I’m excited to share this conversation. The idea is that this kind of “dual interview” format might allow us to dig a little deeper into questions of craft and “the work” of our work, and just be a fun way to connect.
Ollie’s work is incredible, and I’m super grateful that they agreed to do this (and create the pullquote graphics sprinkled throughout); my initial thought was that these would be relatively short, but of course we ended up with… a lot. But this whole conversation is so good, and I hope aspiring/emerging writers, poets, and/or just people interested in our work can find something useful in it.
Get Ollie’s book, Dead Dad Jokes, here. Get my book, Not a Lot of Reasons to Sing, but Enough, here.
it doesn’t take a bolt of lightning to keep the television on- just the steady, background hum of electricity, the invisible power coursing through the walls. My earliest memory of masculinity is not a particle, it’s a wave. My earliest memory of masculinity is not a man, it’s a mask.
This is actually an older piece; Button Poetry posted a version of it back in 2019, but there was an audio issue, so we decided to record this new version. I’m grateful, as always, to them for giving an admittedly… nontraditional poem/speech/thing like this a home.
It’s also a fun break from promoting my new book; the sci-fi-driven “Not a Lot of Reasons to Sing, but Enough” definitely has a thread running through it examining masculinity and its relationship with authoritarianism, but a poem like this, taking place on our world, written in my own voice, can be a lot more straightforward. I don’t think “straightforward” is a good thing or a bad thing; it’s just one way for a poem to be, and I like experimenting with multiple ways.
This is a special preview chapter from my book, Not a Lot of Reasons to Sing, but Enough. The book is more-or-less a poetry book, but it’s written from the perspective of various characters; sometimes, those characters do other things beyond writing and performing poems—they have conversations, get into arguments, tell stories, and participate in panel discussions. Since Button will be posting a bunch of poems/videos from the book (like this one) over the next few months, I figured I’d share one of these non-poem pieces here.
In this excerpt, the robot poet Gyre has been invited to be part of a panel discussion; Gyre doesn’t want to, though, so makes their apprentice Nary do it instead.
The Role of the Artist in Times of Authoritarian Brutality: A Panel Discussion
The Great Hall of Castle Whitecap, temporary host of the Floating University, the largest and onlyest center of learning outside of Heart. Our cast is seated on a bench behind a long, elevated table at the front of the room; students, faculty, and staff haphazardly occupy some 30-40 of the 200 rickety wooden chairs below. An owl tries to sleep in the rafters of the impressive, if not a bit ostentatious, hall.
Moderator: Welcome, students, faculty, and staff of the Floating University. We have some very special guests with us today for this important conversation. As many of you know, the council of Heart has been moving further and further away from the principles set into place by Hen March and the First Congress all those years ago. From the increase in propaganda, to the expanded role of the guard corps, to the ongoing saber rattling between districts—our society would be nigh-unrecognizable to March, were she still with us today. We are here today to discuss what artists can do in response to this reality. Allow me to introduce our panel.
How small a seed it takes to birth a forest. How small a spark it takes to burn down an empire.
If I’m being honest, this is maybe my favorite poem of mine, or at least one that means a lot to me. I’m very grateful that Button was able to capture this footage and chose to share it. A few quick notes:
I wrote this during the pandemic, parallel to writing my new book. It’s not actually in the new book, though, since that book takes place on another world and this poem is full of very Earth-centric references. But both this poem and that book explore the idea of what hope can mean, and what it can look like, amidst great crisis, grief, and uncertainty. So if you like the poem, you might like the book too.
I also want to be clear that, to me at least, this is a poem about finding those moments when we can choose to step up, to show up, to act. I realize that it will likely be interpreted to be more about mental health, and I worry that a line like “it only takes one moment to choose to fight” might hit differently depending on how people are hearing the poem. Of course, everyone is free to interpret how they need to; I’m just saying that for me, the poem is less about dealing with depression in a mental health sense, and more about dealing with cynicism in a political sense.
The poem is built from not just some of my favorite songs, but my favorite individual moments in songs. Obviously, there’s a deeper metaphor at work here, and the poem isn’t actually *about* the songs. But compiling those moments was really fun; my favorite moments aren’t always from my favorite artists, and my favorite artists don’t all show up in this poem. I would recommend it as a playlist-building exercise for anyone. It forced me to really identify those rare moments when a song “turns,” or where an already-great song becomes something truly transcendent.
Speaking of playlists, I made one for this poem here, especially for anyone who isn’t super familiar with the songs I chose. Bear in mind, however, that the timestamps in the poem might not be perfectly accurate, since different versions of songs (especially with videos) might have additional content that changes when the moments happen. But they should be close, at least.
Thanks so much for watching and sharing. I’d love to keep adding to this list, by the way. So if you have a favorite moment from a song, please feel free to share with me, whether on IG or whatever.
Here’s the text. The video is for an earlier draft of this piece; since then, I’ve added to it. Probably not necessary additions on a poetry level, haha, but just some extra shout outs that I wanted to include:
~~~
TENSION AND RELEASE
One minute and 42 seconds into Springsteen’s Thunder Road, when the whole song opens up exactly as though you had just… rolled down the window, to let the wind blow back your hair. 24 seconds into Yoko Kanno’s Tank! and how could we not jam? The dance choreographed to Nina Simone’s Lilac Wine, about 38 minutes and 58 seconds into the Netflix version of Beyonce’s Homecoming. Four minutes and 27 seconds into Mind Playin’ Tricks on Me, when Bushwick Bill says… I’m not going to tell you what he says! You have to listen to the song. Five minutes and six seconds into Donny Hathaway’s A Song for You. 18 seconds into Fortunate Son by CCR. 10 seconds into Lost Ones by Lauryn Hill.
I don’t believe in magic, or miracles, or destiny. Just tension and release.
In 9th Wonder by Digable Planets, Ladybug Mecca comes in at 3:11 with… “Now you see that I’m 68 inches above sea level/ 93 million miles above these devils,” …and that rhyme, like it was meant to be, like it couldn’t be any other way, answers a question I never knew I was asking. Four minutes into Radiohead’s Let Down, the lead vocal pulls itself apart, like the splitting of a cell, like the splitting of an atom. Like 44 seconds into Think by Aretha Franklin, when a song that was already great, and already would have been a classic, transforms, and transcends… that lyric: “freedom.” Expanding, overwhelming… miraculous.
We collect and catalog these moments. Mixtape our memory. Call it inspiration; call it ammunition. Call it evidence, the building of a case for our species, the idea that as much tension as there is in this world, the release is worth fighting for.
Pull up the footage of Sam Cooke covering Blowin’ in the Wind. Or Gogol Bordello performing Wanderlust King on Letterman. Or the video for Never Catch Me by Flying Lotus and Kendrick Lamar. Or Kesha hitting that high note in Praying. Or BTS tearing up as ARMY sings Young Forever at Wembley Stadium. Tension and release works so well in music because it’s a language our bodies already speak. At four minutes and nine seconds into Pa’lante by Hurray for the Riff Raff. We listen to our bodies. In Sabotage by the Beastie Boys: the breakdown at 1:40 and the scream at 1:52. We listen to our bodies. We feel. The bassline in Papa Was a Rolling Stone. The bassline in #1 Crush. The bassline in Come as You Are. The bassline in Dance, Dance. The bassline in Devil’s Pie.
At the lowest point in my life, I listened to D’angelo’s Voodoo every night, usually falling asleep about halfway through Send It On. But then there’s this moment, 42 minutes and 30 seconds later, in the song Untitled, where what feels like an entire album’s worth of sunrise finally erupts into day… and that would always wake me up.
And isn’t that art? Waking up.
Isn’t that the power of a moment? The DJ crossfades and a door opens. Between oblivion and being a body again. How does it feel? To step through it?
Because yeah, it takes more than a moment… to win. Or to heal. Or to build the world we want to live in. But it only takes one moment to choose to fight. So make me a playlist of those moments, and I will listen to it whenever I need to remember: how small a seed it takes to birth a forest. How small a spark it takes to burn down an empire. How all it takes to break an infinite silence, is one… two, one two three…
Here, you can find the poem (written in 2020, went viral in 2022, and then recontextualized in 2024 and 2026), followed by some additional commentary. If you can’t tell, I have mixed feelings about this piece! I stand by the broader point it’s making, but I don’t love that one specific excerpt (voting as fire extinguisher) has been shared so much out-of-context; I think this poem only works as a whole, as an exploration of an idea from multiple angles. I write more about that in the 2024 update below.
The Original Post + Poem (2020)
I wrote this for Voices for Racial Justice’s online Get-Out-The-Vote event, where I performed alongside Erin Sharkey, Michael Kleber-Diggs, Sun Yung Shin, Essence Blakemore, Anaïs, and Kevin Reese.
Also, if you’re reading this before election day, here’s my post sharing some links and resources on the process and why I think it matters. I’d also point to some other writing on this topic:
The poem itself is really just me trying to write something for my 18 year-old self, illuminating the various arguments I’ve heard, from organizers over the years, about why and how voting matters. It’s very rarely “vote because you have to!” or “vote because it’s the only way you can have a voice!” The best arguments, or at least the ones that have been most persuasive to me, are more nuanced than that. Not that nuance is always my thing as a poet… but here’s the poem:
Update: lots of new eyes on this piece because it’s the source of the sample in Fred Again’s beautiful “Kyle (I Found You)” …yes, I’m Kyle. Check out more of my poems, songs, and beyond all over this website.
“Ours is not a love song sprouted from redemption, hope, or even longing… but it is a love song. Sing it under your breath. Sharpen it, every morning.”
This is an older poem of mine (it’s available along with many others in my book); those of you who know my work may know: it’s gone through three different titles. I like this one the best; I also like this footage/performance better than older ones.
It’s a love poem, and yeah it’s kind of a weird love poem, but it’s a poem that’s always meant a lot to me. I think love poems are great opportunities to dig into some of the nuances of our emotions; there’s longing and romance in this poem, but there’s also fatalism and cynicism; those impulses can exist at the same time. To me, some of the most “anthemic,” soul-stirring media is about deeply cynical people maybe finding hope not in external possibilities or heroes, but just in each other; that us-against-the-world impulse.
Not to get too word-nerdy, but I also love the word “undeath.” I think it communicates something powerful not just about vampires and zombies, but about in-between spaces, about states of being that move over borders and transcend easy, black-and-white dichotomies.
I hope you like it; please feel free to share. Here’s the transcript; I share it here for accessibility’s sake, but of course, if you like, please consider getting my book.
Call me Hmong before you call me American/ because Hmong is the closest word I know to home…
The first line of this poem is “Eight responses to the phrase ‘go back to where you came from,’” and Yang uses that setup to craft a narrative that is both deeply political and deeply personal. Specifically, there’s a moment in the poem where the phrase/question is turned back to its speaker: “Do you ever wonder where you come from?” That structure—starting with a kind of defensive humor and naturally transitioning into proud defiance, using the language itself as a fulcrum—gives this poem a powerful arc.
A lot of aspiring/emerging poets struggle with structure. This may be because of the stereotype of poetry as this kind of magical, pure, stream-of-consciousness expression. And sure, that can be powerful. But if you watch enough *good* spoken word, you’ll see how much intentionality goes into structure– not “structure” in the same way that sonnets or haikus have specific rules/formats, but more like an organizing impulse. That may be as simple as giving a poem an introduction, middle, climax, and resolution (with intentional transitions between ideas), or something more complex and challenging that plays with formula and subverts audience expectations.
When talking about this broader idea of structure with students, we often ask questions like: Is there a reason the poem starts where it starts? Could it start somewhere else? Is there a reason the poem ends where it ends? Does it “earn” that ending based on what came before? How does the poem “move” from one stanza/idea/section to the next? What would the effect of rearranging some of those ideas be? When you say the poem out loud, does it “feel” right in terms of its flow and timing?
If you know Kevin Yang’s work, you may also know how good he is at structuring poems. He’s also, for me, one of the best at taking on explicitly political issues and putting a human face on them. This is a poem about big issues like xenophobia, the refugee experience, and finding home, but it’s also a poem about small, specific moments– the conversation with the elder, the wisdom of the mother, the hummingbird. As poets, we earn the “big stuff” via the care we put into writing the “little stuff,” and Yang does that so well.
Be sure to check out Kevin’s other poems online! He’s one of my favorite poets, and has a ton of work that is especially useful for teachers/educators looking for poems to use in the classroom.
***EDIT: This poem/post is from 2017 (and includes some specific references to that time), but the video below is the higher-quality version that Button Poetry shared in 2020)
The Japanese American Citizen’s League asked me to write a piece for the 2017 Day of Remembrance (the day in 1942 that Executive Order 9066 was signed, requiring internment of all Americans of Japanese ancestry), connecting it to current issues regarding xenophobia and anti-immigrant hate.
Check out this story for a bit more background; there are a ton of other resources online as well. As the poem talks about, this is the kind of story I feel like a lot of people know about in a general sense, but that few internalize and really grapple with. And we need to be thinking about it, especially right now. Full text below.
1. Asked what the infant city was like, those first residents might have, with some justice, summed it up with one word — dust. -Journalist Taro Katayama, writing about Utah’s Topaz internment camp.
The Japanese side of my family settled in Hawaii. And of course, during the war, they couldn’t intern all of the Japanese there; that’d be a third of the population. But still, decades later, I grew up hearing about the camps. For every story about one of my great uncles fighting for the US against the Japanese Empire, another story: about a different empire, an empire of dust.
There was a kind of distance, of course: hearing the echo, of the echo, of someone weeping. It was subtle, like, for every Packer game, to make room for snacks, I’d have to move those three huge coffee table books: one about Hawaii, one about Ireland (for some reason), and one about Manzanar. This is where the “less” of my more-or-less whiteness lives. Not so much a waving flag as a map hidden in the sole of my shoe.
I learned very early that ghosts are not just the disembodied spirits of the dead. They can be, but they are also more, in the same way that water is more than just rain, that history is more than just the history we are taught. Ghosts appear, like dust, everywhere, from nothing, they multiply. They swim in the ink of newspaper headlines, smile in the background of photographs seized by government censors, burst by the thousands from a grandmother’s single tear. They create patterns in the dust; we breathe them in, when we breathe in the dust. And I learned very early, that ghosts don’t just haunt houses. They haunt history. And that knowing your history determines: whether you learn to live with your ghosts, or are devoured by them.
2. Tennessee legislator Glen Casada calls for the National Guard to “round up” all Syrian refugees, despite constitutional protections. He says: you have to ask yourself, which is greater: life or due process?
As if that were the choice. As if our history, if we listen to it, does not curse and condemn those who offer these kinds of choices– life or your freedom, life or your culture, life or your property, life or your language, life or your child’s life. Just do the math. How much can you carry, as you leave your home, unsure of your return? What do you leave, what can you not live without? Do you plan to return? Do you hope? What year is this? Is the distance disappearing? And suddenly it isn’t math anymore.
Question #27: “Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered?”
Question #28: “Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, or other foreign government, power or organization?”
Is answering yes an admission that you, at one point, would not have answered yes? Will you be loyal to that which is not loyal to you? When uprooted, will you still reach for the sun? Will you grow here, in this dust? Will your children? How will you protect your children?
You have to ask yourself, which is greater: one grain of dust, or all those ghosts? You have to ask yourself: which is greater: that weight on the conscience of a nation, or all those ghosts? I learned very early, that you have to ask yourself: which is greater: your commitment to order, or your commitment to justice?
3. Before he died, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia gave a talk at the University of Hawaii Law School about the Korematsu decision, the legal rationale for the internment of 120,000 innocent people of Japanese descent, most of whom were US citizens, born here, half of them children. He invoked a Latin phrase: Inter arma enim silent leges: “in times of war, the law falls silent.”
And evolution is slow, slower than the sun crawling across the desert sky, slower than the fading of memory. The only real difference between who we are now and who we were in 1942 is our history, and what we choose to learn from it. I learned very early that it is always a time of war. That they will always find a scapegoat. If not our people, someone’s people.
There are still people living, who witnessed lynchings. There are still people living, who survived the Holocaust. And of those Japanese Americans still living, who lost time to the camps, to the dust, we must hear them. And those who are not still living: we must hear them too.
Fred Korematsu said: “… No one should ever be locked away simply because they share the same race, ethnicity, or religion as a spy or terrorist. If that principle was not learned from the internment of Japanese Americans, then these are very dangerous times for our democracy.”
Mary Hirata said: …we have to make sure it’s never done again. It’s so easy, and the more I read about it, the more I know that this was already planned way before the war… it’s a terrible thing to happen. Of course, I don’t think they’ll ever do it again, they couldn’t. I think. But that’s what we thought, too.”
Yuri Kochiyama said: “Remember that consciousness is power. Tomorrow’s world is yours to build.”
These words, these stories, are my family’s only heirloom. And we must listen. Through the dust storm of history, through the wailing all those ghosts. We must hear these voices.
…But they must hear us too.
Because when the law falls silent, we must not be.
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