D’MANI THOMAS
RLU: I want to ask you a poetry question.
DT: Okay.
RLU: Poem at the beginning of the world #1 weaves the story of the original fall from grace,
this primary feminine mistake, into Oakland’s geography. We travel from myth to materiality. Then the poem arrives in the chair of the braider’s salon. To me, this poem explores how women can make beautiful their own disrepute or out of that which is discarded. I was also reading into the poem that there's nothing that the “we” of the poem—Black femmes—can't make beautiful. I guess this question is about your relationship to beauty, your relationship to Oakland, and how you think of this city–your hometown—that has its own mythology about it, precisely because this poem explores the convergence between the myth that began the world and the place that began you.
DT: I have big beef with a lot of the origin stories we’re told. Adam and Eve just never made sense to me. Okay, you made a whole person out of your rib, and then you made a second person, apparently, and it's their fault? Okay. Something feels off here. I was born and raised in East Oakland and in the early 2000s a lot of media and news reports compared Oakland to war zones, which was very jarring for me. Yes, there are gangs here, but there’s also the Art and Soul Festival, which doesn't happen anymore. There are kids dancing in Frank Ogawa Plaza and there are Oakland youth poet laureates and there's all of this artwork everywhere. And I'm like, it feels like some data points aren't matching the reality of the situation—similar to my beef with Adam and Eve. Writing that poem, it was like, “I feel like, deep in my heart, Eve and Lilith are cool and I feel like Adam's the problem.” That poem actually sat in my Google Drive for three years because I'm very hard on myself. So I wrote that poem, and then I was like, “Oh, this just isn't good.” And it just sat there. At the top of the year, I saw Muzzle’s call for submissions. I was like, fuck it.
RLU: Working in media, I'm always curious about how these stories get written and who wrote them. The person who was narrativizing Oakland as a war zone was someone who felt entitled to storytelling that intended to make people afraid and ashamed. Not so dissimilar from Adam and Eve; a story told to make women ashamed. Edenic eschaton brought about by consumption; it’s food that prefigures corporeal shame, and it’s this shame that is so intrinsic to Christianity. As with this poem, why not counter myth with myth, and why not reposition myth within its own precarity—demonstrate its fallacy.
Can I do something annoying and quote you back to you? For my next question, I want to counterpose two lines of poetry that I think are actually in conversation with one another.
One of the poems that you read for the launch of your chapbook, Grownup Elementary was “Self Portrait As America Asking for All The Black People Back.” The line goes: “I can make a missing poster out of anything / even a menu.” The other poem is called [No title] and it has a line from Sabrina Carpenter. The line is “I’m so in love with being wanted/ that I don’t mind/ My lover / says things like “If you show me too much love it makes me leave.”
In this sad Sabrina Carpenter poem there’s this exchange of self for money and time. The speaker struggles with the valuation of time with money. Being able to move through time unmediated by the dollar is rare and calls to question how loving and spending time with loved ones can be a political statement or is made political because that time is rendered more precious.
This exchange of time for money flattens the substance (time) that we live our lives in. Maybe the connective tissue in these poems that I’m reaching for are ways that both loverhood and work can flatten, objectify, or obviate our humanity.
DT: First of all, I love that—the sad Sabrina Carpenter. I also think it's really fascinating that you put these two in conversation, just from a time perspective. I wrote the Sabrina Carpenter poem three years ago, around the same time as the Adam and Eve poem. “America Asking for All the Black People Back" I wrote back earlier this year. But yes, they are in conversation.
In the Sabrina Carpenter poem I'm trying to make sense of the exchange rate of intimacy. And there are subscription models to buy someone’s time. You could pay for a message, but does that make you special? But then one has to look inward: I did [XYZ] and what does that make me? I just thought it would be fascinating to look at a future where maybe the poem takes place after the spell for time travel is invented and all of these people have left. America is left to deal with that void. A false love letter—what does that look like? What does love look like if it's rooted in what another person can do for you? Towards the end of the poem the veil falls and it becomes a threat. The tone is: you left a mess, come clean it up, versus a tone that says, “I genuinely miss these intangible things about your presence (and maybe that harkens to a digital interaction or digital presence).
RLU: A question of what it means to belong to someone. Given the exchange rate of intimacy, as you say, maybe there is a trade or something being brokered in any intimate interaction. I believe love is a commitment, but there can be elements of a more caustic exchange. I think both poems enhance what we may take for granted: that belonging to a people and to a place are such fragile experiences.
DT: Yeah, fragile. Fragile, I think, is the closest word I can find as well. Belonging to a country that’s a really fucked up empire is very fragile for a lot of people, especially with the current state of things. For the audience at home, I'm using a lot of hand motions. [Ha] But yes, love as a thing rooted in the amount of money you have in order to maintain access to someone is very fragile. We’re constantly being fed these forms of love, which can make you hyper aware of your own situation and your own relationships.
RLU: I also want to be wary of moralizing certain interactions over others. I feel like technology can mediate intimacy just as much as it can erase it under the guise of providing it. I think about queer communities flourishing online because of population density, lack of safety in physical spaces or maybe you're disabled and being online is one of the main mechanisms for connection. But also, if you’re at home all day jerking off to like women, is that intimacy? Is that intimacy with yourself?
DT: That’s a question. At the height of the pandemic during the shelter in place ordinance—that park sucked—but something I thought was beautiful was how people, especially in the arts community, pivoted to open mics and slams online because it allowed for people that were like immunocompromised and disabled to finally be on an equal platform with people who can compete with a loud bar and don't have to think about if the stage has stairs. It’s you, your screen, and a silly zoom background.
RLU: And intimacy in those spaces is possible precisely because of the intangible versus what you were saying earlier—the problematic nature of intimacy that we can’t hold onto, that’s immaterial. Still, there's something about the emotionality of an interaction that you can't really hold and that's what makes it special.
DT: For some reason the movie, Call Me By Your Name comes to mind. At the end of that movie, he's sitting in front of a fireplace and there’s this over spill of emotion that his parents pick up on, and they're like, he hasn't said it, but like you can feel that. You can feel that some things don't need words, but the process of trying to explain a fleeting moment is complicated. It's like, how does this kid begin to explain that to his parents in front of a fireplace? But I think there's a lot of stories like that; how do you name that which can’t be put into words?
RLU: I was at a Tamarack poetry reading and one of the poets said that language always exists in front of us, that we're always entering into language. I wonder about the project you mentioned before about cops monitoring queer spaces. What language would the patrons of these bars use to describe themselves? What language or experience of language (existance) could the cops criminalize? What languaging makes possible variousness of experience? How does language delimit experience?
I think poetry does that really well: articulating something ineffible. You could have written a paper on the figures of Eden but that wouldn't say what you needed to say.
DT: Maybe this is an invisible thing about consent, but I think people who agree to go to poetry events also agree to suspend their disbelief or opt into being whimsical. You have to be okay with someone using a ridiculous metaphor. You bought a ticket for two minutes. You are on a stage. People are being asked to listen to you and your attempt at making sense of a situation through language. And sometimes it works.
DT: Okay.
RLU: Poem at the beginning of the world #1 weaves the story of the original fall from grace,
this primary feminine mistake, into Oakland’s geography. We travel from myth to materiality. Then the poem arrives in the chair of the braider’s salon. To me, this poem explores how women can make beautiful their own disrepute or out of that which is discarded. I was also reading into the poem that there's nothing that the “we” of the poem—Black femmes—can't make beautiful. I guess this question is about your relationship to beauty, your relationship to Oakland, and how you think of this city–your hometown—that has its own mythology about it, precisely because this poem explores the convergence between the myth that began the world and the place that began you.
DT: I have big beef with a lot of the origin stories we’re told. Adam and Eve just never made sense to me. Okay, you made a whole person out of your rib, and then you made a second person, apparently, and it's their fault? Okay. Something feels off here. I was born and raised in East Oakland and in the early 2000s a lot of media and news reports compared Oakland to war zones, which was very jarring for me. Yes, there are gangs here, but there’s also the Art and Soul Festival, which doesn't happen anymore. There are kids dancing in Frank Ogawa Plaza and there are Oakland youth poet laureates and there's all of this artwork everywhere. And I'm like, it feels like some data points aren't matching the reality of the situation—similar to my beef with Adam and Eve. Writing that poem, it was like, “I feel like, deep in my heart, Eve and Lilith are cool and I feel like Adam's the problem.” That poem actually sat in my Google Drive for three years because I'm very hard on myself. So I wrote that poem, and then I was like, “Oh, this just isn't good.” And it just sat there. At the top of the year, I saw Muzzle’s call for submissions. I was like, fuck it.
RLU: Working in media, I'm always curious about how these stories get written and who wrote them. The person who was narrativizing Oakland as a war zone was someone who felt entitled to storytelling that intended to make people afraid and ashamed. Not so dissimilar from Adam and Eve; a story told to make women ashamed. Edenic eschaton brought about by consumption; it’s food that prefigures corporeal shame, and it’s this shame that is so intrinsic to Christianity. As with this poem, why not counter myth with myth, and why not reposition myth within its own precarity—demonstrate its fallacy.
Can I do something annoying and quote you back to you? For my next question, I want to counterpose two lines of poetry that I think are actually in conversation with one another.
One of the poems that you read for the launch of your chapbook, Grownup Elementary was “Self Portrait As America Asking for All The Black People Back.” The line goes: “I can make a missing poster out of anything / even a menu.” The other poem is called [No title] and it has a line from Sabrina Carpenter. The line is “I’m so in love with being wanted/ that I don’t mind/ My lover / says things like “If you show me too much love it makes me leave.”
In this sad Sabrina Carpenter poem there’s this exchange of self for money and time. The speaker struggles with the valuation of time with money. Being able to move through time unmediated by the dollar is rare and calls to question how loving and spending time with loved ones can be a political statement or is made political because that time is rendered more precious.
This exchange of time for money flattens the substance (time) that we live our lives in. Maybe the connective tissue in these poems that I’m reaching for are ways that both loverhood and work can flatten, objectify, or obviate our humanity.
DT: First of all, I love that—the sad Sabrina Carpenter. I also think it's really fascinating that you put these two in conversation, just from a time perspective. I wrote the Sabrina Carpenter poem three years ago, around the same time as the Adam and Eve poem. “America Asking for All the Black People Back" I wrote back earlier this year. But yes, they are in conversation.
In the Sabrina Carpenter poem I'm trying to make sense of the exchange rate of intimacy. And there are subscription models to buy someone’s time. You could pay for a message, but does that make you special? But then one has to look inward: I did [XYZ] and what does that make me? I just thought it would be fascinating to look at a future where maybe the poem takes place after the spell for time travel is invented and all of these people have left. America is left to deal with that void. A false love letter—what does that look like? What does love look like if it's rooted in what another person can do for you? Towards the end of the poem the veil falls and it becomes a threat. The tone is: you left a mess, come clean it up, versus a tone that says, “I genuinely miss these intangible things about your presence (and maybe that harkens to a digital interaction or digital presence).
RLU: A question of what it means to belong to someone. Given the exchange rate of intimacy, as you say, maybe there is a trade or something being brokered in any intimate interaction. I believe love is a commitment, but there can be elements of a more caustic exchange. I think both poems enhance what we may take for granted: that belonging to a people and to a place are such fragile experiences.
DT: Yeah, fragile. Fragile, I think, is the closest word I can find as well. Belonging to a country that’s a really fucked up empire is very fragile for a lot of people, especially with the current state of things. For the audience at home, I'm using a lot of hand motions. [Ha] But yes, love as a thing rooted in the amount of money you have in order to maintain access to someone is very fragile. We’re constantly being fed these forms of love, which can make you hyper aware of your own situation and your own relationships.
RLU: I also want to be wary of moralizing certain interactions over others. I feel like technology can mediate intimacy just as much as it can erase it under the guise of providing it. I think about queer communities flourishing online because of population density, lack of safety in physical spaces or maybe you're disabled and being online is one of the main mechanisms for connection. But also, if you’re at home all day jerking off to like women, is that intimacy? Is that intimacy with yourself?
DT: That’s a question. At the height of the pandemic during the shelter in place ordinance—that park sucked—but something I thought was beautiful was how people, especially in the arts community, pivoted to open mics and slams online because it allowed for people that were like immunocompromised and disabled to finally be on an equal platform with people who can compete with a loud bar and don't have to think about if the stage has stairs. It’s you, your screen, and a silly zoom background.
RLU: And intimacy in those spaces is possible precisely because of the intangible versus what you were saying earlier—the problematic nature of intimacy that we can’t hold onto, that’s immaterial. Still, there's something about the emotionality of an interaction that you can't really hold and that's what makes it special.
DT: For some reason the movie, Call Me By Your Name comes to mind. At the end of that movie, he's sitting in front of a fireplace and there’s this over spill of emotion that his parents pick up on, and they're like, he hasn't said it, but like you can feel that. You can feel that some things don't need words, but the process of trying to explain a fleeting moment is complicated. It's like, how does this kid begin to explain that to his parents in front of a fireplace? But I think there's a lot of stories like that; how do you name that which can’t be put into words?
RLU: I was at a Tamarack poetry reading and one of the poets said that language always exists in front of us, that we're always entering into language. I wonder about the project you mentioned before about cops monitoring queer spaces. What language would the patrons of these bars use to describe themselves? What language or experience of language (existance) could the cops criminalize? What languaging makes possible variousness of experience? How does language delimit experience?
I think poetry does that really well: articulating something ineffible. You could have written a paper on the figures of Eden but that wouldn't say what you needed to say.
DT: Maybe this is an invisible thing about consent, but I think people who agree to go to poetry events also agree to suspend their disbelief or opt into being whimsical. You have to be okay with someone using a ridiculous metaphor. You bought a ticket for two minutes. You are on a stage. People are being asked to listen to you and your attempt at making sense of a situation through language. And sometimes it works.