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Walt Hunter on Gwendolyn Brooks ("kitchenette building")
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What a delight this was, to talk to my friend Walt Hunter about the marvelous Gwendolyn Brooks poem "kitchenette building."
Walt is an associate professor and the Chair of the Department of English at Case Western Reserve University. He is the author of two books of criticism: Forms of a World: Contemporary Poetry and the Making of Globalization (Fordham UP, 2019) and The American House Poem, 1945 - 2021 (Oxford UP, forthcoming in 2023). He is also the author of a book of poems, Some Flowers (Mad Hat Press, 2022), and the translator, with Lindsay Turner, of Frédéric Neyrat's Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism (Fordham UP, 2017). He edits poetry for The Atlantic, where he is also a frequent contributor, and has published in such journals as New Literary History, American Literary History, Essays in Criticism, Modern Philology, and ASAP/Journal.
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello,
Introduction to the Podcast and Guest
00:00:01
Speaker
everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Comron Javidizadeh.
00:00:06
Speaker
And it is my sincere pleasure to have my friend Walt Hunter on the podcast today. Walt is joining us from Cleveland, and he's here to talk today about the great poem Gwendolyn Brooks and her poem, Kitchenette Building. As ever, you can find a link to the text of the poem. If you'd like to read along as we talk about it, you can find a link to the text of the poem.
00:00:34
Speaker
in the episode notes. Gwendolyn Brooks is a poet who has come up on this podcast before, though we haven't had a whole episode dedicated to her.
Walt Hunter's Background and Works
00:00:44
Speaker
You might remember that when I talked to Chris Spade, we talked about the Terrence Hayes poem.
00:00:51
Speaker
The Golden Shovel, which is a kind of an elaborate riff on the much beloved and anthologized Brooks poem, We Real Cool. So you've even heard Gwendolyn Brooks's voice on this podcast before, if you've been listening all along. But now we get a whole episode dedicated to Brooks, and I'm so excited about it, and I'm so excited to have Walt on to do the honors.
00:01:19
Speaker
Let me tell you a little bit about Walt Hunter before we turn to the poem. So Walt is an associate professor and chair of the Department of English at Case Western Reserve University.
00:01:32
Speaker
And he's the author of two books of criticism. So his first book was called Forms of a World, Contemporary Poetry and the Making of Globalization. And that was published by Fordham University Press in 2019. And Walt's second book of criticism, which is due out this year from Oxford University Press, is called The American House Poem.
00:02:01
Speaker
1945 to 2021. And though I don't know this for a fact, I didn't ask Walt about it ahead of time. I wonder if his choice of poem for today is related to that project. And maybe we'll get a preview of some of the kind of thinking on display in that book in our conversation today, because this is, among other things, an American House poem.
00:02:23
Speaker
from 1945 to 2021. So it's much closer to the front end of that historical period than the back end. Walt is also the author of a book of poems, a book called Some Flowers. So our guest today, he's a scholar of poetry, a poetry critic, an essayist, and a poet himself. His book of poems is called Some Flowers. That was published by Mad Hat
00:02:53
Speaker
in 2022, and it's a beautiful book. I'm gonna embarrass Walt in a minute by reading from it briefly, but Walt is also,
00:03:05
Speaker
A translator, a translator with Lindsay Turner, his wife, and a previous guest on close reading. So if you've been listening all along, you may remember Lindsay came on the podcast to talk about the Elizabeth Bishop poem, The Shampoo, in an early episode of the podcast. And I don't play favorites, but a favorite of mine. I mean, Bishop is a favorite of mine, and so is Lindsay.
00:03:33
Speaker
The two of them together translated Frederic Nerat's Etopias, Manifesto for Radical Existentialism. That was also published by Fordham, but in 2017. In addition to all of that, Walt edits poetry for the Atlantic.
00:03:51
Speaker
And you can also read some of his essays in the Atlantic. Buddy's the author of several academic refereed articles as well.
Hunter's Dual Role as Poet and Critic
00:04:03
Speaker
They've appeared in journals like New Literary History, American Literary History, Essays in Criticism, Modern Philology, and the ASAP Journal.
00:04:14
Speaker
So we have a really accomplished, thoughtful, and talented guest on the podcast today, and I'm so excited about it. You know, Walt is one of those people, this is true as often as not, especially when it comes, I've found to critics and scholars of modern and contemporary poetry,
00:04:41
Speaker
that he's a poet and a critic. That's something one finds often in the scholarly field. Those two sides of Walt's writing life are, in my way of reading, always both present. Whichever mode he's working in, you can sort of detect the ghost and the presence of the other Walt Hunter. And it makes him
00:05:10
Speaker
a kind of essayist that you can trust and that writes with an ear for beauty. And it makes him a poet who has read a lot of poetry and is thinking about it and is haunted by it, bothered by it, inspired by it in his own poems. I mean, I could pick any number of examples to cite,
00:05:38
Speaker
But I'm just going to exercise some recency bias, I guess, and say how much I enjoyed Walt's recent essay in The Atlantic on, of all things, chat GPT and its difficulty or inability in Walt's view in writing poetry.
00:05:59
Speaker
And I want to read just a very brief passage from the end of that essay, because I think it'll give you an idea of the kind of thinking that's on display in Walt's writing. So here he is towards the end of this essay in which he's experimented with chat GPT, asking it to write a poem in the style of Seamus Heaney, which it failed to do.
00:06:25
Speaker
And out of that, Walt develops a kind of account of what it is that chat GPT is missing.
00:06:31
Speaker
But ultimately, I think the value of this piece, and I'll link to it so you can all read it, I think the value of this piece is not what it's telling us about chat GPT, but what it's telling us about poetry and about human beings. So this now is Walt, quote, whatever upgrades might come for chat GPT, what it writes likely won't emerge from the burning sense that something is missing from the world. Poetry speaks in the words of the dead.
00:07:02
Speaker
Words sometimes borrowed from past poems, but the desire to use those words comes from an intuition that something is still hidden in them, something that needs to be heard in the harmony between our present voices and those earlier ones.
00:07:21
Speaker
I think that's beautiful and profound. I think it is elegantly stated. And I found myself thinking of many poets when I read it. One of the poets I found myself thinking of was Walt Hunter. So let me now read you a
00:07:39
Speaker
A poem from Walt's new book. I get to still call it new. A book that came out last year. Again, the book is called Some Flowers. The poem is called The Backward Spring. It's one of many poems in the book I love. This is Walt, The Backward Spring. You try to like the sea because we say it moves like love moves. So strange, the clouds around the moon. Then you try to like the mountain.
00:08:10
Speaker
tearing into the moonlight when the day is gone. Like that kid in the Claire poem, bringing summer to the bored faces of the angels, dropping things behind them in the rain. We can't begin again. I wish I knew what I knew now. Breathless, dimensionless, limited on the macadam in sunlight.
00:08:35
Speaker
It wasn't sweeter when it ended. It wasn't anything when it began. Well, I mean, we could spend the next hour talking about this poem, but let me just say a word or two about it now, which is it has one of those qualities that I most admire in poetry, a kind of ear for idiom.
00:08:58
Speaker
for the way we all talk to each other beautifully often in just daily conversation. But it's as though that idiom has passed through a kind of lens where it suddenly becomes sort of strange off. I mean, an example might be, for instance, I wish I knew what I knew now rather than they expected. I wish I knew what I know now. That play with tenses
00:09:25
Speaker
is a subtle and kind of jarring change that helps you see things differently. The backward spring as a title might call to mind a gymnastics move or a stream running in reverse.
00:09:49
Speaker
And I think in both of those possibilities, we have a kind of implied account of where poetry might come from. And it's consistent with that piece that Walt wrote for the Atlantic on chat GPT and poetry. That is that there is something that the poet does with the language that they inherit and that they make new in their own hands.
Introduction to Brooks' Kitchenette Building
00:10:18
Speaker
And so I'm excited to get to talk to Walt for the next hour and to talk to him about Gwendolyn Brooks. Walt Hunter, welcome to Close Readings. How are you doing today? Oh gosh, that's a lot better. That lovely introduction. Thanks, Cameron. It's great to see you. I miss seeing you and I'm glad we can do this. Thanks for inviting me.
00:10:39
Speaker
Well, it's my pleasure to have you on, as I said. So, you know, you and I traded a few messages in trying to get you onto the podcast.
00:10:52
Speaker
So I guess I saw you, our listeners couldn't see it happening. And I don't remember you saying anything when I intimated that this poem might have a role to play in your book. I take it that it does. And presumably that is at least part of what went into your thinking in choosing it for the episode. So again, for people who don't remember, don't know,
00:11:15
Speaker
I'm not assigning the poem to the guest. I'm inviting the guest and they're choosing a poem. Maybe say a word about what led you to make this choice. Sure. The poem is the second poem in Street in Bronzeville, Brooks' first book. I chose the poem because of its relation to the sonnet, which we can talk about, but also because of the dynamism in the language of the poem. I thought it would be a good choice for
00:11:44
Speaker
podcast because really one of the protagonists in the poem is the sound of the poem as it developed. And that seems like a bit of an obscure way of putting it but I think it would be exciting if at some point one of things we could do in our conversation would be to look at the way the poem poses kind of contest between more
00:12:13
Speaker
traditionally poetic language and language that Brooks connects to the topic of the poem, the kitchenette. The kitchenette being, you know, just for those who are unfamiliar with the space of the kitchen. Yeah, good. We should define what that means, what that term means. Kitchenette building. An apartment carved into multiple apartments where five or six or seven families live often without a shared bathroom.
00:12:39
Speaker
which comes into play in the poem. Yes. And I know you're going to play the poem too. Yeah, right. These poems, these kitchenettes were originally marketed to Eastern European immigrants too and eventually then by the mid, by the early, mid 20th century to black families in cities like Chicago. Right. Richard Wright has a famous chapter in The Kitchenette and 12 Million Black Voices, which is more in the style of
00:13:09
Speaker
Photo photo realism and then Brooks Brooks's version of course is a dramatic More dramatic version with speaking voices in it. So yeah, and you know, so so common the poem I chose for those reasons the sound the dynamic movement And the relation between the poem and its material Circumstances to where people live and how they make poetry out of where they live. Yeah, that's that's one of the themes of the poem for sure
00:13:38
Speaker
Right. So poetry coming not just out of, I mean, as I was saying in my intro of you, poetry coming not just out of the poet's sort of sense of all the poems they've read up to that point, but also the noises they hear down the hallway and upstairs and downstairs and in their non-poetic lives, as it were.
00:13:58
Speaker
Right, exactly. Yeah, that's exactly right. And all of that comes into this poem and is quite palpable. Walt, do you remember when you first read Gwendolyn Brooks and sort of how she came to play a role in your love of poetry or your way of thinking about poetry? Like many people, I came to her through that poem, We Real Cool, but
00:14:24
Speaker
But later on, a street in Bronzeville and Annie Allen became fixtures for me. However, until I was writing this book, I hadn't carefully read later poems like in the Mecca, which I think is a brilliant masterpiece. Also about an apartment building. Yeah, that's right. And then, you know, somewhere in between those years. And so I think I discovered here in middle school in a classroom, honestly, and then
00:14:49
Speaker
you know, reading through blacks, the collection of her work, I think is a, for somebody who is interested in exploring American poetry of the 20th century, it is just a fabulous introduction. I think you know, you could do much worse than just picking up a copy of blacks, if you're thinking, hey, I really want to get into poetry, American poetry. I think that she doesn't quite get the kind of
00:15:15
Speaker
top billing sometimes that other poets like Plath or Lowell or even Bishop get. But I think, you know, I think there's just marvelous discoveries to be made in this book, even for people who are pretty well versed with her work. Maud Martha is in this book too, of course, the novel, which is a beautiful masterpiece. So yeah, that was a long answer to your question. I believe in middle school. And then later on, I've even found her later work more recently, I think.
00:15:44
Speaker
Right, right. Okay, good. So, yeah, let's listen to a recording of Gwendolyn Brooks reading the poem.
00:15:59
Speaker
Walt, did you say, or am I just, am I remembering something I read that this book is, sorry, the poem is the second poem in the book, A Street in Bronzeville. And is there anything, you know, like I said, I will link to, I think probably to the Poetry Foundation's version of the poem so that people can see the text.
00:16:28
Speaker
But not everybody is going to be able to do that. Is there anything you would want people to know? I mean, they might be driving or whatever, right? So is there anything people should have in mind about what the poem looks like, Walt, on the page before we listen to it? Basic schema here would be four stanzas. And then Brooks has three lines in the first stanza, four in the second stanza, and then three lines in each of the final two stanzas. So it's not going to be one uninterrupted stanza if you're
00:16:58
Speaker
if you're listening along, you'll hear the rhymes that will clue you into the line endings. And you can try to imagine, even if you're driving along, you can try to imagine it split up in basically those proportions.
00:17:13
Speaker
And I think it's true that the rhymes will, in each case, like, bookend the stanzas. So when you hear a rhyme, it's as though you'll know a stanza. You've reached the end of a stanza, and the next one is beginning.
00:17:32
Speaker
Good. All right. Well, let's listen to Brooks Reed. And this recording is also available on the Poetry Foundation's website. So if you want to listen to it again and not be bothered by me and Walt, you can also do that at your leisure. So here's Gwendolyn Brooks.
00:17:56
Speaker
This is Gwendolyn Brooks, January 19th, 1961, reading from my own poems. From a street in Bronzeville, kitchenette building. We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan. Grayed in and gray.
00:18:16
Speaker
Dream makes a giddy sound, not strong, like rent, feeding a wife, satisfying a man. But could a dream send up through onion fumes, its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes and yesterday's garbage ripening in the hall, flutter or sing an aria down these rooms? Even if we were willing to let it in, had time to warm it, keep it very clean, anticipate a message, let it begin.
00:18:45
Speaker
We wonder, but not well, not for a minute. Since
Language and Social Context in Brooks' Work
00:18:49
Speaker
number five is out of the bathroom now, we think of lukewarm water. Hope to get in it." So that's Gwendolyn Brooks reading Kitchenette Building from a street in Bronzeville.
00:19:06
Speaker
A Street in Bronzeville, Walt, published in 45. Have I got that right? That's right. So this recording is somewhat later. She makes this recording somewhat later. Maybe that's interesting to note. Maybe not. Walt, when you listen to Brooks read, what do you find yourself noticing in her voice? I was struck by the last phrase and the characteristic
00:19:37
Speaker
Brooke's inflection that she gives to it. I couldn't imitate it myself, but there's something that snaps at the end of it. That's a nice word for it. In a light way, in her reading of it, you almost... We should talk at some point, perhaps, about the content of the poem. So my characterizing it as light makes sense, but there's something that...
00:20:05
Speaker
She closes off the poem with, I don't know, you almost tempted to say something like a whimsical.
00:20:16
Speaker
There's a whimsical conclusiveness to it. I'm not sure how else to put it. Well, I think that's well put. And yeah, of course we will. We will get into the content of the poem. But I take it that what you're suggesting is that there is something sort of unlikely, maybe, or
00:20:36
Speaker
not what a person would would immediately expect having only read it on the page about a kind of lightness of tone or and I like that word you use a sort of stamp at the end or something. Yeah. Yeah. I think the question that the poem poses is what type of poetry is appropriate? What type of sound of poetry is appropriate for a poem? She says dream dream in quotation marks and text. Dream makes a yiddy sound, not strong.
00:21:05
Speaker
And then her examples of a strong sound are rent, feeding a wife, satisfying a man. That's all in the first stanza which lays out the problem that the poem is going to explore. And that problem is a very old, you know, it calls back a very old subgenre of poetry, which is the singing contest in a way. There's a sense that there are these two voices or two ways of casting the sound in the poem and there are
00:21:33
Speaker
at odds with each other. One is the dream or the other example she gives is an aria or
00:21:40
Speaker
you know, a song. And then the other is onion fumes, fried potatoes, garbage ripening. You know, these words that she says have a strong sound. So the giddy and the strong are, you know, not the raw and the cooked, but the giddy and the strong are the two options here. Or not two options, because when the poem dallies with the idea that maybe there could be an aria made out of, yeah,
00:22:09
Speaker
onion fumes and potatoes, it has to discard that idea because the bathroom has opened up and that's when she snaps the conclusion. Yeah. All right. Okay. So there's so much in what you just said, but for the benefit of our listener, I want to gloss one thing and then sort of pull on the string because to me it's so interesting. You said not the raw and the cooked.
00:22:32
Speaker
But what did you say? The giddy and the strong. So the raw and the cooked, Walt might be referring to a few different things, but my guess is that what he has first of all in mind is a famous split in poetry that Robert Lowell described
00:22:53
Speaker
as what confronting and implied that he was trying to resolve when he accepted the National Book Award in poetry in 1960 for his 1959 book, Life Studies. So what Lowell meant by raw was something like the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and Howell sort of be declaiming of poetry. And
00:23:18
Speaker
What Lowell meant by cooked was something like the poetry of Richard Wilbur, I think, the sort of tidy, well-behaved, elegantly rhyming, often poetry of mid-century, both of which left Lowell feeling disappointed, ultimately, and he was wanting to kind of
00:23:41
Speaker
find some middle path between those two poles. So the ones that you've identified in Brooks' ear here, they don't map neatly onto those two. But there's something. Sorry Walt, here's the question for you.
00:24:02
Speaker
When Lowell made that speech, readers can come to their own, might have their own ideas, and surely did, about which camp Lowell belonged to and which side of things life studies falls down on, ultimately, if it falls down on one or the other. But clearly, his ambition was to say, there are these two ways of writing, and I'm trying to do neither and both, or something.
00:24:26
Speaker
It wasn't sort of here are two sides of a debate and here's the one I prefer. It was here are two sides of a debate that don't leave where a third option is wanted. And is the form of that
00:24:40
Speaker
tension between the two poles, even if the poles don't map neatly onto Lowell's, in Brooks' ear, in this poem, is she wanting to kind of, while you choose the verb that makes the metaphor work for you, marry them together, reconcile them with each other, or, you know, avoid both? I don't know. It's a very interesting question, and I think if you were
00:25:07
Speaker
to step back and say one picture of 20th century American poetry is that in the 40s there's a reaction to modernism's breaking of the pentameter with a doubling down on a kind of formalist verse. And Lowell starts out that way and then finds his own way to incorporate a loose hermetrical design starting with life studies and moving up through especially history and notebook. If you were to replace some of that narrative with a different kind of narrative that says
00:25:38
Speaker
On the one hand, you have the strong language, which is the language associated with labor, care work, feminized housework in this poem, raising kids, living in conditions that are unprofitious for writing poetry. And then on the other hand, you have the giddiness of art. And I don't think giddiness should necessarily be read as bad here or as coded as totally pejorative in any way. I mean, giddiness as
00:26:05
Speaker
exciting, ecstatic, even, you know, in a, in a Bruxian way, maybe. And, and if you were to think about poetry as trying to find a marriage between
00:26:21
Speaker
the aesthetic and the material, instead of between the loosely formed or the broken and the whole or whatever, I already meant to put it. Then you get poetry that encompasses a lot of the poets that I think, Cameron, you and I both love, including people like later, like Bernadette Mayer or Alice Notley, or people who do write about the strong in Brooks's sense that, you know,
00:26:44
Speaker
the rent, the onion foods, the fried potatoes. And Brooks is writing at this moment when, you know, I think she anticipates some of the struggles that later poets will try to, you know, will try to undertake, will find themselves having to undertake, which is, hey, Audrey and Rich here, I'm raising three kids, I'm trying to write poetry, I must discover a new style that blends the giddy and the strong in some way, or that incorporates the two in a resonance.
00:27:12
Speaker
structure,
Collective Experiences in Brooks' Poetry
00:27:13
Speaker
something that moves back and forth between them. But okay, to return to your question, though, I think the poem, this particular poem, at least in terms of where it ends up, ends up on the side of the material conditions, because that's where it closes down. It says, I can't actually continue to write this poem because I need to right now get into the bath.
00:27:36
Speaker
But then you might say, well, wait a minute, but that's the end of a very accomplished poem that represents all the possibilities for what giddiness and sound can do. Yeah, sorry. That is certainly a totally convincing or plausible line of argument.
00:28:03
Speaker
A question one might interject is, well, when you say it ends up on the side of or whatever, what do you mean by ends up exactly? Is it the final line of the poem that has the last say? But because another thing I'd want to say, just sort of mirroring back to you something you pointed out to us a few minutes ago,
00:28:27
Speaker
is that though, as it were, and this distinction is always a kind of facile one to make, but though the content, as it were, of the final line seems to be drawn to the pull of the strong, as you put it, or the real, we might say. Yeah, exactly. The real is a great net of input. Though it does that, in hearing Brooks read the poem,
00:28:57
Speaker
her tone seemed to be pulling sort of like helium, like lifting the kind of ballast of that line up into the realm of the giddy. I think of, as you were describing what giddy meant, and I love that word for Brooks, I hope we don't overdo it here, but I think it's a great one. What that word means for Brooks, I was thinking of,
00:29:23
Speaker
you know, Marianne Moore's word gusto, that poetry should have gusto, but it should have, for Moore, humility, concentration, and gusto, right? I love that. I mean, I think there's something kind of maybe isomorphic between those divided impulses that we're seeing in the case of a few different poets here.
00:29:49
Speaker
Um, oh, well, this is, you know, go ahead. Stevens is love of the, you know, the playfulness of language. I think Brooks shares, shares a lot of that. And of course, yeah. Stevens is another poet of, you know, the angel of imagination and the angel of reality. Right. Right. Right. Exactly. So those mean maybe different things for Brooks, but okay. It was a very heady and interesting conversation. And I, I'm kind of tempted just to lean fully into the
00:30:15
Speaker
Poetics and the literary history kinds of angles that you've opened up for us But I'm also wanting now to back up and and move a little more carefully through the poem Maybe we could just begin with the first line and a half before we get to This sentence with the quotation marks and the sentence that introduces the work word giddy so the first sentence of the poem is
00:30:45
Speaker
We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan grayed in and gray. Well, talk to us about the first word of the poem, we. I was going to ask you about that, too. Yeah. Right. So this is very interesting. You know, the poem emerges out of silence with that. Yeah.
00:31:13
Speaker
first person plural pronoun. We are things of dry hours and involuntary plan. One thing to say at this moment would be that Brooks had come out of a period of writing some drama with a creative writing group in Chicago in the late 1930s. She had also
00:31:39
Speaker
developed her skills in the Chicago Defender at writing dramatic monologues, including one that was in the voice of an apartment house. These were published in a column called Lights and Shadows and the Defender in 1930, from 1935 to 1938 or beyond. 38 is when that old apartment house poem was published. And I actually begin my book with that poem from the Chicago Defender or a nod to it because what it shows, and this is
00:32:09
Speaker
why I think the we is important is that Brooks is invested in a street in Bronzeville with giving us vignettes of people living
00:32:20
Speaker
around her in Chicago. She is living in kitchenettes. She's living, she lives in multiple kitchenettes, including ones where she hosts big parties with 100 plus people and likes to use in these spaces. She and Henry, her husband lived in kitchenette sector right after they were married and subsequently from those kitchenette windows, she
00:32:44
Speaker
recounts how she got the material for these poems and for many of her poems by watching the street life. And so that we, as a plural pronoun here, it makes some sense, I think, if you think about both her interest in the collective street life developing around her, the social life. I mean, it's a poem that is set in a room, but it's a very socially oriented poem. She's not saying in a single voice,
00:33:14
Speaker
I am a thing of dry hours and voluntary plan. It would it would sound even. It would sound quite odd, I think, to have that, you know, to have it based in that lyric, I so-called. And in part, the other kinds of art that she mentions after that line, you know, an aria is sung by a single voice. Right. And this poem wants to say, can we sing an aria in this apartment, this kitchenette building?
00:33:44
Speaker
out of a week, out of a sense of- Can an aria be a chorus? Can an aria be a recitative or a chorus, right? Yeah, exactly, right. So yeah, no, that's right, a chorus. And it maintains that we too throughout to the end where it says we wonder. Yeah, sorry. Can I ask you to go back and just say a bit more? When you said it would sound quite odd to have
00:34:09
Speaker
the first person singular pronoun begin the poem in the eye, which, you know, again, right. So for people who aren't, you know, for whom this idea might not be at their fingertips, there is this kind of long tradition
00:34:28
Speaker
taken sort of interestingly historicized by many scholars of poetry, including people who've been on the podcast and all kinds of directions I could point you, but this long history of the I being the kind of privileged pronoun of lyric poetry, of sort of short, introspective,
00:34:54
Speaker
consciousness reenacting poems or something. So the we here, I think Walt and I are both sort of noticing as a real departure from that tradition or a kind of modification of it maybe. But Walt, say more about why you think it would have been odd had the poem begun in the singular.
00:35:16
Speaker
Yeah, this is just an intuition I had really come in as I was reading it and replacing that eye or substituting that eye into the poem. But I think the title clues us to a collective. I mean, it's a kitchenette building. It's not a kitchenette apartment. It's not a kitchenette room. She's writing from the perspective in a way of the building, which she does again within the mecca where she actually moves between all these different rooms in the building.
00:35:42
Speaker
Right. Well, if I could just add one thing, which just occurred to me when you said this about the title is that, you know, sorry. So if not consciously, not necessarily consciously or whatever, but just if as though by instinct or what feels intuitively right to her at the moment, she doesn't begin with an I, but instead begins, replaces it as it were with a we.
00:36:07
Speaker
And now I'm thinking about how the kitchenette building itself, in the history that you gave to us a moment ago of what the kitchenette building was, is like, have I got this right? Was once a large and single family dwelling, or a larger apartment, which was then subdivided artificially into smaller units.
00:36:35
Speaker
Yes, as far as I know, I mean, there might have been different ways of doing it, but that in part explains why the bathrooms are not
00:36:43
Speaker
you know, not en suite. Yeah, I guess I'm just noticing a kind of, I don't know if it's the same, or is it kind of symmetrical play on the kind of unitary and the collective or the divided in the structure itself, but also in the subjectivity that governs the poem, as it were, right?
00:37:10
Speaker
Yeah, that makes sense. OK, we, you've given us a lot to think about with the word we. Now, what about the word things? We are things of dry hours in the involuntary plan, grayed in and grayed. I don't know. What else are you hearing in that first sentence, which gets us to the middle of the second line? Yeah, I mean, things, if we press on it,
00:37:40
Speaker
I think opens up into a lot of questions that we could explore through the poem. One is the lack of freedom that involuntary also signals in the same line. We are I think if we read it very, if we push again, like I said, if we push hard on that word. So there is also the second thing I'd say is that there's
00:38:05
Speaker
There's a rhyme here with strong, she's able to bounce those off each other. But the third thing is Brooks has an extraordinary ear for colloquial language, we know that. She also has an extraordinary capacity for inventing
00:38:25
Speaker
inventing her own kinds of colloquial language. You know, those two things are one in Brooks. I mean, and I think many have noticed that. So I think the casualness of the opening of the poem. We're things of dry hours in the involuntary plan, grayed in and gray. The first interpretation that we were thinking about where freedom and agency or willpower at stake here
00:38:54
Speaker
is supported by the grammar of that line. We are things of dry hours and the involuntary. As it were, we are the subjects of dry hours. We have no
00:39:07
Speaker
Let's see. What makes the hours dry? Why are they dry? Is this dry in the sense of like, as opposed to drunk or fertile? I don't know. For me, I think of a still afternoon in an apartment. That is the semantic field that that word opens up for me. I don't think that the word
00:39:34
Speaker
I mean, dry hours, of course, could also be hours when nothing happens. It could be almost a kitsian indolence, too. I mean, it doesn't have to be purely negative. The inflammatory plan, of course, and gradient and gray, as it goes on, it seems much more of a progression into
00:40:00
Speaker
into the material constraints of the rest of the poem signals. But I think with dry hours, I wouldn't call it a lazy afternoon by any means, but that kind of sense of nothing happening. For me, that's what that phrase stands in for. Yeah. Does involuntary plan refer to like a building
00:40:25
Speaker
plan. One of our listeners may know this. It's something that I haven't been able to actually figure out. There are references in the criticism to layaway plans, to exploitative types of mortgages or simply a kind of euphemistic way to talk about redlining or other forms of racist housing discrimination.
00:40:53
Speaker
Others opt for a more general interpretation of plans that we didn't get to make, the involuntary plan. I'm certain that perhaps somebody who's listening to us right now might have a stronger reading of involuntary than that, but those are the options, I think.
00:41:12
Speaker
I
Sound and Emotional Resonance in Brooks' Poetry
00:41:12
Speaker
think you've nicely laid out an array of possibilities for us to consider. Grayed in and gray, it's actually a sort of like lovely phrasing there. The rhythm of that I find sort of moving.
00:41:40
Speaker
Yeah, what to make of grayness here. I mean, it brings us back to the dry hours, right? Well, let's go to something that you just said. I mean, this is not a poem that purports to be a piece of reportage. It's not giving us a bit of journalism about what it's like to live in the Kitchenette building, or at least that's not its only or primary purpose. It is, in a way, as you just pointed out, it's giving us an aesthetic sensorium that opens up from opens up in this building
00:42:11
Speaker
even as the poem acknowledges the forms of destitution that it acknowledges are present even as it also is keenly aware of
00:42:28
Speaker
the possibilities of the senses as they're moving about in this space. I don't think it's possible to pull those two things apart in the poem, which is one of the reasons why I think people are drawn to this poem. It's such a good poem. But you're right, Graydon and Gray. Another thing I'd say there, Cameron, is that if Gray is what the we in the poem are, they are Graydon because they've been Graydon in a way. So there's something there that's about
00:42:58
Speaker
about appearance, about the way that people are associated with their dwelling spaces. And Brooks often returns to this theme, especially in modern Martha, when two people leave their house and go on a date, and people make assumptions about what kind of house they live in. And that starts to color their perception of who they are. And of course, that's racialized. And in this poem, that happens in that brief set of four words there. So the gray becomes
00:43:24
Speaker
an aspect of the building space that attaches onto the people as a predicate, which I think is kind of interesting. Right, right, right, right. Yeah, great in almost. It sounds to me like the we who are speaking are speaking as though they had been, they were figures who had been illustrated by some other, you know, by some other designer.
00:43:51
Speaker
Yeah, and maybe that's something that the poem wants, you know, that's, I think that's really brilliant. I mean, maybe that's something the poem wants to fix in a way to redress, sort of a great inversion, that it's going to give a fuller, you know, color destiny to the white and violet that come in later, and an olfactory smells too.
00:44:12
Speaker
So then into the second sentence of the poem, which takes us to the end of the first stanza of the poem, the end of the third line of the poem, we get these quotations, these bits of overheard language. So you've already told us something about, in setting up the poem Walt, you've already told us something about the kind of function or force of quotation for Brooks here.
00:44:40
Speaker
But now that we've reached this point, do you want to say something more about, dream makes a giddy sound, not strong like rent, feeding a wife, satisfying a man. So man incidentally rhymes then on the involuntary plan, right, satisfying a man.
00:45:03
Speaker
What's your sense of like, if what the quotation marks are signaling here, if I'm right in saying is that this is overheard language that's being sort of incorporated into the poem, recorded into the poem, but wants to be sort of cited and framed as though it were not her own words, but words she's hearing, or words that we are hearing maybe.
00:45:26
Speaker
Where are they being heard from and who were the speakers of those quotations? How do those quotations play in relation to each other? It's a great question to ask of the we in the poem something like
00:45:50
Speaker
What is the dream? Or what are you dreaming? What are your dreams? What are your what is the good life? What is the what you know, if that's what that's standing in for, in addition to the more obvious relation to the American dream or something like that. It's a very concise argument that says in a way,
00:46:12
Speaker
That's an incomplete question, you know, to ask of the we in this poem what the good life might be is ignoring some of these material necessities. The poem is going to set up. Now, this isn't where the poem ends, but I think it poses these two poles here. It sets them up in parallel with each other. Sorry, antithesis with each other. You have the green and then you have red.
00:46:38
Speaker
Uh, you know, but I really think it's important with Brooks to remember too, that she, um, we shouldn't be too metaphorical about the word sound here. She really means that dream has this sound quality to it and rent has this other quality. I think, you know, Brooks just loves, loves the capacity of the English language to have those two different sound quality. So, I mean, I'm not taking away from everything that's very clearly signaled in the social
00:47:06
Speaker
in political and economic dimensions here. But since we're dealing with Brooks here, the consummate purveyor of sound in English, I think that it's important to also acknowledge that she's saying that too. Good. Well, I guess that occurs to me that's really nicely said, but apart from sounding strong, what rent feeding a wife and satisfying a man
00:47:33
Speaker
have in common, maybe is a kind of sense of obligation or like a social obligation. Right. The involuntary plan. So, you know, rent, you know, is is the obligation that someone who is whatever a lisi has to a lender, whatever the person who's living in the apartment has to the landlord.
00:48:03
Speaker
Feeding a wife sounds like a kind of marital obligation. I mean, that doesn't sound like love necessarily. It's transactional. Right. Satisfying a man sounds like what one had better do if one is a woman, right? And those things happen also to sound strong. Yeah. That's interesting.
00:48:32
Speaker
If the dream then is the capacity of art to elude those types of obligations, you know, in what way does it make its way? In what way does the poem have to be written through the lens of those obligations that you said? In what way could it be written as a dream? If it can be, this is in a way, I think the
00:48:54
Speaker
the contradiction or the contestation that the rest of the poem tries to understand. It's so interesting because you might think that if you had just gotten to that point in the poem, like through three lines of the poem, and then we're told the next stanza begins, but, right? And then we're asked to predict where it went from that but. You might think that what it was about to tell you, you know, dream makes a giddy sound. It's not strong like these things.
00:49:26
Speaker
And even, you might think that what it was about to say was, and now make a defense of dreaming, sort of notwithstanding its sort of insubstantial, what has just been established as its kind of giddiness and unseriousness or something. But that's not what happens here instead.
00:49:53
Speaker
Well, I don't know. So I have lots of questions, Walt, about the second stanza. So I'm going to try to trim my list down and then let you run with it in whatever direction you want. One question is,
00:50:06
Speaker
Every stanza of this poem has three lines except for the second one, which has four lines. So why does the second stanza stand out in that way? And then, you know, the onion fumes and the fried potatoes and all of that, that's sort of drifting up.
00:50:28
Speaker
you know, how do those sensory experiences sort of map on to the dichotomy that was established in the first stanza? I don't know, maybe start with just by thinking of the stanza as a stanza, Walt. I think the stanza is one of the great examples in English of how poetry can pack in so many of the senses into such a brief little room. And I think readers of Brooks have been
00:50:59
Speaker
readers of this poem by Brooks have been alert to the compact nature of this near sonnet, as an allegory for as an analog of the packs and compacted nature of the kitchenette. And so there's that sense of, is this poem trying to mirror in its density, the density of the building? Now, I think there are issues with
00:51:28
Speaker
making too strong a claim that way. But certainly it does seem as though there is a lot being contained within this score line stanza. And I think what's being contained are the following. The onion fumes, the white and violet, two substantive adjectives there, white and violet,
00:51:52
Speaker
you know, it's white and violet. It's a wonderful phrase there. The dream's white and violet? Yeah, the dream's white and violet. A phrase that just sets your mind really going. I don't know your vision. The fried potatoes echoing the onions fumes and then the garbage ripening in the hall. Right. Again, maybe a little
00:52:21
Speaker
bit of Kitzian language there. And then of course the sound, the aria, the fluttering, that sense of tactile motion there. I mean, it's just quite extraordinary. Almost every word in this stanza appeals, solicits our senses, our ability to imagine. I mean, this is where the poem, and maybe that but is, maybe that but,
00:52:51
Speaker
is a signal that what's going to happen is that the poem will, like all poetry that's based in images and in the body and in the senses, maybe the butt says, you cannot keep the mind from dreaming, even in this poem where I'm going to pose the dream against these
00:53:17
Speaker
these strong alternatives.
Dreams vs. Reality in Brooks' Work
00:53:20
Speaker
And if, you know, so is dreaming the, so I guess, okay, just to pull us out to a question here, is dreaming being redefined? Is the aria being, is the sun being redefined as comprising all these senses?
00:53:35
Speaker
as well as, you know, other things we might associate with the sign or with Arias or with Dream. It seems maybe like, right. So if the first stanza sets up a dichotomy between like, oh, the sort of fanciful head in the clouds business of dreaming as against the, you know, down here on terra firma reality of rent and marital relations or whatever.
00:54:03
Speaker
The second stanza, now as you describe it to me and help me see what's so wonderful about it, what it's doing is sort of following the thread of the real stuff, of the material reality of living in this space, but describing it in such a way as to,
00:54:30
Speaker
elicit and recreate its own, as it were, dreamlike quality. It's as though the building is producing its own dreams. What would a dream as dreamed by the we in the kitchen building
00:54:52
Speaker
sound, smell, feel like, you know, what would the aria sung by the wee of dry hours? It would still be, Brooke says, it would be replete of this copious sense of
00:55:09
Speaker
I'm almost verging on saying beauty and maybe that's what it is. There's something that's being... Well, there can be all kinds of beauty, right? Exactly. Yeah. So I feel like we're contractually obligated as poetry professors to now point out that the word stanza
00:55:25
Speaker
has this etymological connection through Italian to the word room, right? So there's this long-standing, I mean, I realize that you are the one who should be explaining this to me because you'll do it in fine or you don't. But there's this sort of long-standing kind of tradition on sort of thinking of stanzas in a poem as somehow like the rooms of a house or like rooms in general.
00:55:53
Speaker
I mean, in a way, Walt, I think what you were saying a moment ago about how densely packed
00:56:01
Speaker
the second stanza was, and you were suggesting that at least one possible reading there was to read it as it were mimetically, to say that its densely packedness was somehow replicating or representing the densely packed nature of living in a kitchenette building. Yeah, some readers have seen that connection. Okay, that's it? No, that's fine. And I understand why one wouldn't want to limit oneself to that kind of reading, but it's
00:56:29
Speaker
It's plainly there, I think. Absolutely. Yes, agreed. But so to go back to this other kind of nagging question I had, well, why is that stanza longer than the others? Oh, right, right. I mean, if we were to extend the mimetic reading thing, like you could say, well, you know, the rooms presumably aren't perfectly regular, or this is a place where, and not only is this stanza one line longer than the others, but it's the only not end stopped stanza in the time. That's right.
00:56:58
Speaker
So it's like longer than the others, but it's still overflowing, as it were. I think that's because my reading of that, my response to that would be this excess fourth line is perfectly suited to a stanza where we're trying to feed the dream into its full
00:57:20
Speaker
Blossoming as a dream so you know Brooks and Brooks needs that extra line Yeah, give us that that dream emerging for at least the space of that Extended room and that's nice and then continues with that With that excellent, you know word even you know, even if we were willing to let it in pushes it a little further, you know It pushes the balloon up a little bit more even if we were willing to let it in Although that extends it is quite different in nature. I mean we've lost some of the
00:57:51
Speaker
Concrete.
00:57:54
Speaker
olfactory, tactile, sense data, as it were. Yeah, so I'm just going to, I'm going to do the kind of self-indulgent thing here, but I think it might serve a purpose of reminding, of rereading now the second and third stanza together, because then I want you to talk to us about what the third stanza is doing differently. Well, okay, so the second stanza, remember, began this way.
00:58:21
Speaker
And I'm going to read till I get to the bottom of the third stanza. But could a dream send up through onion fumes? It's white and violet. Fight with fried potatoes and yesterday's garbage ripening in the hall. Flutter. Or sing an aria down these rooms. Even if we were willing to let it in. Had time to warm it. Keep it very clean. Anticipate a message. Let it begin.
00:58:49
Speaker
So that ends with a question mark. And the question is, but could a dream to do this stuff, even if we were willing to let it in, take care of it and let it begin, whatever that means, exactly.
Structure and Form in Kitchenette Building
00:59:01
Speaker
Walt, you were starting to say something a moment ago about how the third stanza is doing something in a different kind of spirit, I think, from the second. And so I wonder if you might say more about the third stanza now. Yeah, we get hints of the
00:59:18
Speaker
Prosopopoeia in the third stanza, in the second stanza. By that I just mean the dream is made into a human character. It's fighting, it's singing, you know. And now it takes on a slightly different aspect, I think. I come to think of the stanza must be treating the dream as another child, anticipating the next moment in the collection, the mother.
00:59:46
Speaker
And that moves to pull them along a little bit more because it says, oh, are we going to have to take care of this dream? Is it not just going to float, you know, through these wonderful four lines of the senses, but are we going to have to vote if we let it in, warm it, keep it clean?
01:00:03
Speaker
anticipate it telling us something about the future. Is it going to put us in another relation of obligation? That's right. And I do feel that there's a hint of that. Let it begin. Can we take on one more thing in this crowded apartment? I don't think that that's the only emotional meaning to this stanza. I don't think that's the only thing happening, but I think
01:00:32
Speaker
There is that sense of, oh, it takes work to dream. Yeah. And we have a limited time and we have limited capacity and we have to take care of a lot of things. And are we also going to have to take care of, of the dream? But it's still, it's still in that same sentence where the dream is developing and, and, and, and, uh, growing, blossoming, whatever verb you want to use there or, uh, participle, um, or during, um, so yeah, I mean, anticipate a message.
01:01:00
Speaker
is a curious phrase for me. Yeah, well, I totally agree with you about the sense in which the dream is described as though it were like a kind of orphan child that needed to be taken in or something like that and looked after, as it were. And
01:01:21
Speaker
But it also sounds to me like by the time we get to that final line of the third stanza, anticipate a message, let it begin. The one that you say is sort of strange to you. It's strange to me too. It's a strange line. It sounds like what I'm hearing and tell me if this sounds right to you, Walt. What I'm hearing is that
01:01:45
Speaker
You know, something like, were we able to care for this orphan child that's showing up on our doorstep, that is this dream, which would require a lot of us and maybe more than we can manage, were we able to do that?
01:02:09
Speaker
it might tell us something very important, maybe. I mean, anticipate a message, let it begin. It almost sounds to me like this moment, it's sort of like right on the precipice of a kind of prophetic utterance or a revelation, where you get, as it were, not just the obligations or the work of nurturing a dream, but the kind of payoff of a vision or something like that.
01:02:39
Speaker
And it's sort of right on the brink of that, that she's kind of funny and funny might be the wrong word for it, but sort of briskly dismissive of that possibility. Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, I think it says, is there a future?
01:02:56
Speaker
Is there music of the future that is coming if we let this dream begin? And the fact that it's in a question, okay, but it's still part of this long sentence that basically has let the dream begin. That's the thing. I mean, the poem has performed itself, the letting in of the dream in the space of this sonnet scanty plot of ground or whatever. I mean, you have this dream that's been let in.
01:03:21
Speaker
It's happening already. And it's happening for Brooks and her career. It's happening for poetry at the war. It's just, you know, it's happening in Chicago in a kitchenette. You know, she's saying, here's poetry, you know, the message, it's coming, listen for it, you know, but let's let it begin. You could read that as an exhortation, you know, let it begin almost, almost. I'm not saying you can read really good.
01:03:45
Speaker
You've mentioned a couple times that the poem is one line short of the 14 that would be in a sonnet. And, you know, I don't know, I wonder like, so I'm, I hear that. And I think I'm persuaded by it. I mean, I want to put out the possibility that, you know, there could be a 13 line poem that wasn't like, not quite sonnet. But maybe this one is, if it is, is, I don't know, I think of that line we were talking about, Diane's
01:04:13
Speaker
Diane Seuss in her sonnets before we begin. One of the sonnets in Frank begins, the sonnet like poverty teaches you what you can do without, that there's a sense of like, with the sonnet, a sense of a sort of restricted form.
01:04:33
Speaker
not enough room, you know, the nuns narrow convent, right? And here it's as though that restriction is even more restricted or something like that. I mean, that's how you take the 13 rather than 14. Yeah, I think, sure. Yeah. Where's the evidence for calling it an almost sonnet? Well,
01:04:58
Speaker
I find it in the word Aria because Sanetto is a little song. Yeah, I just think there's that for me that really nails it. I think that 13 lines you're right. If there wasn't already this reference to to
01:05:19
Speaker
to forms like this. I know, of course, somebody's gonna say, well, an artist who heard me, or like, of course, it's not. But I mean, these references to these discrete forms, these forms that make a virtue of their constraint.
Societal Obligations vs. Personal Aspirations
01:05:31
Speaker
But no, yeah, a little song. But is it essential is another question for it to be
01:05:39
Speaker
a para-sonnet or a, I don't know what you want to call it, do we have a word for a trump kit? And it sounds like, even apart from the matter of 13 rather than 14, it does have something like the rhetorical shape of a sonnet too, doesn't it? I mean there's
01:05:56
Speaker
Now, I don't know if I want to call it Italian or Elizabethan or English, as it were. But I mean, on the one hand, it does seem like the ending of the poem gives us something that feels witty, like a couplet in a sonnet. And having said that,
01:06:16
Speaker
You know, I can imagine an argument that would say, like, at some place, like, even if we were willing to let it in or somewhere around there, we're getting something like a Volta or a turn in the Petrarchan tradition. Anyway, okay, we don't need to press too hard on that. We wonder, so the we returns, I'm now at the beginning of the fourth and final stanza, we wonder, a two word sentence.
01:06:42
Speaker
There's a kind of colloquial sense of that, right? Is there something more profound there, too? I don't know. Brooks is interested in dramatic speakers and what they're going to think and say at a particular moment. I think many of the poems that follow our characters in particular situations. And here, she's coming back to this wee. And Wonder is a...
01:07:12
Speaker
It has two purposes. One, yes, it signals that colloquialism, that interest in invoices. And I want to make it clear, I don't mean some sort of naturalistic colloquialism. Brooks' colloquial is always something that's partially invented. Yeah, for sure. But then the second thing that wonder does is it ties together some related words in the other stanzas of the poem, including dream and aria and
01:07:42
Speaker
you know, message even. And so there's a reason for wonder to appear there as a culminating verb that pulls together some of the other things that are almost associated with visionary experience.
01:08:00
Speaker
Really, I mean, to be honest. Yeah, good. Yeah. A question has been asked, and I guess colloquially, we wonder is a way of sort of punting on answering it, right? It's a way of saying like, yeah, it's a good question. Well, the clock is also ticking. Right. So, you know, we wonder, but we have to get into that. Yeah, but not for a minute. Right, not for a minute. Yeah. So I mean, one of the things that the poem does, which is fascinating to me, and I haven't yet figured out how to think about this really is,
01:08:29
Speaker
it really does open up a space in time where something can't really logically happen in reality. So it's, it's more about that. Yeah. Well, it's, or maybe it can, maybe it's just the time of waiting is actually as long as the poem has depicted it. Um, but I think, uh, I think there's this sense of, um, what, what, what is the, what is the, what is the time that the poem is occurring in and it's the time of waiting for the bathroom. And during that time,
01:09:00
Speaker
all of this is happening, and the poem is opening up a space within that very narrow time, that interval, that wasted so-called time, that time of waiting, that those dry minutes, those, I don't know what to call it, but there's something where it's- Now I'm thinking of other poems about waiting, like in the waiting room. Exactly. The ships would be one.
01:09:25
Speaker
I think it is a poem whose weighting is governed by the constraint of their being this shared. But yes, that would be an interesting pairing. And in this case, though, it's weighting that's governed by the kind of material reality of a shared bathroom and a kind of living arrangement that
01:09:53
Speaker
requires its inhabitants to sort of manage their bodily functions, right? Yeah, sure.
Conclusion and Reflection
01:10:03
Speaker
And their own kind of embodied, you know, if what it is like,
01:10:08
Speaker
I don't know if the we want to take a shower and hope there's a bit of not even hot water, right? Right. Warm water left. Right. Since number five is out of the bathroom, number five is what? Presumably like the the inhabitant of an apartment number or something? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, that's how I read it. I mean, yeah. That makes the most sense given the kitchenette building.
01:10:34
Speaker
And if the word dream was introduced early in the poem, it seems like one might say that it's replaced by the word hope in the last line, but it's a more modest kind of thing, right?
01:10:54
Speaker
certainly hope is part of that field. Whether it's more modest or not, I'm curious about why you said that. I do think, you know, hoping does have a forward momentum. Okay, no, no, go on. Momentum. Well, hoping does have some
01:11:14
Speaker
forward momentum, you hope for something, you dream of something, but that dreaming of something could also be anticipating a message. There are all these, but you know, you put your finger on something important. I think here we're finding another verb that strengthens this net of words in the poem that are starting to pull together this
01:11:41
Speaker
I don't know, you want to say kind of optimism for the future in a simplistic way, but that or that kind of visionary flavor that we get later, much later in Brooks. But when I think about that last line too, you know, there's willing to let it in in the previous dance.
01:12:01
Speaker
And then there's hope to get in it. And so I'm thinking, hope to get in what? Hope to get in the bathroom, of course, but also hope to get in... In the water, I think. Yes, yes, of course, yes, but also hope to get in the sonnet, hope to get in the aria, hope to get in the dream, hope to get in the hope.
01:12:20
Speaker
you know it's sort of you know there's this wonderful mirroring and reversal of syntax there that can't help but you know seduce me into thinking okay we're gonna let
01:12:35
Speaker
it in, let the dream in, but then we're going to hope to get in the dream ourselves. Yeah. Oh God, I love that Walt. And I don't know if it's because I still have the kind of echo of your poem that I read earlier today.
01:12:50
Speaker
in my mind here, but the idea of like a spring or a kind of source of poetic inspiration, you know, it's like the Castilian spring in Greece or whatever, you know, that, you know, it's the story that Byron once like leapt into it as the to like secure a kind of poetic power, but also to include himself in a kind of poetic tradition.
01:13:16
Speaker
Maybe one thinks also of things like baptismal water, or the idea of a kind of rejuvenation that happens in bathing. Here the fact that the water that's hoped for is lukewarm,
01:13:35
Speaker
that it's sort of communal and like municipally delivered and totally imbricated in this kind of racialized form of segregation and sort of housing injustice that's happening in Chicago and elsewhere is,
01:14:01
Speaker
is I think not to sort of take away the possibility that what we're also talking about is like getting into a poem. But somehow it's as though the magic of Brooks is that it's both things at once, maybe. Yes, that's right. That's right. It is no less a source of inspiration for all of those things that you said. And perhaps the way that the spring appears at this moment in time is as the lukewarm water
01:14:23
Speaker
And that doesn't mean that it is not also, as you said, tied into racist housing discrimination in Chicago. We're looking for where poetry appears at different points in time. We have to not look for it in ancient Greece. We can't only go to Greece. Just to be a procedure. But no, I think that you're right. I mean, we associate poetry with the breath.
01:14:46
Speaker
But there are also very frequent associations with water, as you say, and not just in the wasteland, different types of water that serve as inspiration.
01:14:58
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. That's right. And transformation. Right. I mean, I think maybe it's because we're talking about we've been talking about Bishop to I think of at the end of at the fish houses, you know, dipping her hand in the in the cold water there. OK. Well, this was such a wonderful conversation. And I wonder if I could ask you to cap it off by giving us one more reading of the poem. I'd love to. Thank you so much.
01:15:31
Speaker
Kitchenette building. We are things of dry hours in the involuntary plant, grayed in and gray. Dream makes a giddy sound, not strong like rent, feeding a wife, satisfying a man. But could a dream send up through onion fumes, its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes, and yesterday's garbage ripening in the hall, flutter, singing aria down these rooms, even if we were willing to let it in?
01:16:00
Speaker
had time to warm it, keep it very clean, anticipate a message, let it begin. We wonder, but not well, not for a minute. Since number five is out of the bathroom now, we think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it.
01:16:17
Speaker
So that's Walt Hunter reading Gwendolyn Brooks's pump kitchenette building. Walt, it's been such a pleasure to get to talk with you this last hour. I'm really grateful for it. Thank you so much. I can't imagine somebody I want to talk to about poems more than you, comrade. I really appreciate the time.
01:16:39
Speaker
That's very sweet of you to say. And of course, that feeling is mutual. So I'm really excited that we get to share this conversation with other people. And to those other people, thank you for listening. Thank you for participating in this series of conversations.
01:16:57
Speaker
with us. I hope that you're enjoying the podcast so far and that you'll subscribe to the podcast so that you get it automatically, whatever service you listen, leave a rating review, even more importantly than that, because I love this feeling I'm getting that the audience for this thing is growing. I hope that you'll be a part of that and pick a favorite episode, maybe this one, and share it with someone
01:17:25
Speaker
you love, share it with a friend. Thanks for listening along with us. We'll have more for you soon. And until then, be well, everyone.