George Saunders & Terrance Hayes

Today on KPR presents It's a Literary Double Header. I'm Kay McIntyre on today's program, George Saunders, the author of Lincoln in the Bardo, one of the most original novels on the best sellers list. We'll also hear from poet Terrence Hayes, who spoke at the University of Kansas Leads Center, sponsored by KU's Hall Center for the Humanities. But first, Lincoln in the Bardo tells the story of Willie Lincoln, the president's son, who has passed away and is trapped in limbo between this world and the next. George Saunders will speak at Lawrence's Liberty Hall on Tuesday, October 10th, sponsored by the Lawrence Public Library. Saunders joins us by telephone from New York City. Thanks for joining us today. Oh, thank you so much for having me. Great to be here. George, take us back to 1862 and the story behind Lincoln in the Bardo. Yeah, basically it's a very simple and very sad story.

Lincoln's son, Willie, who was supposedly his favorite, the most like Lincoln himself, got typhoid and along with his brother, Ted. And they thought it was under control. The Lincoln's got permission from the doctors to throw this kind of reception they were playing at the White House and that night, Willie got worse and about two or three weeks later, he passed away just completely, you know, traumatizing the family and especially Lincoln. And then there was just a mention in the newspapers at the time that Lincoln had gone into the crypt. They borrowed a friend's crypt to enter their son while they were in Washington. The report said he had somehow interacted with the body, had looked at it or had held it or had stripped the hair or something like that. So that's really the whole story, the book is just that night, the night that Lincoln got into the, into the crypt. So it sounds like a real uplifting laugh riot, wasn't it? But Lincoln and his son, Willie, are not the only characters in the book. As it turns out, the cemetery is full of people who are, I introduced it as being trapped

in limbo, but you use the more exotic term, Bardo. Can you describe those people who live in the cemetery and the condition they're in? Yeah, I mean, one of the challenges of this book is since it's just Lincoln going into a crypt and coming out again, it's, you know, he needs some, some additional narration and I thought, well, that's, you know, who else is in a grave other night and get these sort of trap spirits. I was raised Catholic and my, you know, my sort of a distraught understanding of limbo or purgatory is a little bit, you know, you're, it's sort of all over for you if you're in that state. You, you lived in a way that wasn't the best and now you're made to sit on a hard bench for all of eternity until, you know, until the end of days. Bardo is a, to that in turn, it means transitional state. There are many Bardo's. We're in one right now. Actually, we're in the Bardo between a birth and death. The one that I'm referring to in the book is the one that starts at the moment of your

death and goes to, you know, whatever comes next in reincarnation or heaven or hell. So, so that's one Bardo. I thought that was an interesting choice, only, only says this for a writer, I had to remind myself not to make it too purgatory, like the Bardo is actually a little bit transactional. You can kind of, it responds very directly to the kind of person you were at life. And at least, I think, at least in my book, there's some notion that if you understood it correctly, you could then escape and go on to your destiny. So, I kind of used that word just to remind myself not to make that afterlife too fat, you know, or too, too predictable or too much like the natural life we've seen. Spiritualism, the idea that the dead are still among us and can communicate with us was really at its heyday in the 19th century. How did that figure into your story? Well, I think it made me understand that initial visit to Lincoln made to the crib a little differently.

You know, when I first heard it, it sounded a little bit strange and a cob and a little gothic, you know, and then when you start to look at it at that time, you see that they were much more comfortable with the dead body. They were, you know, they would have wakes in the house and so on. And also, at that time, there's so much death, you know, so much young death. So it seemed to help me a little bit to understand that the 19th century idea of death was quite different from ours. You know, we tend to rush the body away and treat it as something you don't want to look at or think about. But I think they had a more organic approach to it. And of course, Lincoln himself and his wife, they were involved in spiritualism after what he's death because the loss was so extreme and so harsh that I think they never got over it. They were talking about it on the last day of Lincoln's life, talking about how they might finally, you know, conspire to get over this and get back to being the couple they had been before his death. When your subject is as fantastical as this is, what kind of research do you do?

Well, that's a good question because actually what I found out this book was the stranger it got, the more grounded it had to be in facts. So I did a lot of reading about Lincoln and especially about that particular period in his life, the illness and death of Willie and then the period just after. My feeling is, you know, a lot of fiction is kind of a game, it's sort of a seduction between reader and writer. You know that I'm making this story up and especially with this one, you know that there's a lot of crazy stuff going on. So then we're in a bit of a dance. I'm going to say some things that strain credibility a bit, you're going to back away, I'm going to somehow pull you back in again. And the idea is to get you to the end of the book, deeply believing in that fictive reality. In this book, I found that the historical research and the facts of the case were a good way to get the reader back a little bit. So it's sort of a, almost like writing a bike, you know, sometimes you get a little less left, meaning the book is getting to be too much to believe.

Then you say to yourself, okay, to correct this, I have to lean to the right. Let me talk about the Civil War and strictly factual terms. So that is, that's kind of the dance that you do as a writer. Fiction itself is such a weird proposition. When you pick up a novel, you know it's not true. You know that the writer has manipulated reality to make the fictive dream that you're consenting to go into. So that's an interesting thing. I think what we do is we say to the writer, I'm going to allow you to basically lie to me in the service of a higher truth. In this case, I kind of knew it was a rough entry. I was asking a lot of the reader in the first 20 or 30 pages. And I tried to make it as easy as possible, but I also had an idea that if, if I could get certain things started there, they would really pay off in the last 30 book. And so that's kind of the contract, you know, I like the idea that a book should be challenging but not gratuitously.

So in other words, I'm going to try to, in my revising, to make it a pleasurable and easy experience for you, but it still might take a little bit of acclamation time. And that's okay. I think, you know, generally readers and writers agree to that as long as there's a pay off in the end. One of the more delightful parts of the book, or at least I thought so, was the characters utter obliviousness to the fact that they're dead. They call their coffins sick boxes. Usually after an awkward pause, they refer to their corporal bodies as their sick forms. How can they be so clueless? Well, I kind of look at us, you know, we, I mean, how many times a day this is somebody say, I am a walking corpse in 50 years, I shall be no more. I mean, you know, we know that at some level, but it's considered somewhat impolite to dwell on it. You know, it's considered more, but I think to, you know, to let death dominate your life. Or the other thing I think we do, I do all of it. There's a kind of a, you know, an energetic construction of an identity that is maybe, it's

hopeful. You know, I like to think of myself as a good writer of their father and his husband and a good citizen, a mindful person, all these things. But of course, every day you have to reconstruct that identity. It's not, you actually do things all the time that subtle and not so subtle as violates your self-identity. So I think they're doing in death an exaggerated version of what we basically do in life. I think in this book, you know, one of the things that moved me, I didn't know this was going to happen, but how much did that envy the living? They are so nostalgic for the time when they were living. They can sense that they used to be more vital. There was something more active and wonderful about them, but they don't quite know what changed. And so they're very energized when Lincoln comes into the graveyard and actually pays attention to one of their numbers, son. So that, I've read in some books about ghosts that the dead really like to be remembered. And they like, for example, photographs of themselves to be out.

They like to be respected by the living. And yet the way the people in the Bardo describe us, the living, who come to visit the cemetery with their cigars, their wreaths, their tears, their crape, their rumors, their hissing of things, having nothing to do with us, we're so self-absorbed and yet so are they. Yeah, that's right. I think they, you know, they don't, they like us if we're, if we're properly obsequious. But I felt there that they were a little bit like the, these kids that have to work in the State Park concession areas, you know, they're sitting here at Yosemite and they get the same question 400 times a day and people are trampling through the, the store. So yeah, I think they, they, they don't like that, they don't like when people come to the graveyard and treat them as if they're dead, you know, when they come to the graveyard and, and, and those in their own grief and don't take them a real moment to think about the people there, you know.

George, I understand that actors Nick Opperman and Megan Malali have purchased the film rights to Lincoln and the Bardot. Given the fantastical nature of the subject matter, are you nervous at all about seeing this on the screen? Yes, yes, yes, yes. And that's the, that's thing is to be a little nervous because I was nervous the whole time I wrote this. I'm always nervous. But I mean, when you, when you have weird material, the first order of worry is that you won't be able to pull it off. The second one is it will be cheesy or that, or that the reader won't believe it. You know, so all those things are definitely at play and I'm, I think I'm going to write the screenplay, so that makes me even more nervous. But I think the idea is if you, in my experience, if you know what you're going to do in the work of art, you're in trouble because the dangers you might just do that thing, which somehow ends up to be a bore for everybody. You know, if you, in other words, art is not, in my experience, a process of me knowing what I want to do and then me doing it and then dumping it on you and going to see what's that great.

It's much more troubling than that. You know, you start out, the book shows you a curve. This doesn't work. That doesn't work. You're nervous. You know, you're failing. It's that, I think the, the work of art that's vital, it, it comes from doubt. It comes from problems. It comes from recognizing on page 40 that you've got a huge problem that you didn't anticipate, then the book kind of glows around that problem and incorporates it and so on. So one of the things I've been saying to the people that, you know, that are involved in the early stages of this movie is, let's remember that it's not going to be the book and that it's got to be as weird as the book and we have to go through a strange a process and make the movie as I went through and read in the book. So, which means sort of saying it, it might be impossible, you know, and it might be bad. George, do you have a copy of the book with you? If you don't mind, I'd love to have you read next served. I do. Yeah.

So this is just a section where the dead kind of reflect on what it feels like to be in that state of being dead and a little bit forgotten and their vague sense that they're being underestimated by the living. Please do not misunderstand. We had been mothers, fathers, had been husbands in many years, men of import who had come here that first day, accompanied by crowds so vast and sorrowful that, searching forward to hear the oration they had damaged fences beyond repair, had been young wives diverted here during childbirth, our gentle qualities stripped from us by the naked pain of that circumstance. Who left behind husbands so enamored of us, so tormented by the horrors of those last moments, the notion that we had gone down that awful black hole pain-sundered from ourselves that they had never loved again, had been bulky men, quietly content who, in our first youth, had come to grasp our own unremarkableness and had, cheerfully, as if amusingly accepting

a heavy burden shifted our life's focus. If we would not be great, we would be useful, would be rich and kind, and thereby able to affect good, smiling hands and pockets, watching the world we had subtly improved walking past, this empty valley filled that education that secretly funded, had been affable joking servants of whom our masters had gone fond for the cheering work we managed that they launched forth on days full of import, had been grandmothers, tolerant and frank, recipients of certain dark secrets who, by the quality of their unjudging listening, granted tacit forgiveness and thus letting the sun. What I mean to say is, we have been considerable, had been loved, not long, not lost, not freakish, but wise, each and his or her own way. Our departures caused pain, those who had loved us sat upon our beds, heads in hand, lowered

their faces to paper tops, making animal noises, we had been loved, I say, and remembering us, even many years later, people would smile, briefly glad that the memory. That's George Saunders, reading from his novel, Lincoln in the Bardow. Saunders will speak at Lawrence's Liberty Hall on Tuesday, October 10th, sponsored by the Lawrence Public Library. That event is free and open to the public. You can find out more at the library's website. You can find a longer version of my interview with George Saunders on our website, kpr.ku.edu. I'm Kay McIntyre. You're listening to KPR Presents on Kansas Public Radio. Support for KPR Presents on Kansas Public Radio comes from Midco Internet, cable and phone service, now proudly connecting the Lawrence area, working hard to be better for you every day.

Midco.com. Welcome from the Lawrence Arts Center, a center for visual performing arts, contemporary exhibitions, film, lectures, and education for all ages, details at LawrenceArtCenter.org. Terrence Hayes has been called one of the most compelling voices in contemporary American poetry. He's published five books of poetry, his book Lighthead, one a national book award, his latest book, How to Be Drawn, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Hayes was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant. He teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. Hayes spoke at the University of Kansas Lead Center on November 17, 2016 as part of the Hall Center for the Humanities Lecture Series. So yeah, I'll read a little bit, actually, I'm not sure. I was like, okay, we'll see if I'm going to read like crazy weird poems or like straight forward poems, so I guess I'll do some mix of it. But you know the most exciting thing that happened to me today, is that in my hotel I looked

out my window and I saw a bookstore, so I was like, wow, an independent bookstore and then I looked and right around the corner, there was another bookstore. That's crazy. I'm serious. That used to be normal, but it's not anymore, so I was like, okay, good, this is good. I wasn't sure about Kansas, but you got bookstores, so you're doing something right. All right. So yeah, I just actually have how to be drawn up here and what I will tell you is all I ever really care about. I say this all the time and you know, if you've been to any of my readings, you know, it's true. But if you haven't, you think I'm making this up. But I really only care about like the last thing I wrote, you know, like by the time the book is out there, this isn't great for my publisher, but I will read from the book. But I'm mostly just thinking about like a few new things that I need to try out. So that means they could be terrible. I never end on something I've never tried before, but I am always trying to work towards

those. So that does kind of inform what I read. Just like, oh, you know what, you know what, should I read? I saw some signs should I be funny then. I just haven't been feeling funny for like the last 10 days or so. You know, so I was like, do I have any humorous poems? I do usually, this is the first poem, what it looked like. Dear old dirty bastard, I too like it raw. I don't especially care for Duke Ellington at a birthday party. I care less and less about the shapes of shapes because forms change and nothing is more durable than feeling. My uncle used the money I gave him to buy a few vials of what looked like candy after the party where my grandma sang an outfit that was obviously made for a West African king. My motto is never mistake what it is for what it looks like.

My generosity, for example, is mostly a form of vanity. A bandana is a useful hankerchief, but a hankerchief is a useless bandana. This only looks like a footnote in my report concerning the party. Trill stands for what is truly real, though it may be hidden by the houses just over the hills between us, by the hands on the bars between us. That picture of my grandmother with my uncle when he was a baby is not Trill. What it is is the feeling felt seeing garbage men drift along the pre-dawn avenues. A sloppy, slow rain taking its time to the coast. Milk toast is not Trill nor is bulia bass. Bakushan is Japanese for a woman who is beautiful only when viewed from behind. Like I was saying, my motto is never mistake what it looks like for what it is else you

end up like that Negro of fellow was a fellow a Negro. Don't you lie about who you are sometimes and then realize the lie is true. You are blind to your power brother bastard like the king who wanders his kingdom searching for the king. And that's okay. The one will tell you you are the king. No one really wants a king anyway. So that's sort of in the middle of what I could do. There's some weird stuff in there. But then there's a grandmother for people who like poems that have grandmothers in them. And then there's like, you know, yeah, there's some weird stuff in there. And then there's like even weirder like stuff in the basement, like king lear stuff that I would never say. But I'm doing that because I'm working my way towards, you know, some sign it. So there's a little Shakespeare for you, but there's also some ODB. Not everybody going to know.

I don't know if the same people who know ODB are going to know that I was eluding to king lear in there. Y'all get the king lear. You've got a college degree, especially in English, you should know. Okay, okay. So that's the first one. Here's the second one. This is the deer. Usually when I read it, I talk about like the muskidine, I don't know if muskidines grow in Kansas, but they do in the south, and they love berries and my favorite thing to say. It's probably, it's going to be true any day now, is that, you know, if they sold them the whole food, you would buy them. But actually where I grew up, they would just be like little weeds on the side of the road. So there, that's what there are these little berries. And Potascula is just the name of a town in Ohio and I don't actually know how close I was to Potascula when I saw this little deer get hit one time, but I knew I was going to put Potascula in a poem because it's Potascula, so the deer. Outside Potascula, I saw the deer with the soft white belly.

The deer with two eyes as blind as holes. I saw it leap from a bush beside the highway as if a moment before it left, it had been a bush beside the highway. And I saw how if I wished it, I could be the deer, a creature boning as a branch in spring. And when I closed my eyes, I found the scent of muskidine. The berry, my mother plucked Sundays from the roadside where fumes, toughened its speckled skin and seeds slept suspended in a mucus thick as the sleep of an embryo. It is the ugliest berry along the road, but chewed it reminded me of speed. And I saw when I was the deer that I didn't have to be a deer. I could become a machine with the woman inside it, moving at a speed that leaves a stain on the breeze and on the muskidine's flesh, which is almost meat, the sweet pulp a muskidine

leaves when it's crushed in the teeth of a deer or a mother for that matter, or her child waiting with something like shame to be fed a berry uglier than shame. Though it is not like this for the deer, it is not shame because the deer is not human. It is only almost human. When it looks on the road and leaps, covering at least 30 feet in a blink, the deer I cannot be the dumb deer dumb and foolish enough to ignore anything that runs but is not alive. A trafficking machine filled with a distracted mind and body, deadly and durable enough to deconstruct the deer when it leaps, I'm telling you like someone being chased. I remember a friend told me how when he was eight or nine, a half naked woman ran to the car window, crying a man was after her with a knife. But his mother locked the doors and sped away.

Someone tell him his mother was not a coward, that's what he thinks. Tell him it was because he and his little brother were in the car that she would not let the troubled world inside. It was no one's fault. The mind separated from the body. I could almost see the holes of her eyes, the white fuzz on her tongue, the raised bud soft as a bed of pink seeds, the hole of a mouth stretched wide enough to hold a whole baby inside. I could almost see its eyes at the back of her throat. I could definitely hear its cries. Don't ask me what that would mean. But this is the first time I'm reading this since I was hanging out, the person in this poem, so he did tell me the story once and Miami and Carpooled up. He told me the story and I said to him what I'm saying, she was trying to save you. That was it.

I wrote the poem and the last time I saw him, he was like, man I went home and I saw my mom and I read that poem to her. Which I was like, oh man it's just like blowing my mind and she was like, oh baby I didn't know that you were upset, I didn't know that you even remembered that. So I was like, okay well if nobody else reads the poem, I've done it. But then a little while later I had a few drinks, he was like, don't write no more damn poems about me. I was like, all right, all right, I'll let you know if I'm going to put you in the poem again. I didn't put his name in it, but so I think he was torn. Okay, let's see. Maybe I'll move to the second. So here's something weird. This maybe will get you a little bit ready for some of the stuff to come. You know what I ain't going to tell you none about it, except that it's about Wigs. Wig Frastic. Sometimes I want a built-in scalp that looks and feels like skin. A form of camouflage, protection against sunburn and frostbite, hoist hair that covers the nightmares and makes me civilized.

Somebody slap a powdered wig on me so I can hammer a couple of cynicism like Louis XIV small and bald as a boiled egg making himself taller by means of a towering hair piece resembling a Corinthian column or maybe a skyscraping kid with no play wig worn by someone playing in WA at a pin house party with no black people. Be up in the club humming, mm-hmm, hey mama, while our numb skull caps underscore the brain's captivity. Somebody slap me. Norman Mailer's essay, The White Negro, superficial reflections on the hipster never actually uses the word wigger. I'd rather say whack. It may be fruitful to consider me a philosophical psychopath. We clubbing in our wigs of pleas and longing, the ladies wear wigs of knots, knots of knots, wood knots, do knots, cannot. Wigs dipped and die swirl on their scalps off their scalps, sides of scalps, their synoparts

and irrigated flats, flirty bangs, dangle below a bow clip of sparkle, a lady places her bow about face to place her face in place, which is a placebo of place. Her face is a placebo. Let's wear ready made wigs, custom made wigs, hand tied wigs and machine made wigs. No Negro can santa down a street with any real certainty that violence will not visit him. Wrote Mailer, Bullets shout through the darkness, dumb people are dangerous. Calamity pimps come out of the woodwork and start to paddle their own canoes. This was a white do's response to the death of Martin. Let's beat that apathy wig right off him. Let's get higher than God tonight, like the military wives of imperial Rome smiling on the blonde and red headed wigs cut from the scalps of enemy captives. Somebody slap me.

Real wash and liquor, watching the coils curl, the curls coil, the coils coil, the curls curl on the girls. Unslip polyurethane patches, super fine lace, isis wigs, clear patcher wigs, big booty judy wigs, under the soft radar street music of climax, singing the men all pause when I walk into the room. The men all pause, animals, the men all fangles, the men all woof woof's, a little bit lost, lust, lustrous, trestless, restless as the rest of us. In my life, the wigs eat meat. The wish to live a while on the mind of another human, it is not in human. The wish to slide for a while inside another human, it is not in human. If you like like, like I like like, you should wear a hair piece. It is peace of mind, it is artistic, it is a lightweight likeness, comfortable wash and wear, virtually looking and feeling with virtually no side effects.

Let me hear you say, this wig is terrific. A colored despair wig for your color despair, an economic despair wig, a sexual despair wig, a wig for expressive despair, political despair, a movable halo. New and improved, your wig can be set upon the older wig just as the older wig was set when it was newer upon the wig beneath it. Where's your wig? Where your wig? Your wig is terrific. So I had decided, you know, I'm so sick of talking about future presidents, that's what I'll say. But of course, as I was reading, it's like, oh, okay, this is going to be my trunk poem, because I got the wig stuff in it. I just decided that. I just decided that. All right. Just moving through it. So here's something that's kind of straightforward for the people that are baffled right now. This poem is called Black Confederate Ghost Story, and there's not that much to say about it.

Attention. Well, you know what I'm going to tell you about it. So I don't know, maybe this will be a question later, I, a lot of the poems have a shadow of like experiencing them. So I can take it like a little something, and then it'll become a poem, although that week fasting is pretty much all made up, though I have been in club before going, you know, so there's a little shadow of something. But this one, this didn't actually happen to me. This actually happened to my wife, where a dude, Bud, was known around Pittsburgh for having like Confederate stuff all over his car, he ain't even from the south. So anyway, one day he did show up at the house and tried to work on something and didn't work on it or something, and then later when I came home, my wife was like, you know, I Bud was here with all that Confederate stuff, and I was like, you know what, I need to write a poem about him. So in the poem, it's me dealing with him, because you know, I don't know if I could have dealt with him in the real world, so I made a poem. Black Confederate Ghost Story. A tension African-American apparitions hung, burned, or drowned before anyone alive was born.

Please make a mortifying midnight appearance before the handyman standing on my porch this morning with a beard as wild as Walt Whitman's, except he is the anti-witman, this white man with Confederate pens littering his denim cap and jacket. And by mortified deer ghost, I mean scare the snot out of him. The wish hour is tolerant as Walt Whitman, waltzing across the battlefield like a song covering a cry of distress, but I want to be a storm covering a Confederate parade. The handyman's insistence that there were brigades of black Confederates is as oxymoronic as terms like civil war, free slave. It is the opposite of history. Goodbye plantations doused in Sherman's fire and homely lonesome women weeping over blue and gray bodies. And by colored ghosts, you could have had it north that there was a south to flee. In Louisiana, north begins with Mississippi, as far as I know, east is Alabama, west is Texas.

And here is this food telling me there were blacks who fought to preserve slavery. Goodbye slavery. Hello black accomplices and accomplished blacks. Hello Robert E. Lee, Bobblehead doll on the handyman's dashboard, whistling Dixie across our post-racial country. Last night I watched several hours of television and saw no blacks, NASDAQ, NASCAR, NASDAQ black. I wish there were more ghost stories about lynched Negroes haunting the mobs that lynched them. Do I believe no one among us was alive between 1861 and 1865? I do and I don't. We all have to go somewhere and we are probably already there. I know only one ghost story featuring a brother in Carlton, Alabama dragged to the center of town in a storm for some crime he didn't commit. As he was hung, lightning struck a window on the courthouse he's been haunting ever since. Attention apparitions, this is a solicitation very much like a prayer. Your presence is requested tonight when this man is polishing his civil war relics and singing good old rebel soldier to himself.

Hello sliding chairs, hello vicious whispering shadows, I'm a reasonable man but I want to be as inexplicable as something hanging a dozen feet in the air. See now y'all understand that one. Here maybe two more from the book and then I'll try out some of those new stuff and then if it's more time I guess I'll finish with something else in the book. I do like a long sentence. If I just think about like daily practice when it just comes down to like I got to write something every day just to stay in shape one of my kind of default things in addition to the sign it which we'll talk about it's just like to see how long a sentence can go and sometimes it works that deer poem was actually you can kind of hear it structurally. It was pushing to be one long sentence and then when I stopped I really did think about the story and I just say okay well I break the rule and I'll make a new kind of section to the poem but this one how to draw an invisible man is and there's a few in the book actually

there's always one or two in every book because I you know I try it so much. This one is Ralph Ellison if you know the invisible man and in it there's some stuff about the novel and also some stuff about him and his personality but essentially I was just trying to ride this sentence how much could I ride this sentence before I you know before I came to a stop sign how to draw an invisible man and then when Ralph Ellison's corpse burst open I discovered his body had been hoarding all these years a luscious slush a sludge of arterial words the raw and unsaid pages with their plots and propositions with their arcs of intention and babbling with their mumbling streams and fault starts and their love and misanthropic thrust tendons of syntax unraveled from his bones and intestinal cavities the froth of singing stinging stinking ink reams of script fraught with the demons demagogues and demigods of democracy demographies of vague landscapes passages describing muddy river

bottoms and elaborate protagonist crawling through foliage greener than money in America before America thought to release anyone from its dream the monologue monologues one who was unseen speaks burst suddenly from Ralph Ellison's body and because I mean to live transparently I am here bear with me describing the contents the fictions envisioned by Emerson and immigrants the dogmas aboriginal progeny scholastic recriminations dementia Jubilee hubris and Ralph Ellison Duke Ellington shadow a paragraph on the feathered headdress of Marcus Garvey some of it was pornography some of it alluded to Negroes who believe educating black kids means teaching them to help white people feel comfortable some of it outlined the perks of invisibility how we are obliged to issue the zoo the farm animals it has something to do with captivity flayed in the clinical light the notes printed on the underside of his flesh were reversed but readable mirrored in the metal of the medical table and I wanted to print it all properly

in a posthumous book in the name of prosperity and proof the genius we believed he'd waste it had been waiting all these years for a simple death sentence to break free so this poet Wanda Coleman died a couple of years ago and she was a spectacle is what I like to say about her she was big and she wore like these the zeal glasses in her hair it wasn't dreadlocks it was more like almost like you know Lisa Simpson it would just be like coming out almost like a star shape and she had an affinity for like leopard skins and stripes and polka dots she was a hell of a poet so one of the things she did though that I feel like I'm the only person that thought was wondrous was that she would write these poems called American Sonnets and I wish I had one to read to you right now but I don't because I ain't got no phone in that know me but so anyway if you look her up they they show up in her books and so I thought while she was alive actually and you know we were friends although you had to kind of pass a couple of tests to be friends

with them so we were friends but I sent her this one so it's just called the American Sonnet for Wanda C but I started thinking about it again lately and because my poems have gotten really long I didn't want to bring you too many long poems but I have a poem that's like 1200 words long that's like okay that's too much I need to stop so I thought I'll just write Sonnet's and it just sent me back sent me back to this and so it doesn't scan if that means anything to I think you can graduate without knowing how to scan a poem but it is playing around with like rhyme so like the end clamped and claims and then calm and then calamity and then claiming and then calamity and then calmly or are in her and here and here and here and her and hurt so that's really what I'm messing around with although in the more recent stuff I dispensed with that but what I love is just like the American Sonnet the idea of an American Sonnet versus a Shakespearean Sonnet if you know what I'm talking about or a Petrokin Sonnet or even a Miltonic Sonnet Milton has a kind of Sonnet for him too so I was like okay cool well what does American Sonnet look like

anyway so let me read this one as I said I gave it to her before she passed although it does sound kind of like an allergy at this point American Sonnet for Wanda C who knows I know while all those lush bone worn out girls are whooping at where the moon should be an eyelid clamped on its lightness nobody sees her without the hoops firing in her ears because nobody sees tattooed across her chest she claims is bring me to where my blood runs and I want that to be here where I am her son pent and blackness and turning the night's calm loose and letting the same blood fire through me in her balm hair shells full of thunder in her mouth the fingers of some calamity somebody foolish enough to love her foolishly those who could hear no music weren't listening and when I say it it's like claiming she's an allergy it rhymes because of her with effigy because of her if there

is no smoke there is no party I think of you miss calamity every Sunday I think of you on Monday I think of you hurling hurt where the moon should be and stomping into our darkness calmly all right so that's also fairly straightforward some other stuff's going on so I won't end with these because as I said I don't know I think I got some other stuff to end with instead here's the first two so yet so far I got like six American sonnets from my past and future assassin probably twilight makes blackness dangerous darkness probably all mine counters are existential jambalaya which is to say a nigger can survive something happened in sanford something happened in Ferguson and Brooklyn and Charleston something happened in Chicago and Cleveland and Baltimore and most everywhere in this country probably someone is prey in all of our encounters probably blindness

has a chewed heart in its belly probably twilight makes blackness darkness and a gate probably the dark blue skin of a black man matches the dark blue skin of his son the way one twilight matches another probably all of our encounters are existential jambalaya which is to say can a nigger survive would you rather have happiness or freedom pain or boredom would you rather hitch your rotten rope to a wagon or a hitch your rotten wagon to a leash after blackness was invented people began seeing ghosts when my father told me I was among God's chosen ones he was only half bulls*** probably each twilight is as different as a father is from his son something happens everywhere

in this country every day someone is praying someone is pray probably blindness has a chewed heart in its belly or a gate opening upon another gate so that's two I'm just going to go in through them they don't have like numbers anything probably ghosts are allergic to us our uproarious breathing and ruckus our eruptions our disregard for dust small worlds unworld in the corner of our house after death our warriors weirdos anti-heroes our surs sires our sires sidelinders and winos winers and wonders become dust I know a few of the dead I remember my sisters last to raw I remember the horror of her head on a pillow for a long time the numbers were balanced

the number alive equal to the number in graves after a long time the bones become dust again and the dust after a very long time becomes dirt and the dirt becomes soil and the soil becomes grain again this bitter earth is a song clogging the mouth before it swallowed or spat out they don't seem to want it but they wanted it they don't seem to want it but they want admitted they don't seem to want admittance they don't seem to heart admission they don't seem to want it but they haunted it they don't seem too haunted but they haunted they don't seem to get it but they got it they don't seem to buy it but they sell it they Don't seem to want it but they wanted it they don't seem to pray but they predators my past and future assassins they don't seem to pray but they full of prayers and ghosts they don't seem to want it

but they wanted it. They don't seem too haunted, but they haunted. Probably blindness has a chewed heart in its belly. My sister became a ghost to happiness, freedom, pain, boredom, and the ghosts destroyed my beloved. When I came to, men were dragging her upstairs. They wore red and gloves. She was asleep, but her eyes were open and encrusted with starlight residue and oozing dust. It looked like any minute she might burst into cloud. She might slip through their rubber fingers like glitter. If they rubbed her vigorously enough, I thought she might ignite. They were not knights. They were not doctors or poets. They were not savages or shadows. The words I would use to describe the men would require five or six months of revision to get right.

No one loves a song that's only ten seconds long, or ten seconds old, or made of one note. No one loves a one word poem or blindness. Pure old heart, poor old heart, I've grown tired of talking to you. This bitter earth is an existential jambalaya clogging the mouth. I remember my sister's last hurrah. Probably someone is prey in all of our encounters. Probably twilight makes blackness, dangerous, sadness old heart, dear poison. She was asleep, but her eyes were open. It was a kind of blindness. She joined the black people I've grown tired of losing. They were going upstairs together. All the dead from parts of Florida, Ferguson, Brooklyn, Charleston, Cleveland, Chicago, Baltimore, everywhere. Would you rather hitch your rotten whiteness to a wagon, or hitch your rotten wagon to blackness my sweet past and future assassin,

my sweetness, sweetness, sweetness? One more kind of weird one, but it's weird because I don't know who you're going to know. It's called homage to Gertrude Badu. It's just two women, I really, you know, at my Gertrude Stein and Eric Badu. I was thinking, make them one person and then pretend you went to high school with them. See what happens. This is like somebody, again, I don't know who's going to know both. That's what they are, Gertrude Badu. So it's just an unusual, unusual crush, as what I would say. If your mama was fine as half a bottle of honey wine, or your daddy cool as a coin tossed into a wishing well, well, yeah, she might compliment your style.

But more often than not, her eyeglasses were tuned to whatever she was spray painting on the war streets. We like to speak in plural case because we pluralistic. This is what she told me before signing her seven pseudonyms, 11 nicknames, and four radio handles in my yearbook. So it's no telling how she felt about me. Her shoes, I think they were called miners boots. Once when she stooped to blow smoke into the mouth of a neighbor's pit bug, I saw the glitter on her G-string. Her and the pig-tailed cashier from the corner store stole the preacher's two-pound Bible. She ain't speaking nothing but verbs like hush, go, stop, to priest, and anyone else peddling so-called myth science. Her and the girl with the head of freckles broken to the Mickey D and the Joanne fabric, the Asian back rub parlor, and then left all the goods in the lawn of our high school principal. You know what you call someone who wins by cheating?

She asked me later that day, a winner. No one lives in adult movies, she used to say. If I recited all the laws of the Nostics, she promised to kiss me in some mysterious way or some even more mysterious part of my longing. She told me trombone was always the word of the day. And also, anytime one finds oneself facing oneself in a mirror, one must say to the mirror, you don't know shit about me. She used to say, you can't be free, trapped in a body. Okay. And ours poetica with bacon is the one I'll end with. And that's really not that much to say. I mean, I do like a little fable here and there. And so I like to kind of play around with that form from time to time. So this one just called ours poetica with bacon. Fortunately, the family anxious about its diminishing food supply encountered a small, possibly hostile pig along the way.

The daughter happened upon it first, pushing its scuffed snout against something hidden at the base of a thorn bush, a blood-covered egg maybe, or a small rubber ball exactly like the sword that snapped from the paddle my mother used to beat me with when I let her down. At the time, the father and mother were tangled in some dispute about cause and effect. Who harmed whom first? How jealousy did not in fact begin as jealousy but as desperation. When the daughter called out to them, they turned to see her lift the pig. It was no heavier than an orphan from the bushes and then set it down in their path. They waited to see whether the pig might idle forward with them until they made camp a wander back toward the home they had abandoned to war. Night began to fall upon them.

Consequence is the word that splintered my mind. Walking a path in the dark is about something the way a family is about something. Like the pig, I too wanted to reach through the thorns for the egg or the ball believing it was a symbol of things to come. I wanted to roll it in my palm like the head of a small red bird until it sank to me. I wanted to know how my mother passed her days having never touched her husband's for example. I'd been hired to lead the family from danger to a territory full of more seeds than bullets but truth was in the darkness there was no telling what was rooting in the soil. Plots of complete silence, romantics posing in a field, bludgeoned by shame. The heart, biologically speaking, is ugly as it pumps its passion and fear down the vein.

Which is to say, starting out, we have no wounds to speak of. Beyond the ways our parents expressed their love. We were never sure what the pig was after. Whether it was in fact not a pig, but some single-minded soul despair had turned into a pig. Some devil worthy of mercy. Without giving away the enigmatic ending, I will say when we swallowed the flesh, our eyes were closed. How about we stop there, y'all. Thank you. So I will know by your questions if that was like a really, really weird set. It felt weird to me.

That's like Miles Davis only playing on the corner, but I wouldn't have my back to you. Again, only half y'all, a quarter y'all going to know what I'm talking about. So that's like, you know, it was a little far out. And you've got a little bit of the range. And what I will say to you, if you are used to poems about grandmothers that go beginning middle and end, I would say like, you know, me too, like the world is full of stories. But that's why I always want to go, you know, a little bit into the equivalent of like the free jazz. It's not improvised, but it is constructed by my ear as opposed to like, you know, experience or whatever. So before you ask those, you can still ask those kinds of questions. But I'm saying to you, I too, it's a risk for me too. It's a challenge for me too, which is why I'm like, oh, how these things are going to work. Are these things going to work? Also, don't get up to the mic and be like, those were great. You know, don't encourage me. Just ask me something else. But I'm saying like, that is part of the work for me, like to kind of play between those two. You know, one wall like, that's pretty narrative and the other wall is pretty, I wouldn't even call it experimental, just more like sound.

You know, it's a difference between music with lyrics and music with no lyrics or something like that. So that's all I care about today. That's what I was working out. So I think about how I feel about it later on. Y'all got questions? Or are we good? We can do it a little too. You know, you can shout it out. I don't know if you need to necessarily get to the mic. I'll repeat it. Yes, ma'am. As it turns out, Terrence Hayes did not end up repeating the off mic questions from the audience. The first of which was about his American Sonnet. It was just a thing that a poet that I respect. And her son is also very strange too. That's why I should have one like this American sonnet number 34. It's like boo. It's like seven o's. Boo. And then she's just off. She's saying crazy things. One was kind of a letter form. Another one ended with like a whole bunch of ease. Like you know, so I look at that and I think probably what you were thinking tonight. Like man, I was crazy. What is she doing, you know. But thinking too that I find that pretty intriguing or kind of free. So it was her.

And that was sort of what she did. I think she, for me, I'm thinking of him as like little boxes where I can put sound inside. So the thing that sounded most interesting to me. It was sort of in the water of those poems. It's just like probably. I got those bees in there. Elves probably, probably. Not maybe. That's not as interesting a word to me. But probably. So that's sort of one of the ways that it got initiated. And it kind of comes back. But it's just, you know, it's just practice. That's what I always like to say. It's just the thing that I'm practicing. Maybe it'll make it to the game and be in a book or maybe it won't. But it's sort of both thinking about her. Sunday was a birthday. I mean, I had already started. I didn't like write these in this. I did not write poems quickly like that. But so I had already been thinking about her. And what it was called actually is what I'll say. It was just called for my past and future assassin. And then I was thinking about her and Sunday because it was a birthday. And realizing that they are all sonnets. So I was like, oh, yeah. I mean, I'm still doing it. She's still an influence. So I just, I called them American sonnets to for anyone who knows what she did or what she does.

They'll understand the relationship. But other people would just see them as, you know, weird American sonnets, which will also be true. Yeah. So what else? What else? Yes. The second audience question to poet Terrence Hayes was which artist have influenced him and his work? Sure. Well, what I will tell you is that I do have another, I didn't bring it because I was like, they ain't ready for that in Kansas. So I'll tell you the story. And you're like, after everything you read, how could we not be ready for it? So one of my favorite dudes is Lucian Freud. And so if you know Lucian Freud is like, she's like, she's a grandson or was. He lived to be pretty old. But the way I would describe him is that he liked bodies. Which is why he had like 14, at least 14 kids. A bunch of different women. Which is actually connected to the poem that I did not bring you. But I will, this is sort of working it out. So I like his work. So it starts with that. And his paintings, if you don't know him, you should look him up. It's like if Van Gogh was just going to paint bodies. So the paint is on the canvas like that.

Not as kind of vibrant. He likes like fairly realistic flash tones. But it's a lot of paint, you know. And so I was always interested in him. And I was like, you know, what about Lucian Freud? So I knew this story from a documentary. I probably watched it 10 years ago. Someone talking about him liking to be beat up. Going to places and getting beat up by younger dudes. And so he was maybe in the 60s. And so I was thinking about like, what would he do to cause a younger guy to lay him out, which is what had happened in the scenario. And then what would he be thinking about when that happened? So the poem is called like Lucian Freud. So you can kind of guess what it's about. It's like maybe he calls to do that. And then the dude hits him and then while he's laid out. Because he's got some kind of weird sexual perverse. I mean, he's related to Freud. So that just gave me a license to really like play with that. And maybe it's not quite done. You know, you don't want to like, you know, that's like dynamite. You don't want to bring a poem with it being it. If it ain't quite finished. So I thought, well, let me work on that a little bit longer. Make sure I believe it before I bring it out.

So, but that's really, that's not the last, I mean, one of the, they wanted, they seemed to want it, but they wanted it. That part of the American scientist is probably the newest thing. But it's just playing with the word. Like, you know, he calls some dude that. And then the dudes beat him up. And he's, you know, obsessing over him. Stuff hallucinating. So we'll see what happens with that. But that's also, I mean, like a persona poem I like. So it's in his voice. I do like to, you know, pretend to be other people. Because it allows me to say, you know, like, I can't say it. Loosen Freud can. So, you know, I find personas very useful from time to time. So that, so I guess what I'm saying is that it does start in a basic appreciation, like see Rothko and be like, oh, that's cool. Rothko, why didn't he kill himself, you know? And then that kind of spiraling, it's usually connected to like personality. But I only get there by virtue of the work first. My relationship to art is that it triggers more art, as opposed to like me trying to kind of honor it or write about it in a really kind of like straightforward way. That makes any sense.

So yeah. That's poet Terrence Hayes speaking at KU's lead center on November 17th, 2016, as part of the Hall Center for the Humanities lecture series. Before that, George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardot. Again, Saunders will be at Lawrence's Liberty Hall on Tuesday, October 10th. That event is free and open to the public. I'm Kay McIntyre, KPR presents is a production of Kansas Public Radio at the University of Kansas.