This year was bad! But good work happens during bad years too. As is tradition: a few highlights from 2024, for people who are interested in what I do but may have missed something here or there.
Target Center performance + Grammy (!?)
It’s a long story, but as you may know, I’m on two songs by producer, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist Fred Again. This year, I got to perform one of those songs, “Kyle (i found you),” with Fred during his MPLS tour stop at the Target Center. Absolutely surreal; that’s what the photo above is from. The other song, “Berwyn (all that I got is you),” is on Fred’s album “Actual Life 3,” which won the Grammy for Best Dance/Electronic Music Album back in February.
My friends try to tell me I should just go ahead and say that I’m “a Grammy-winning artist” since I’m a writer/performer on the album, but the humble midwesterner in me is going to run with “appears on a Grammy-winning album.” Either way, it’s kind of cool and not something I ever expected to happen.
I basically decide to make a zine when I’ve had so many conversations about a topic that a shortcut would be useful. Not that the conversations aren’t fun; I just want to make sure people can share these resources/ideas beyond the conversation. The newest zine in my library is maybe a little more niche than the others—it’s a collection of resources for people who are looking to start some kind of creative-writing based group: like a high school poetry club, a writing circle, etc.
As always, there’s no one way to do that, and not everything in this zine is going to apply to every person in every situation. But my hope is that there’s something useful in there, at least as a starting point.
One brief note: This is a traditional, 8-page, “z-fold” zine. If you want to print/cut/fold some yourself, here’s a PDF (note that it’s formatted for 11×17 paper). I have a different 8-page zine that’s all about getting involved in spoken word for people who are new to it. I have also, however, combined the two 8-page zines into a single 12-page zine (cutting some of the overlapping content), that I will have with me at shows/events for the foreseeable future. If you’re a teacher, event organizer, etc. who might be interested in a bulk order, feel free to get in touch using my booking form.
Kind of a National Poetry Month post. I’ve written about this before, so I’ll keep it short: it times of great crisis, I think poets have more to offer than poems. We should still write the poems, of course, but we can also “be mobilizers. We can be movement-builders. We can use our networks to spread information” and on and on. One way this plays out in our everyday work, for me at least, is the practice of kicking off events and performances by bringing someone else’s voice into the space.
I’ve done this here-and-there through my whole career, but it’s felt like a real necessity over the last five months. If I have 20-60 minutes of stage time at an event, I’m not really interested in just jumping into my own material. I want to acknowledge context. I want to acknowledge that the audience’s hearts might be in two places at once. Opening a show with a poem from a Palestinian poet is a small thing, a tiny thing, but I think it matters. A big part of my own pedagogical approach has been the idea that poems are excuses—they have value on their own, of course, but beyond that, they are footholds, opportunities for us to look at something we weren’t already looking at, to think deeply about something that would otherwise be ignored. If we’re not doing that as a bare minimum, what are we doing?
This post is just a list of links—both to short poems I’ve been returning to, over and over recently, and some articles/interviews on how poetry can be used in this moment. I use that word, used, intentionally. It’s not just about what we can say via poetry; it’s about what the process of writing and sharing poems can help build. Hope these can be useful:
A FEW POEMS
A note on the selections: Any time I make a topic-based list, the list is not exhaustive. This one does not feature every great Palestinian poet, or every poet who has written about war and peace (indeed, the ones listed here are not all by Palestinian poets, and they are not all from the last five months). The list is, very specifically, a small sampling of poems on this topic that have been useful to me in my work as a performer, educator, and facilitator. I’m less interested in the “best” poems, and more interested in poems that can be generative, that can lead to good conversations, and questions—poems that can open doors. There are so many others, and I’d encourage all of us to make these kinds of lists and share them.
A few highlights from 2023, for people who are interested in my work but may have missed something here or there. It was a bit of a “between-projects” year for me (though I did mark the one-year anniversary of my book by making a section available to read online here), on top of the fact that self-promo has been the furthest thing from my mind over the last three months, but here are some links.
**UPDATE: Danez Smith picked this poem as the Academy of American Poets’ “Poem-A-Day” for August 6, 2024! It feels like when an offensive tackle lines up as an eligible receiver and randomly scores a touchdown.***
This past July, I got to open up for Rudy Francisco here in Minneapolis at Icehouse, and used it as an opportunity to formally “debut” a poem I’ve been working on for months, probably my favorite new thing that I’ve written since my book came out. As always, I like the share a few notes on the process.
I used to more frequently do “here’s what I’m up to” posts, but that feels like a relic of an earlier internet time. Still, there’s a lot happening, so I figured I’d share some info here so it can be in a central place rather than a bunch of random social media posts.
NPR Tiny Desk Concert as part of Fred Again’s set
Check it out! Fred sampled my poem “Love in the Time of Undeath” for the song “Kyle (I Found You)” and the result if gorgeous. It’s the first song in his set, and I even appear as a video ghost performing the poem.
This piece is from my book. Not a Lot of Reasons to Sing, But Enough is more-or-less a poetry book (find all the poems/videos we’ve released from it so far here), 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. 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.
All Advice is Bad Advice, Including the Advice that All Advice is Bad Advice
The Library of the Road has brought together three professional wordsmiths for a panel discussion on advice for aspiring writers. The three writers, along with a moderator representing the Library, sit on stools inside a communal hall where a few dozen attendees sit on benches. The Library’s traveling collection of texts lines the sides of the hall; a few wanderers browse through the books and scrolls.
A quick note: the video here is the most recent performance; I did also share this one right when the poem first came out. Thanks to Button Poetry for capturing it!
I know you’re not supposed to explain the poem before sharing it. But I also never liked the notion that poetry is a puzzle to be solved. For me, it’s more about expression and communication, so here are a few brief framing notes:
This is a contrapuntal poem. So it’s one poem, set next to a second poem, that can also be read side-by-side as a third poem.
The first part is about BTS, a Korean pop group. If you know, you already know. If you don’t, I share some recommended listening below.
The second part is about Warhammer 40k, a dystopian, ultra-violent, sci-fi series of tabletop games, video games, and novels. The 40k refers to it being set (more-or-less) 40,000 years in the future.
During the first few years of the pandemic, I listened to a lot of BTS and played a lot of the video game series Total War: Warhammer (which isn’t actually set in the 40k universe, but opened the door to that lore for me), and ended up trying to write two poems about these pieces of pop culture that were so helpful to me in very dark times. Eventually, I figured out that I was actually writing one poem—that juxtaposing the most joyful and most nihilistic pop culture I could think of could be a doorway into thinking more deeply about hope and collectivity. The contrapuntal is a weird form, but it just made sense for this concept.
I wrote this before BTS announced that they were going on hiatus in order to begin their mandatory military service. The militaristic imagery in the piece might make it seem like it’s some kind of commentary on that, but it’s not intentional. I could imagine someone writing that poem, but I leave that to more appropriate and talented writers.
I assume that the venn diagram between BTS fans and 40k fans is quite small, and maybe no one will “get” or like this poem. But sometimes you have to write the thing that’s just for you.
A final note on the text: I’ve included the traditional, side-by-side version below, but I’ve ALSO included a separate block of text for the three poems as separate pieces. I did this because as someone who primarily writes in order to perform, there are a few moments in the poem that just kind of “work” better when performed aloud than on the page, especially concerning punctuation and emphasis.
The video is embedded above; here is the image of the poem’s proper layout + text of the poem below it:
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