day pulls down the sky / a filament in gold leaf

"As I made my list, I realized that almost all of these poets are thinking about and working with materials that are outside of the official boundaries of poetry. How do you make poetry right now? All of these books are asking that question in a really beautiful way. This one is a collaborative book. Asiya Wadud, who I mentioned to you is a caregiver to my son sometimes, teaches poetry to small children. I knew Asiya as a poet before I knew anything about her professional job as a teacher of poetry to small children at Saint Ann’s School in New York, but that’s what her job is—she’s amazing with little kids. One of her other talents is that she’s a beautiful writer. Her first book, Crosslight for Youngbird (2018), is great. Day pulls down the sky/a filament in a gold leaf is a collaboration between Asiya Wadud and Okwui Okpokwasili, who recently won a MacArthur grant . She’s known as a dancer and movement artist. Working together with Okwui’s songs, Asiya in meditation on those songs would produce poems. One of the most interesting things about this book is how this collaboration has been orchestrated on the page. I am interested in the way that the poems’ appearance on the page demonstrates a form of conversation and also suggests a modality of performance. Asiya’s poem will be at the top, looking like a poem, and then in another font at the bottom will be a song upon which she has meditated in composition of the poem. You might think about it as a text for performance, like a libretto. It’s a book that thinks deeply about what song is, and poetry’s relationship to song. What is a chorus? What does it mean to be in a multivocal performance mode or composition mode? What does it mean to have a single voice? Those are very interesting questions, and they’re very profoundly realized in the book itself. One of the reasons I picked these books to talk about is that they’re independently delightful at the level of language. There isn’t anything incomprehensible or unintelligible in these books. All the words are words that are known to us. They all have a kind of magical reality to them, but that’s actually the great thing about reading a work like this. I don’t think they push back against our understanding with disinterest. These are all welcoming texts that are interested in relationships—relationships with readers, too. “Poetry is not here to make your day better, or to confirm what you already know about your day” Poetry is not here to make your day better, in my view. Or to confirm what you already know about your day. Poetry is here to stir your linguistic facilities, to give you the equipment to understand words differently every minute. A book like Love Three is incredibly easy to read. It’s the kind of book I would give someone for Christmas—someone who was a serious reader. It would blow their mind. Exactly. Or sexy, which is one of the questions of the text: what’s the relationship between poetry and pleasure and desire? And that’s the very question you’re asking me."