjectivity and about how Claudia Rankin, a Black poet, negotiated that history.
Impact of Reed's Essay on Kamran's Work
00:03:11
Speaker
The essay of Anthony's that I'd found, which was published at just the moment when I needed to read it,
00:03:19
Speaker
is called The Erotics of Mourning in recent black experimental poetry. And he published it in a journal called The Black Scholar.
00:03:27
Speaker
And it's just a marvelous essay. My copy of it is, you know, I printed out a PDF as soon as I found it and then proceeded to underline just about every sentence in it. It was so full of gems. Here's one sentence from that essay from near the conclusion of the essay, which I think gets at some of what the essay is concerned with. So this is Anthony, quote, to ask what lies beyond the lyric,
00:03:53
Speaker
is thus also to ask what political possibilities are there beyond or other than citizenship. And I take that line as emblematic of Anthony's way of putting together an interest in poetry and poetics with the kinds of social and political commitments and
00:04:18
Speaker
forms of affiliation that people have well outside of the purview of poetry, or at least what most people would think of as the purview of poetry.
00:04:28
Speaker
I'll put links to all of Anthony's, all of the things that I've mentioned in the show notes.
Accessing the Discussed June Jordan Poem
00:04:36
Speaker
Remember also that you can find the text of the poem, of the June Jordan poem that we'll be talking about today in the show notes for people who want to look at a text as we talk about it today. But with that, I want to welcome you, Anthony, to Close Readings. How are you doing today?
00:04:57
Speaker
I'm doing very well and thank you for that lovely introduction and of course for your work, which I continue to engage in and learn from. Well, that's very kind of you to say. It's my pleasure, of course, to have you here. You know, sort of peek behind the curtain for a moment. You were someone who, when I conceived of this podcast, I knew I'd want to have on.
00:05:23
Speaker
And so I sent out an email to
Significance of Releasing the Episode on MLK Day
00:05:26
Speaker
you. And then as I thought about how the dates were lining up, it occurred to me that it just so happened that our episode would be released, if I followed something like the calendar that I was on, would be released on MLK day. And I had a moment of pause at that point where I thought,
00:05:47
Speaker
I don't want anyone to think, I certainly didn't want Anthony to think that I was making a move that was sort of reducing the interest in our conversation, tagging it to a particular occasion or something like that. And so I wrote to you and I said, you know, you tell me, would you like to proceed on that calendar or would you like to make a
Occasional Poems and MLK Day
00:06:12
Speaker
change?
00:06:12
Speaker
And I guess I just wonder, before even we get started today, what thoughts, if any, you have about the idea that a poem might be occasional, in the sense that it might be prompted by an occasion, like a particular event or moment in time?
00:06:32
Speaker
or in the sense that a poem might be something that one wants to read or think about on an occasion, and maybe even on an occasion that recurs like an annual holiday or something like that. So what thoughts do you have, Anthony, about the idea of poetry as occasional, or what was it that prompted you to say, you know what, let's lean into the MLK Day connection and talk about this poem on that day? Well, it seemed fortuitous to me
00:07:02
Speaker
I suppose I'm one of those people who thinks there are no accidents. And so that alignment spoke to me and said, we should embrace this and we should use it as an occasion for something like counterprogramming. Where I'm coming from is my childhood recollections of MLK Day. And indeed my recollections as an adult
00:07:28
Speaker
Very often people will play excerpts, carefully curated excerpts from the I Have a Dream speech. Maybe they'll play a little bit of the I've Been to the Top of the Mountain Top speech. They'll say we should notice the content of our character and ethical of our skins. And that'll be it, which is such a disservice to the person and the complexity of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life that it seems good to lean into.
00:07:58
Speaker
that occasion. It also happens and not surprisingly that there are many, many poems from the Black Arts era and after that are composed in response to his death.
Historical Context of Poetry Responding to Events
00:08:14
Speaker
Both poems like this one or poems by people like Nikki Giovanni published almost right afterwards and
00:08:22
Speaker
in the full kind of feeling of that moment. And then those, one of the poems that I wanted to talk about that's just a little too long for a podcast is Sonia Sanchez's reflection about 20 years on, thinking about and what has happened in the time since. Maybe more generally, writing on occasion
00:08:50
Speaker
is one of the things poetry is most often done historically, certainly poetry in English, so that for every, I don't know if one goes back to the Canterbury Tales to speak way out of my expertise, I'm not sure that any of those are in fact occasional, though they may have been occasioned by real events, but all around
00:09:13
Speaker
the tradition in English are people inspired by things that they've observed, things that just happened, ongoing wars and fights, people leaving and coming back.
Lucy Terry and the Emergence of African-American Poetry
00:09:27
Speaker
The first surviving African-American poem is by a poet named Lucy Terry called Bars Fight, and it must have been composed in
00:09:39
Speaker
I want to say the 18th century, like before the US was the US, but it's not printed until the early 19th century, which means people preserved this poem. They preserved it. They memorized it. They recited it to each other. And it's a poem of commemoration. It commemorates, curiously, it commemorates white settlers being killed by Native Americans and includes the slimes
00:10:09
Speaker
championing those, the names of whom I'll not leave out. And then Lucy Terry proceeds to recite these dead settlers. So in that way, thinking about the African-American tradition, African-Americans specifically in the United States, that's really where the tradition begins. Or so I would argue.
00:10:36
Speaker
with the idea that a poem might be an appropriate or interesting response to an occasion, a way of making something meaningful or of commemorating or of thinking critically about even.
June Jordan's Life and 'In Memoriam, Martin Luther King, Jr.'
00:10:53
Speaker
Yeah.
00:10:54
Speaker
I wanted to be straight on the dates here. And so before we recorded, I reminded myself of when June Jordan, the poet that we'll be talking about in a moment, was born relative to the events of King's life. So for people who don't know June Jordan's work well, she was born in 1936.
00:11:20
Speaker
which means she would have been, well, for one thing about seven years younger than Martin Luther King.
00:11:27
Speaker
And she would have been 32 when King was assassinated in 1968. The poem that Anthony has chosen for us to think about today, I think, was written shortly after the assassination. And as it happens, we have the good fortune to have a recording of Jordan reading the poem aloud herself.
00:11:52
Speaker
As always on this podcast, I'd like for us to hear the poem in its entirety early in the episode. And now is the moment for that. So we'll hear June Jordan read the poem out loud, and then I'll invite Anthony to share some thoughts about what we've just heard.
Analysis of Rhythm in Jordan's Poem
00:12:09
Speaker
This poem is in the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr.
00:12:16
Speaker
Honey, people, murder, mercy, USA, the milk land, turn to monsters, teach to kill to violate, pull down, destroy the weekly freedom, growing fruit from being born, America.
00:12:29
Speaker
Tomorrow, yesterday, rib rape, exacerbate, despoil, disfigure, crazy, running threat. The deadly thrall, appall, believe, dispel, the wildlife. Burn the breast, the onward tongue, the outward hand, deform, the normal, rainy, riot, sunshine, shelter, wreck of darkness. Derogate, delimit, blank, explode, deprive, assassinate, and batten up like bullets. Faten up the raving greed, reactivate, a springtime terrorizing.
00:12:58
Speaker
Death by men by more than you or I can stop. They sleep who know a regulated place or pulse or tide or changing sky according to some universal stage direction obvious like shore washed shells.
00:13:20
Speaker
We share an afternoon of mourning in between no next predictable except for wild reversal, hearse, rehearsal, bleach, the black long lunging ritual of fright, insanity, and more deplorable abortion more and more. So that was June Jordan reading in memoriam Martin Luther King Jr. Anthony
00:13:49
Speaker
When I listen to Jordan's reading, I'm struck, first of all, by the sense of rhythm in the poem. And I know that rhythm was an idea from a kind of technical point of view or poetics point of view that Jordan was quite interested in herself. I want to just invite you to begin this conversation by sharing your thoughts about
00:14:16
Speaker
what rhythm means in a poem like this or what you notice yourself as you were listening along to Jordan reading just now about the poem from a rhythmical point of view. I think the first thing that's really striking carrying her read it, and thank you for finding and bringing that recording to my attention. I hadn't heard it before. She reads in a monotone.
00:14:43
Speaker
Like it's very much a performance of her performance mirrors something that the poem does. She gets herself out of the way in order to just present the poem it seems. And from there the momentum of the words that she's aligned almost fantastically really comes forward. So to rhythm I would say that there's both an A
00:15:09
Speaker
an audible rhythm that we hear, that things like alliteration underscore, but also thinking about the poem in terms of images, those verbal constellations that are meant to awaken our imaginations. There's something like an editing rhythm, as one might find in film, a series of images there
00:15:33
Speaker
juxtaposed next to one another that encourage new thought associations. For Jordan herself, I think that for poets of her generation, the rhythm became an alternative to meter. Meter is a grid that writers and critics
00:16:00
Speaker
used to organize lines, taking the fact that English is a strong, stressed language as its basis, and then figuring out how to arrange that intentionally, something that happens, as it were, naturally, then becomes intentionally arranged in order to create an idea of order on the page. It's, as you know, as many of our listeners will know, there's long been kind of challenges to that, should be used,
00:16:30
Speaker
meter is mirror natural is English naturally an ambit parenthesis.
The Role of Rhythm in the Black Arts Movement
00:16:36
Speaker
No, there are no I am's in English closed parenthesis. But the way that people from Wordsworth appropriating ballad meter through Hopkins and sprung first, they've used meter to try to get at something like speech for the black arts era. And which I'm for one not going to link to Whitman, although one could
00:17:02
Speaker
The meter proved to be too restrictive. It was actually too artificial to impose upon poems. And the idea was to try to get to something like the demonic force, the demonic energy, the demonic with the T. And to have that be the organizing energy of the poem. And I think you hear that really clearly.
00:17:29
Speaker
You see it on the page and you hear it when Jordan reads. The places where she slows down are logical in my reading of the poem, at least on the page. Maybe we can revisit some of those moments in just a moment here.
00:17:48
Speaker
think about why she slows down where she does what those moments correspond to in terms of what you just referred to as a kind of logical sense. What some people might think about is the argument of the poem or the ideas being developed by the poem. I'd be very interested in hearing you talk about that. I know that Jordan
00:18:16
Speaker
has, is on the record as being interested in something she calls vertical rhythm, which I take it is, or as I think I understand it anyway, is related to something you were just discussing. So vertical as opposed to the horizontal kind of rhythm that you might get in a line of
00:18:41
Speaker
say iambic pentameter, which would go something like ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum, and then with all the kind of interesting variations.
00:18:50
Speaker
on that one can get, that's horizontal, I guess, in the sense that it goes left to right across the page, follows the line of poetry. So what did Jordan mean by vertical rhythm? And how is that, can you relate that to some of the history that you were just giving us about the Black Arts Movement and its interest in demotic sort of rhythms? I'll try.
00:19:16
Speaker
The demonic or the vernacular, the wanting to get to the language that people use, I think I want to say first is, and this relates to the question of occasion, whatever else the Black Arts Movement was, it was a reaffirmation of the idea that poetry is something that happens with and among and for people. It's something that happens in communities.
00:19:39
Speaker
And it was an attempt by people, self-consciously, by black writers, self-consciously to
Community Focus in Black Arts Movement Poetry
00:19:45
Speaker
unlearn some of the standards of beauty, of order, of structure that they had been learned because they felt with reason that those external standards made it hard for them to know how to appreciate the culture of their parents, of their grandparents, of their uncles and aunts.
00:20:06
Speaker
And so that rather than, there are people like Gwendolyn Brooks who could brilliantly just invent within those received structures. There is only really one Gwendolyn Brooks. I mean, it's Gwendolyn Brooks, it's Derek Walcott of Black writers, Walcott being the St. Lucian poet and playwright, who are able to figure out how to
00:20:30
Speaker
turn meter to do what otherwise it seems impossible for most of us. So simpletons like myself, I cannot at all. And I always marvel at them. For others, it was like, well, there are other ways of organizing material. And so in a conversation with Ginsburg, with Allen Ginsburg, I think the meter is one
00:20:56
Speaker
way that rhythm could be horizontal. I think that the other would be the breath-based poetics of people like Ginsburg or like Charles Olsen, this idea that the line is fit to the bios of the breathing of living body, that Jordan wanted to do something different. I'm just going to quote her a little bit selectively. Yeah, please. And what she describes is
00:21:24
Speaker
She writes or says and is transcribed whenever anybody, particularly myself, got into a particular kind of momentum in a poem that seemed to me a pretty good bet that you wouldn't lose your audience. And I started to think about this a bit and concentrate, and I self-consciously finally identified what it was. And it was what I call vertical rhythm, which is what I referred to before. This is a long conversation in Ginsburg's classroom.
00:21:53
Speaker
And the first poem, she trails off, and she talks about the first poem that she applied this to that helped her to come up with the concept. And my hunch we were talking earlier is that this poem might well have been that poem. I'm going to quote her a little bit more.
00:22:15
Speaker
And what I really meant was not about jumping from one image to another, but rather a rhythmical momentum, that the spine structure of the poem is rhythmical. And so you choose your words and go
June Jordan's Vocabulary and Rhythm
00:22:32
Speaker
on so that if the reader of the poem, as well as the listeners to the poem, are both compelled from one line to the next, they have to keep going at a certain pace.
00:22:46
Speaker
It's remarkable that it's shifting the locus of poetic convention from the verbal image to the actual, what the words do as words. It's finding a new way of drawing out
00:23:05
Speaker
those features of words that are there, we need them in order to speak this language at all. And poetry has a way of turning those into things that we notice and then can think with. As relates to the larger project,
00:23:22
Speaker
What's interesting about Jordan in this poem is if the rhythm is related to the speech of, let's just say, ordinary people, for want of a better term, the vocabulary is very much not. The vocabulary is very much what somebody like William Wordsworth would have stigmatized as a poetic vocabulary. I'm thinking of words like derogate,
00:23:48
Speaker
That's not what Wordsworth would have called a man speaking to men, right? It's not the language of rustic men plowing the field and then speaking and what Wordsworth would turn into a poem. So exacerbate. These are not words that are commonly used. And yet, in context, they work. They don't stand out, at least to my ear, as especially
00:24:17
Speaker
It's not like reading a Stevens poem or something where I feel I need to reach for my dictionary in order to really grasp everything that's going on. It's something that the rhythm of it alone, I'm going to lean into this harder than I really should, but it's almost as though the rhythm, the propulsion of the poem tells you what you need to know about what those words mean. Even if you're not sure of the dictionary definition.
00:24:45
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And in that sense, I mean, sorry, what comes to mind for me is probably a terrible example, because it's the opposite of so much of other things we've been talking about here. So I hope this isn't confusing. But I've always loved this idea that Robert Frost, of all people, explains where he refers to something called the sentence sound, right? And as he explains the sentence sound, he says that what he has in mind is
00:25:15
Speaker
the sound of sense without the words, and the example that he gives for where one can get this, and that always works so well when I explain this to students, I think, is that imagine you're listening to someone speaking, but you're listening to them through a closed door.
00:25:34
Speaker
And you can't quite hear what words they're saying, but you still have if you're a native speaker of the language maybe, or if you're sort of part of the same culture as the speaker is in.
00:25:48
Speaker
that you have some intuitive sense of what's going on, right? You sort of get the sense of it. You know, oh, that's a parent talking to a child, and the parent is angry with the child about something. Or, you know, that's two lovers talking to each other, something, right? That you get
00:26:08
Speaker
you get this kind of intuitive sense that has to do not with the semantic content of each word, but with the rhythmical arrangement of words. Now for Frost,
00:26:20
Speaker
The crucial kind of unit that he seemed to be interested in was the sentence, the kind of grammatical sentence.
Structure and Emotion in Jordan's Poem
00:26:29
Speaker
And in Frost's poetry so often, he's interested in sort of putting the organizing principle of sentences into a kind of
00:26:39
Speaker
dramatic tension with the demands of traditional, accentual, syllabic, iambic pentameter, let's say, right? And so he'd like to get those into a kind of uneasy relation with each other. In Jordan's case, in the case of this poem, this isn't a poem that seems to me, in any clear obvious sense, to be organized around the sentence.
00:27:07
Speaker
And it's also surely not, as you've noted, with maybe some interesting exceptions that we can come to, a poem where we really hear anything like a sensual syllabic verse. So this is my long way around of asking you the following question, Anthony.
00:27:27
Speaker
What are the organizing principles of this language? And by that, I mean to put it in maybe simpler terms is, okay, when I'm speaking a sentence, I know
00:27:38
Speaker
that whatever word comes out of my mouth next, the point of these words is to get to the full stop at the end of the sentence. There, I just did it, right? And so that's what's motivating the production of speech here. That's how I intuitively, I guess, know to produce one word after another. What is it that gets Jordan in a poem like this from one word to the next, if not the sentence?
00:28:09
Speaker
That's a great question. And I'm resisting the urge to recite Frost for contrast because I won't resist. Whose woods these are, I think I know. His house is in the village though. He'll not mind me stopping here to watch these woods fill up with snow. Frost, he tricks you into thinking it's not really a sentence because the rhyme draws your ear.
00:28:36
Speaker
And the content is, there's a kind of order to it. It begins and ends. He will not mind me stopping here to watch these words fill up with stuff. Shorten gives us something that's, I think appropriately less orderly. It recreates something like the experience of shock, of being shocked by something that's just happened.
00:29:03
Speaker
and of trying, scrambling to make sense of it. I think the very process of making sense is what organizes these words. So just looking at the first stanza. Yeah, let's get an example in front of us. Okay, go ahead.
00:29:24
Speaker
Honey, people, murder, mercy, USA, the milkman, turn to monsters, teach to kill, to violate, pull down, destroy, the weekly freedom, growing fruit from being born, America. What I hear is, first, that word honey is my first assumption, hearing that, using the frost example of hearing things through a door,
00:29:50
Speaker
Honey is so commonly used among working-class women and among African-American women. This is a term of address and men for younger people, for strangers that you want to show some care or affection to. So we immediately start with this kind of disjuncture because this is not a poem that's about showing anyone tenderness, mercy, or welcoming them.
00:30:16
Speaker
even if it's in the case of the waitress welcoming them so they can hurry up and get out. I love it. Yeah, I love it. Right. But so the idea is with the first word of the poem, honey, might make you think that you're being, as a reader, tenderly addressed or that the poet is tenderly addressing, I don't know, given the title of the poem, maybe Martin Luther King, Jr., that she's calling him honey.
00:30:43
Speaker
But then that's not what happens as we get to the second and third and fourth and so on words of the poem. So what I would say exactly, that's exactly so. What happens instead is two things and we're being asked on the page to read in multiple registers with attention to words across different lines. So the first word honey of the first line
00:31:10
Speaker
anticipates the second word of the second line, milkland, which then becomes, we can recompose into the land of milk and honey, biblical Goshen, which many people thought that the United States would be. But because there's no punctuation, we're still able to say, I want a comma of a dress after honey. And it's not a dressing cane. It's telling whoever honey is, people murder. There's an interjection, mercy.
00:31:40
Speaker
USA. This kind of pause to both the idiomatic, the vernacular Lord have mercy with something as terrible as happened. Mercy USA is this kind of look at this. It is exactly what we already thought it was. So then the milk lint
00:32:00
Speaker
Following the USA is ironic. It's overturning the USA, the milkman, which is, of course, not the land of milk and honey. It's something else. People murder. People turn to monsters. People teach to kill. I'm just going down the poem and saying there's a kind of logic here of
00:32:23
Speaker
Silexis, probably I should say it's a zoigma, the thing where you yoke different verbs to one noun. So the controlling noun, I think, if we accept that honey is the person being addressed and not grammatically working, then people do all of these things. People murder, people turn to monsters, people teach to kill, teach to violate, teach to pull down, teach to destroy.
00:32:49
Speaker
What do they teach to destroy? The weekly, and with an A, the weekly freedom, growing fruit from being born. Something is off there. It creates again a sense of heightened emotion. Teach to destroy the weekly
00:33:08
Speaker
weekly freedom-growing fruit from being born, to kill it before it's born. If this poem ends from 68, it's too early to, it anticipates about Marley's, I Shot the Sheriff. Every time I plant a seed, he says, kill it before it grows. And then we land on, this all turns out to be a kind of definition, America.
00:33:33
Speaker
So that's what's happening or one way to take what's happening here. I don't want to reduce it just to that right that we're getting a kind of definition of America that is
00:33:41
Speaker
delivered in a kind of surprising and shocking way, maybe, but also tied to the occasion of King's murder. Now, I'm sensitive to what you said at the outset of our conversation of not reducing King to certain of his most well-known sound bites and so on as so often happens on the day.
00:34:06
Speaker
And I'm also conscious of the fact that I'm talking to someone whose first book was called Freedom Time, right? For whom the word freedom is important in thinking about poetry. I found a quotation from Jordan that I found quite moving and that
00:34:27
Speaker
Well, let me read it and ask you just to think a little bit with us about what the idea of freedom or being free might have meant to Jordan in the context of this poem, or as she thought about
00:34:45
Speaker
Martin Luther King, of course, who in his most famous speech sort of ends on that note, sort of thinking about, you know, free at last, free at last. OK, so here's what Jordan says, quote, I think that I am trying to keep myself free. That I am trying to become responsive and responsible to every aspect of my human being.
00:35:13
Speaker
I think that I am trying to keep myself free, that I am trying to become responsive and responsible to every aspect of my human being. So what would it, the weekly freedom growing fruit, right? What does, this is a big question, I guess, as I'm asking it, what does freedom mean in the context of this poem or to the poet speaking these lines, Anthony?
00:35:45
Speaker
I think if I straighten out, in scare quotes, straighten out the syntax, there's a couple of things are happening. So when I say that, and I would be to say, destroy the weekly growing fruit colon or something, freedom, or M dash freedom, M dash from being born. That is the people
00:36:11
Speaker
kill and destroy in order to prevent freedom.
00:36:16
Speaker
overturning one of our cherished national myths as citizens of the United States, which is that this is the land of freedom.
Exploring Freedom in the Poem's Context
00:36:25
Speaker
And it's drawing our attention to ask, and as in that sense of freedom that you just gave to us from Jordan to be as something that you have to be responsive to and responsible to. Now, what are you responsible to? Your whole human being. Just in the context of
00:36:47
Speaker
the pandemic, which is happening now. There's a way that freedom became reduced to
00:36:56
Speaker
I'll do what I want. No one can tell me what to do. Is that being responsive and responsible to a whole human being? Or is it kind of artificially cordoning off one part of my human activity from other things that I might be responsive and responsible to, including fundamentally my relationship to other people?
00:37:19
Speaker
So I think in this poem, if, again, we assume that the first word honey is a word of address and that somebody is being given a warning, there is like an older person, an elder, or just somebody who's
00:37:37
Speaker
more knowledgeable than the other, saying, this is what happens here. Then it's saying the freedom that we really care about will be destroyed. And that act of destruction will then be called freedom. That even the thing they call freedom, we don't have because people destroy it. And substantive, true freedom will not be allowed to grow.
00:38:02
Speaker
Yeah. And then within the context of the poem, and I guess by that I mean in this case, like imagining Jordan reading the poem as we just heard her do, or any reader who takes on the words and says them to themselves aloud or even silently but as though aloud,
00:38:27
Speaker
keeping in mind what you were saying earlier about Jordan wanting or feeling constrained and not in a productive or interesting way by traditional English meter. We talk about free verse, quote unquote. Is there freedom to be had in the poem?
00:38:54
Speaker
In other words, is the speaker of the poem experiencing freedom in the sense of being responsive and responsible to every aspect of their human being? I think only in that final stanza.
00:39:14
Speaker
in the very final stance of the poem. The final stance of the poem. Is there, I think, a hint of something like the freedom, if I'm right, if I understand Jordan correctly, and being responsive and responsible to my whole human being, is something that, like poetry, happens with and among others?
00:39:38
Speaker
Then that line, we share an afternoon of mourning in between no next predictable. That moment of both mourning and of possibility where what happens next is unknown is a moment where freedom can again be imagined, thought conceived after King.
00:40:05
Speaker
And it brings us all the way back in a way to an occasion being the organizing thing that sort of organizes that collectivity, which some might think.
00:40:20
Speaker
a collectivity feels threatening to one's capacity for freedom. But in your view, sort of describing what you take to be Jordan's view, it's only in collectivities that one can experience freedom. Before we get to the end of the poem, Anthony, I want to ask you to help me think about just the structure of the poem from a slightly more elevated position than like a line by line.
00:40:49
Speaker
Exegesis, so I noticed, and I think I've got this right, I hope I've got it right, that when Jordan read the poem, she did not call out in any kind of highlighted way the fact that on the page, the poem is numbered in sections one and two. I don't think she read those numbered sections or indicated them in any way other than maybe with a pause or something.
00:41:15
Speaker
But there is, on the page anyway, there is a section one for the poem which begins with the word honey and ends with what, at a glance, is probably the most conspicuous visually moment in the poem, the all-caps word stop that comes at the end of the first section.
00:41:39
Speaker
And then there is a somewhat shorter second section that concludes the poem. Anthony, as you look at the poem as a whole, sort of scan your eyes over the extent of it, is there some easy or articulable way of describing the meaning of that structure?
Analyzing the Poem's Dual Structure
00:42:06
Speaker
you know, what is the relation of part one of this poem to part two of this poem? Or maybe another way to ask you to think about that would be to say, what does that all-caps stop doing at the end of section one, and how does section two begin again? You know, so what do you think about structure here?
00:42:32
Speaker
It seems to me that the first section of the poem, it affects something like immediacy.
00:42:45
Speaker
I mean, the poem is artifice, the poem is reflection. I'm not saying that Jordan just wrote down what she was thinking as she was thinking it, but the effect of the first part to me is a kind of immediacy right down to that address. So that, and even if it's not, even if the first line is not read as address, the springtime terrorizing death by men by more than you or I can stop and stop as in all caps.
00:43:15
Speaker
there is this sense that that idea has run out. It started one thought that this is what's happening and it's going to keep happening. And the language of it is something that is raw, that the rhythm of the lines, the repetition, the use of alliteration, especially of M's and D's, of near repetition, onward, outward, that there's a very much something headlong
00:43:46
Speaker
The, and there's one, there are two lines as I read it of iambic pentameter, or yeah, two iambic pentameter lines. One is the third line of section one, to kill, to violate, pulled down, destroy, which is maybe in, what was Frost's term, loose iams? Yeah, all right. He said there's two kinds of English verse, strict iambic and loose iambic. That's right.
00:44:16
Speaker
What a jerk. But then the second poem is the second section rather of the poem is that moment as if one has taken a breath and like the the order implied by that by an isolated line of dynamic pentameter doesn't hold in the first section. The second is a later moment. It's the moment of mourning
00:44:43
Speaker
Yeah, give it to us. They sleep who know. Sorry? Sorry, I just said, yeah, please read that line for us. They sleep who know a regulated place. 10 syllables, stress at the end, without scanning the rest, that's iambic. Yeah, that's pretty iambic. Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. Yeah. But it's they sleep who know a regulated pace. So there's still a kind of distancing. Who are those they, Anthony?
00:45:13
Speaker
I think it's the same day as the people who murder in the opening stanza. And it strikes me that, you know, interesting to get what does really feel like a line of iambic pentameter in a poem that is for the most part not in any kind of meter like that,
00:45:41
Speaker
that in that line we get the description of a quote-unquote regulated place. In other words, there's something almost kind of mimetic happening in the rhythm of the poem at that place. It's as though what's being described
00:45:59
Speaker
is like some kind of narcotic or well-behaved state in which one just gives in to the rhythms that one has inherited rather than breaks free of them or something like this.
Narrative of 'They' vs. 'We' in the Poem
00:46:18
Speaker
Yeah, they sleep who know a regulated place or pulse or tide or changing sky.
00:46:27
Speaker
Yeah. Say more about that they. I feel like I cut you off a moment ago and you were going to share another thought about who you thought that they was. Well, it's possible that it's the people who murder, but it's also in that
00:46:49
Speaker
there's something particularly I dare say poetic or at least literary about it that the day is really anyone. So because what this is doing to be a little bit technical about it
00:47:04
Speaker
It's almost Miltonic that is like John Milton. It's switching around the order of the words in a way that's subconsciously poetic. The way that one would ordinarily express the sentiment, I think, might be
00:47:23
Speaker
If you know a regulated place or in order to perceive this as a regulated place, you must be asleep. They sleep who know a regulated place or pulse or tide or changing sky. That idea of order is a construct that is itself narcotic.
00:47:42
Speaker
And in that way, it's the perfect counter. It anticipates what would happen. The neoconservative reclamation of King away from the King who warned about the triple evils of racism, militarism, and poverty and into whatever he has become for too many people.
00:48:04
Speaker
I have to remember this is being recorded, and there's an anecdote that I can't share about how I've heard King being deployed, but beware of those who come bearing quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. is what I will say. Well, listen, I mean, I've heard people cite Martin Luther King Jr.'s words in their arguments for why we shouldn't have affirmative actions, right? So people do all kinds of perverse things.
00:48:31
Speaker
to bring it back to the poem for a minute, it sounds to me as you've just described it, like now I'm really getting a kind of contrast between, so again, for people who aren't looking at the poem, section two of the poem begins with that line, they sleep who know a regulated place. And that section of the poem is itself divided into two stanzas, or maybe that's not the right word, but little verse paragraphs.
00:48:59
Speaker
the second of those two sections, of those two stanzas or verse paragraphs within the second half of this poem begins with this line. We share an afternoon of mourning. So, you know, what I'm thinking, and I try to accentuate it as I just, no pun intended, as I just spoke the line right now that
00:49:23
Speaker
They do this, but we do that. You know, we do something else. Really creating a kind of distinction that's being drawn between people who are able to sleep and people who share an afternoon of morning. And yeah, you tell us about that second line, Anthony, that we share an afternoon of morning. It's awake.
00:49:50
Speaker
I mean, there's a kind of implied pun. As you're talking about it, I think that's exactly right.
Collective Mourning and the Potential for Change
00:49:57
Speaker
The first stanza of the second section describes this thing, who know a regulated place, who believe that the pulse times changing skies move according to some universal stage direction. This is in fact, I mean, it's a kind of
00:50:16
Speaker
it's in conversation with one of people's other favorite lines from Martin Luther King Jr., which is that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. And there's a way that one can hear that and believe that it's going to bend on its own, which couldn't be further from what King himself stood for and gave his life for. So there's this kind
00:50:43
Speaker
inevitable. The white moderates that King called out in the letter from a burning camp chair who believed just go slow, it'll all work out over time. That's sleep.
00:50:53
Speaker
But then that kind of immediacy, the pun of, we share an afternoon of mourning, that is, we wake, we hold awake. And just worth saying again for people who aren't looking, and Anthony's referring to this as a pun, but it may not be audible to you if you're not looking at the text, the word mourning at the end of that first line of the second stanza of the second section of the poem, that word mourning, and we share an afternoon of mourning.
00:51:20
Speaker
morning there is with the you, right? So this is a reference to, presumably, at least in the first place, to the grief, the collective grief upon the assassination of King or whatever other kind of event you want to insert in its place. But of course, yeah, there is a kind of pun there on morning without the you that is morning is the time of waking.
00:51:44
Speaker
Which, I think, is necessary for that second line in between no next predictable, that sense of grief mourning with you, but also with something new is dawning, but what's going to come next is entirely unknowable.
00:52:08
Speaker
freedom almost in that existential sense of we're just here in this void without guarantees. There's nothing that seems inevitable. Yeah.
Reflections on MLK's Assassination and Ongoing Social Injustices
00:52:21
Speaker
I wonder as we near a conclusion to this conversation, Anthony, you just referred to
00:52:33
Speaker
Well, you just called our attention to Jordan's reference to no next predictable, right? This sort of chaotic or not scripted imagining of futurity
00:52:55
Speaker
I wonder if you can give us some way to think about the very last lines of the poem, because if I were to read on from there, she says, in between no next predictable, except for wild reversal, hearse rehearsal, bleach the black long lunging, ritual of fright, insanity, and more, deplorable abortion, more and more.
00:53:25
Speaker
Those are very hard lines for me to follow and aware, to make sense of. And maybe I'm interested in the way they sound. And it's clear to me that there's some kind of play on words and sounds happening, for instance, in that phrase, reversal, hearse, rehearsal.
00:53:50
Speaker
There's some interesting play happening on the oar sound in a deplorable abortion more and more. What else do you think about as you hear the final lines of this poem, Anthony? I think here it's helpful to de-exceptionalize King and to put him back in the context of the 1960s and of what once upon a time was called the Black Freedom Movement.
00:54:20
Speaker
And there, think about just the many deaths that happened. One reason that cities blew up in 1968 after King's assassination is that before his assassination had been Medgar Evers' assassination, had been Malcolm X's assassination, had been the murders of many civil rights workers and maimings, beatings on national television. And just the sense that, look,
00:54:49
Speaker
King, who was despised in his time despite what people would have you believe now, seemed like kind of the last hope, I think, for many people. And so the only next predictable is, while reversal, the kind of turning back of the so-called gains of the 60s,
00:55:12
Speaker
hearse, that is the more funerals, more rehearsals, this kind of the sense of going through the emotions without a kind of clear sense of where this was all going to end up. So from there, just to skip down to those lines that you asked about, I think that this is still in that the only other thing that's predictable
00:55:41
Speaker
the ritual of fright, insanity, and more deplorable abortion. Abortion, I think, there isn't referring to, I mean, abortions in the sense of terminating pregnancy had been happening. But I think that the reference there is calling back the word stop and is calling back the stop specifically in the sense of
00:56:08
Speaker
That feeling that what had been happening with the civil rights movement was being prematurely ended It reminds me of the Destroying the weekly freedom growing fruit right that kind of idea to go all the way back to the beginning. Yeah Yes, I think that there's no way to stop it, but there's no way to stop this
00:56:34
Speaker
artificial ending from happening. That in other words, at the end of the first section, we talked about those lines, death by men by more than you or I can stop. Those men, the ones destroying the weakly growing freedom are going to keep doing that. And therefore, there will be more deplorable abortion more and more.
00:57:00
Speaker
that there's just going to be this pattern of how does Stevie Wonder put it? You killed all our leaders. This is from the song, Big Brother. I think that that's what Jordan is evoking, and it's really a, it's a memorial. It's very much a poem of grief.
00:57:23
Speaker
and a poem of grief without the consolation of mourning. It's not the consolation of, yes, but a brighter day is dawning. Yes, but we'll have our freedom nonetheless. It refuses that kind of gesture of optimism that I think most of us would, without thinking much about it, turn to. Someone is suffering. Oh, you'll feel better in time. Oh, don't worry.
00:57:53
Speaker
This is just saying, nope, it's just going to get, keep being this bad. And there's nothing we can do about it, but share afternoons of mourning with one another.
00:58:03
Speaker
Well, that's a beautiful place, I think, for us to draw to a conclusion, Anthony, except that it occurs to me we've heard the poem once in June Jordan's voice. And I wonder if you wouldn't mind closing us out today by reading the poem one more time in your own voice. I'd be happy to. In memoriam, Martin Luther King, Jr.
00:58:33
Speaker
Honey, people, murder, mercy, USA, the milkman, turned to monsters, teach to kill, to violate, pull down, destroy, the weekly freedom-growing fruit from being born. America. Tomorrow, yesterday, rip, rape, exacerbate, despoil, disfigure, crazy, running, threat, the deadly thrall, appalled, belief, dispel, the wildlife burn, the breast, the onward tongue,
00:59:01
Speaker
the outward hand, the form, the normal ranting riot, sunshine, shelter, wreck of darkness, derogate, delimit, blank, explode, deprive, assassinate, and batten up like bullets, fatten up, the raving green, reactivate, a springtime, terrorizing, death by men, by more than you or I can stop. Two.
00:59:26
Speaker
They sleep who know a regulated place, or pulse, or tire, changing sky, according to some universal stage direction, obvious like shore-washed shells. We share an afternoon of mourning in between no next predictable except for wild reversal, hearse, rehearsal, bleach, the black long lunging, ritual of fright, insanity, and more deplorable abortion, more and more.
00:59:57
Speaker
Well, Anthony Reed, thank you very much. It was my pleasure genuinely to share this afternoon of mourning with you. And I want to thank you for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me and for talking about poetry with me. What could be better than that? All right. Thanks, everyone. More soon. Bye now.