the transcript
Carmen Giménez (CG): Hello and welcome to the Graywolf Lab podcast, a new project from Graywolf Press. I’m the publisher of Graywolf, Carmen Giménez, and I’m joined today by executive editor Yuka Igarashi. Hi Yuka. Yuka Igarashi (YI): Hi Carmen! CG: I’m excited about the first episode of this podcast, which also marks the launch of Graywolf Lab. Do you want to explain what Graywolf Lab is? YI: Graywolf Lab is an online platform we’re launching for interdisciplinary conversations and new writing. It’s a way for us to publish short pieces and other works that don’t fit inside a book. In some ways Lab is also a response to our experience of virtual events. We’d all been in the audience of inspiring conversations, with our authors and with others these last few years, and had talked about wanting more to happen after the events ended. We wondered if we could have the event first, before publishing anything. And we decided to try, to try hosting a roundtable and using it as a springboard to explore a theme. So, you could say Lab is an online magazine that starts with a conversation and unfolds in response to the conversation, and this episode of the podcast is a record of that first conversation. CG: I love that the podcast also gives us another container for conversations. It’s part of Lab but will also go beyond it, giving us another way to showcase and connect with our authors and collaborators and audiences. Our first Graywolf Lab theme is time. That’s a big topic. YI: When we were deciding on a theme, the Lab team had this Google doc of ideas that we kept adding to. Lists of artists and writers and lists of topics. At some point somebody added “space-time-question mark?” to the Google doc. I remember it seeming kind of like a joke at first because it was such an enormous topic. But we just kept coming back to it. We realized we were all troubled and fascinated by time, and that it would be a good topic for artists coming from different disciplines like music and performance. CG: We have four amazing guests for the first roundtable. First, we hear from Kweku Abimbola——Graywolf published his debut poetry collection, Saltwater Demands a Psalm in April. Then we have Lisa Hsiao Chen, author of the 2022 novel Activities of Daily Living, followed by performance artist, theater artist, and educator Daniel Alexander Jones. Lastly there is the musician Thảo Nguyễn, best known for her band Thao and the Get Down Stay Down. YI: Kweku was in Ghana when we had our Zoom; Lisa and Daniel were in California; Thảo was in New York and I was in Honolulu, and I thought it was a nice touch that our time roundtable crossed a lot of time zones. CG: I love how the Nap Ministry came up, how rest is situated in time when so often we want to just propel through it. And the notion of the past aligns really well with so many of the books that we’re publishing. YI: Yeah, it was great that the conversation was very grounded and practical and personal——so, talking about resting, and napping, and dancing, and the difference between sharing your work as a performer and sharing your work as a writer so, one in real time and one not——but it was also very philosophical. There, there was a lot about history and memory, as you said, about how history seems like something that happens to us, but that, if we think of time a little differently, it doesn’t have to be. CG: Is there anything else listeners should know? YI: Before we recorded the conversation, I invited Kweku, Lisa, Daniel, and Thảo to share some of their work with one another. I gave a few prompts: work that played with past, present, and future; work that considered time and labor; work that explored time as endured by the body. You can see all the material they shared——poems, extracts, music videos, lyrics——on the Graywolf Lab site at graywolflab.org. You’ll also find their full bios, video clips of the roundtable, and a transcript. And after the roundtable, our four guests suggested other artists whose work they thought was inspiring on the topic of time. We’re showcasing those artists on the site too, along with original essays and other work responding to our theme. We’ll be adding to the page over the next few months and we’ll be inviting submissions too, so, so I hope you check it all out at graywolflab.org. CG: Max Neely-Cohen and Katy Gero created a great interface that sort of degrades poems, words disappear as you toggle and change speeds that are meant to approximate time. It’s like a digital Sapphic erasure. And the Lab logo is thrilling! Choosing it was a long conversation but it’s perfect, and it points to another time: the old Graywolf logo using the wolves. I just found out that Graywolf is named after a river in Washington. YI: And I just drove by that river last week! Now here’s Kweku Abimbola, Lisa Hsiao Chen, Daniel Alexander Jones, and Thảo Nguyễn talking to Yuka about time. * YI: I have questions I want to ask each of you, but I hope everyone feels free to jump in and, and comment and ask questions also. Kweku, your first poetry collection is being published with Graywolf in April. It's called Saltwater Demands a Psalm. And I know one of the poems you've shared with us is from the collection. Could you talk about the poems you've brought to us and your use and conception of time within them? Kweku Abimbola (KA): It's a pleasure to be here. I really enjoyed engaging with each of your work, and like, it's inspired some of my newer writing too, so that's always a joy in itself. So I brought two poems. One is “Libation.” The second one is “Ayan,” which is from a new collection that I'm working on. But “Libation”: it takes sort of a imagined scene of a priest or an elder, pouring libation before the start of a ceremony, like naming ceremonies, funerals, even birthdays. And its purpose is to conjure the spirits of ancestors to also join in with the merriment of those who are gathered, to, like, ensure that the ceremony is successful or to ensure that the ceremony has their blessing. So when I'm engaging with time in that poem, it's this idea of, like, Black eternity. Like everyone gathered is present. But we're also able to conjure those who came before us. And it was also sparked by this idea of malleable time. The various portals in which we in our present worlds can conjure and also manipulate time. And, many of the names that I mention in the, the poem itself, they also come from my tribe's practice of Kradin or ”soul names,“ which are names given to children based on their day of birth. So like my name Kweku, it signifies that I'm born on Wednesday and every day of the week has its own deity or God. Think of it almost like star signs, right? Sagittarius, Scorpio, et cetera. But for us it's based on the day of the week. What would it mean for us who come from this system of naming that is so bound to time to also be impacted by something as earth shattering and traumatic as colonization or enslavement? If you come from a place where your children are days of the week, if you lose a child, you've lost a day of the week. And how does that then render your experience of time? Does it make your time go faster? Does it slow down your time? Questions that I was trying to answer through the collection as well. YI: Did you want to read any part of it? KA: I'll start from the beginning and then jump a little bit to the end. [reading from “Libation”] I'll cut a little bit to the end. [reading more from “Libation”] Thank you. One thing that I forgot to mention in the beginning was that part of the collection also is a series of elegies for victims of police brutality in the US. And instead of like writing a traditional elegy, I also named the deceased, giving them these day names. They're sort of given birth poems, right, this idea of a black ancestral or black eternal plane. YI: That was amazing. Thank you, Kweku. It's, it's really interesting to me that there's this tension between something that's eternal and something that's almost quotidian with the naming of the week. There's this line in the poem that you just read: “the days we cannot yet see require the most mercy.” That I thought was really beautiful and wondered if you had, if you wanted to say more about that and, and what that means to you. KA: Thank you, again, so much. It’s always such, like, a joy being able to engage with this poem because it was, it was the last poem that I wrote for the collection. “The days we cannot see require the most”——I think that's me as the poem's “I,” the poem's speaker, trying to be vulnerable and also being uncertain. I think we are taught, at least when I came to the US and was taking history classes, we were taught that, oh, history, you progress, you go from enslavement to Jim Crow, Civil Rights era now we're free quote unquote, and it's just trying to disrupt that. Say, okay, maybe like progress might not be this linear thing. And there's this quote by MLK, which is that the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice. But as I've grown older, a lot of the things that I've experienced and also interacted with, definitely complicate that as well. In the face of this vulnerability, in the face of this uncertainty, all that I could do in that moment was asked for a bit of mercy or appeal towards mercy. YI: I was gonna bring in Lisa next. Lisa, your novel Activities of Daily Living was published earlier this year, and it's partly about the performance artist Tehching Hsieh, whose work often investigates the passage of time. And you write about one of his most famous pieces, “Time Clock Piece,” which was described in the extract you shared. Do you wanna talk about it and then read from it or read from it and talk about it? Whichever order you wanna do things in. Lisa Chen (LC): Sure. Thanks for having me. I think one of the things that emerged reading all of our work before this Zoom is: I didn't expect to see how much of the ceremonial feeling of time emerges from all this. So I'm excited to, to talk about that. Um, so, I'll, I'll describe the novel a little bit and then I'll read a very short excerpt. As Yuka said, it's, it’s about this durational artist Tehching Hsieh who was active in downtown New York in the seventies, eighties, nineties. And the, the novel is about a woman named Alice, who's, has a day job but is trying to make something artistic. And she decides she's gonna do a project about this artist just because he's on her mind at the same time that her father is declining from dementia. And the book is partly organized by going through these six seminal projects that the artist is known for before he stopped making work. And right, so, so the “Time Clock Piece,” he punched a time clock on the hour, every hour for like a year. And he missed, he missed a few. So again, Alice is trying to make a project out of this work so part of it is she's digging into each of these durational projects and trying to think about what it stimulates or what she can make of it. So I’m just gonna read a part. Okay. So she, here, she's riffing. [reading from Activities of Daily Living] I'm gonna stop there. YI: Thank you so much. I, I love, I love this artist. I’m, I sort of am obsessed with, with him thanks to you, Lisa. “When the clock was invented, time was too,” is something that you just read. That's something that made me think a lot and whether that's true—— LC: (laughs) YI: ——and wondered if you had, you had something to say about that. LC: (laughs) Most of us modern people experience it by the clock, but no, there’s a, there's a larger time at work that I think folks on this call definitely get into that makes it a reclamation almost of, of what real time, you know, what time is before we were on the clock. So, what Tehching Hsieh does is draw out a little bit of the feeling of both, right? That he's on clock time, he's enacting the, the cruelties of labor in, in the capitalist sense, but, also, he's, by making this artwork on his own time, he's making a stand: here's my art, here I'm claiming my own time (laughs), I'm setting it in this way. Which many people thought was quote unquote insane. And then some other themes in the book are, is caretaking for our relatives or a loved one, a different kind of labor that sadly isn't remunerated in the financial sense that we have to often make up for but it's more meaningful, the most meaningful, I would argue. YI: Yeah, and there, I, I can't remember if you read this part, but there's a line in the extract that says: “What she sees is the will of a man stitching himself into time. And only after the piece was completed was the artist disconsolate. He felt that after all his pieces ended because it meant he was returning to the life of an ordinary man.” So, again, I feel with like Kweku and Lisa, both of you, we're dealing with eternity, but we're dealing with something very earthly. Like there's something kind of freeing about stitching yourself into time in a particular way, being grounded, whether it's the day of the week or with a, with this cruel punch clock. LC: Yeah. It's so interesting. I think that Tehching Hsieh, by the, by the end of, you know, his official art making career, I think he would probably disclaim that earlier quote of his saying he felt like, you know, he was a little depressed 'cause he was back to being an ordinary person not making art. I think he had argued for some transcendent state where life-time and art-time are blurred. But I think that doesn't work for most of us, and that the sort of the tragicomic concept of the, of the quote unquote project is one of the things my novel grapples with, and the project being this thing that many of us work on that isn't remunerated for financially, but is sort of our soul. And what do we do with this thing, this project that we wanna make, that we can't seem to not make or maybe feels scarily sometimes, that we can all too easily discard because it's like, this isn't being, I'm like getting paid for this, et cetera, et cetera. So I think how, yeah, how do we make, how do we make our project time, our art time essential, not only for ourselves, but I think for a lot of our friends who make art and are always kind of waffling, like how much time they're able to spend on it, how much they wanna pursue it, strikes me as a lot of the caregiving that artists and editors give to each other. Cause we're often the only (laughs), sometimes the only people cheering each other on through the really hard patches. So I think the artist is really great to think of for that because of his intense devotion to his own work, which was largely ignored at the time that he was making it. YI: Kweku, did you have anything to add to that? KA: One of my favorite, like, moments was when it was mentioned that we used to sleep eight hours a day. That like now it's like been reduced to like six and a half. It’s like this idea of like sleep as a form of resistance. I have a friend who like created this page called The Nap Ministry where like her thing, after being burnt out, it was like we're gonna nap and this is gonna be us, like claiming our time from the institution, from jobs, from the dissertation. So I think that that's definitely something this piece made me very cognizant of, it's like, okay, what are ways in which we as individuals in this capitalistic society can sort of reclaim our time? YI: I wanted to bring in Daniel now. Daniel, you have such an incredible breadth to your work and it sort of resists summarizing. You've shared two things with us, a music video that is an homage to Saturn and some texts from your introduction to your book of plays, Love Like Light. I want to hear about both of them in whatever order you want to talk about them. Daniel Alexander Jones (DJ): I wanna start by just saying I'm now a super fan of all of your work. I'm so thrilled to be introduced to your practices and I got so excited this morning, delving back in and, and feeling the vibe of, of what you're about. So thank you so much. I really believe love dilates time. I think it is a, it is a force when applied that helps us to experience something. It helps us to experience the ways in which we have been settled, colonized, by these external systems. And when we have a passion for something, whether it be for our work, for another human being, for a cause——for, for life itself writ large, right——time starts to move in different ways in our experience. And this was very heightened for me when I worked on the Saturn video. Two years ago, my mother passed away and just this Friday my father passed away and I was with him last week while he was in his hospice. And one of the things that was so funny: my brother and I were there together and we would look up and we would look at each other. We'd be like, how long have we been awake? What did we eat? You know, like, it just felt like time suddenly became this other thing than something that would be measured by a clock. And internally, there was a different kind of energy that I, I've been, like most of us as a result of the pandemic, so scattered, so, so distracted, having so many things on my plate. Suddenly I was able to focus on one thing and, and be at my father's bedside for eight hours in a row without even knowing that that much time passed. So to me, I've always been interested in, when I think about the historical continuum of all of our cultural traditions that have in some way or another been violently affected by settler colonialism and its legacies, what it means to still find our unimpeded connection to love and how that love can create space that there's no way for them to settle. You can't colonize that thing, right? But you can prevent us from being habitually engaged with it. We can be blunted, we can be wounded, we can be distracted. So I just wanna read very briefly from the intro to this book, and I say: [reading from Love Like Light] And so that's very much in the forefront of my mind right now and in particular because part of what I have feared in recent years, especially in the wake of what you've been talking about Kweku, especially, in terms of this litany of violences and the kind of the ways in which we're continually being reinscribed with this long history of murder, of erasure, of constraint, is that we are in a resistant and a reactive relationship to these events. And love gives us back some degree of sovereignty and it gives us access to tools, to ceremony, to memory because it moves across time. I think we can see ourselves then as time travelers, as beings who can actually move through the past. We can move through our present moment in ways that reveal things that are otherwise hidden. And we absolutely can move into potential futures. And that is something I found with all of your work that really got me so excited. Y'all are imagining so radically and challenging us then to have to see and to hear and to feel very differently from the way that we are conditioned around time to think and feel. YI: That's really beautiful. Can you talk a little bit more about memory? What I was struck by with all of your pieces is that memory seems to be a big part of it in the past, and history. Again, being tied to it and then somehow trying to transcend it. You had, you have another really beautiful thing in, in your excerpt I think it was the word rememory, remembering—— DJ: Oh yes. Rememory was a term that, when I was in grad school back in the early nineties, because Toni Morrison had defined it, we all used it. Like we, we knew it. We're like “Rememory!” (laughs) You know, everything. It actually goes back to one of the great ancient tales of Isis and Osiris and, and that Osiris was murdered and dismembered and scattered. And Isis, who was his sister wife in this, in this mythic tradition of, of the ancient Kemetic or Egyptian, had to gather those pieces together and literally remember him to resurrect him to bring back his memory. And so, one of the things I would say about, about memory (and I'm very curious for, for y'all what your thoughts are and experiences are with memory, and this was validated for me just even yesterday when we held this vigil for my dad, with all members of the community): we remember collectively. And so much of what gets emphasized in the United States at least is the, is the individual at all costs and the idea that one person's memory is either gonna be accurate or inaccurate, rather than thinking of the fact that we come together and the multiple perspectives by which we regard something from the past help to illuminate it. It's almost like a negative space on a drawing, everybody's sort of touching some part of it and then there's a gap and it's in the gap that that light comes and that that movement happen. We don't do anything alone, you know? Lisa, you were talking about that beautiful relationship between writer and editor, and there's a way that the writer and the editor are holding the memory of the piece together. One of my great mentors, Robbie McCauley, would always say, “The writer doesn't know what they wrote!” You know, ‘cause you have to have somebody else to witness it, to hold it and to conjure it with you. LC: I love the line in the, I can't remember the exact words, I don’t have it in front of me, it was the section after you're describing: what does it feel like to be loved, to love? And then: “we're all contributing to the jam.” Oh! That's such a great word for what we're talking about right now. When I went back to read everybody again, I was like, that's the word I kept coming back to. And the Lab is the jam! YI: Let’s hope so. It is, I think, already. KA: Kind of building off what Daniel and Lisa just said, especially, like, what you said, Daniel, about the vigil, made me think back to the idea of oral literature. It’s a lot more individual, right, to experience literature at home is to be in the communal space. It's less about the accuracy of the memory of these stories and more about what energy can you draw upon from those who are present to make the story come to fruition. So for example, in our storytelling tradition in Gambia, where I was born, right, you can't tell a story without the consent of the listeners. So, like, we'd say, oh, “once upon a time,” then the crowd has to say, “time, time.” So that grants you the ability to okay, like now I can, like I have your ear, I have your attention, let's jam, you know? And I feel like it just makes the memories more complete when you have these different perspectives. And then also it, it destabilizes, uh, this idea of a single authority, on a issue or on story. And it makes, I think, a more egalitarian listening and performing experience as well. * CG: Lab is amazing! I love the energy of different artists intersecting, what a chemistry. You’re listening to the first episode of Graywolf Lab podcast, featuring Kweku Abimbola, Lisa Hsiao Chen, Daniel Alexander Jones, and Thảo Nguyễn. Our artists have been talking to Graywolf editor Yuka Igarashi about eternity, progress, labor, and about experiencing time beyond clock time. Coming up, Thảo Nguyễn discusses “Temple,” from her 2020 album of the same name. * YI: Maybe we can bring in Thảo now. So I thought there was a lot of resonances between Daniel and your work. I just was struck by how much your music videos were connected or seemed similar in the way they were dealing with memory and personal reckonings with history, especially in your music video “Temple,” which I think I've read is, is sort of from the perspective of your, of your mom. Is that right, Thảo? Yeah. So I wanted to hear you talk a little bit about that. Thảo Nguyễn (TN): Certainly. And thank you for having me, and thank you all for your generosity. It's been beautiful. It's an honor to be in this space, in this kind of discourse. It's an honor to interact with your work and be inspired by it. With memory and time yeah. I, and especially with, with this song with “Temple,” you know, I wrote this album in 2019. It released in May of 2020, incredibly auspicious time to release an album. And has a, a ton to do with my Vietnamese identity. And it has a ton to do with being queer and queer and out and Vietnamese, and, you know, the difficulties I encountered within my family, hurdles that I had to overcome to, to be out publicly because of what it meant culturally and for me within my own family. Anyway, this song in particular, the first and only time I've been to visit Vietnam was in 2015 and my mom hadn't been back in 43 years. And it was so intense to witness her engage with it and what she chose to remember and what she chose to not remember. And it took me months before I even thought about it, coming back, and it took me that time, those years of, of processing it to better understand the legacy of war and how people choose to proceed. And I'll say that my family——I've always been struck by how joyful everyone is, and really light. My mom and her siblings, everyone who, over the years have made their way to the States, but have definitely lived and survived the war. And they have this remarkable capacity to just be fully present and alive and happy, happier than I can be, and lighter than I have been, you know? And with my mom, I think it's just this decision, to leave what is no longer useful to, to choose not to take it with you. And it made me reconsider what memory is for. And Daniel, that's what you were saying. I think we've all touched upon it, the accuracy or inaccuracy of memory at a certain point is not relevant. It’s: What do we need memory for? Is it a safe harbor? Is it an indictment? Is it to remind yourself never to do something again? It's useful to me to let go of the idea of maybe a fundamentally unsound documentation of time anyway. I think memory now is this decision to not suffer anymore. And that, that's what I've learned from my mom and my family. And there are lyrics: “Why would I choose to remember?” You feel, as someone who doesn't have that immediate connection to war, you know, how insensitive is it, or how useful is it that I ask questions? What do I need to know from it that they don't wanna remember? And what kind of position do you put someone in when they're, they're surviving in a way that you've never had to. So that's my application of time and memory now for my own life and as I move forward, as, and as a songwriter, you’re, like, sort of——I'm sure you guys have this too——you're kind of confronted with your catalog, and at a certain point I realized everything captured so much pain. And it had to. But now I'm done. In moving forward, what am I trying to capture? And as a performer, what is the energy I wanna create in my live shows? You know, it's such a symbiotic relationship, which is what Daniel was just talking about——like writers, they don't know what they wrote ‘cause it, you know, it, you need that reflection. And then I'm a performer. I don't, I don’t know what I'm doing without an audience. If that didn't matter to me, I wouldn't tour, I wouldn't perform. So the exchange, the creation of that energy, and people pay money and I'm, I'm there and we, we enter into a contract and this symbiotic relationship where I feel a responsibility to make sure that whatever energy and atmosphere I create is something that I would wanna be immersed in. Cause when they enter that space with you, they're trusting you. I want them to trust me and I wanna take you somewhere, but where is it that I wanna take you? Not just pain, you know, I want to take you beyond that because I want to go there. I'm done with just pain. And then also, oh, with time, time is so interesting to me in a more immediate sense, as a musician, there's a ton of collaboration. And when you improvise with someone, you have to have an aligned sense of time in one way. But then basically you all agree to meet at different points, but how you get there is your own business, you know, which I think is really cool. YI: I wanted to talk a little bit about your other music video “Phenom,” which is so incredible. And it also has to do with space and time and how, how those things can be brought together. It’s so awesome I can't even explain it. But do you want to talk about how, how that that video came to be and, your use of virtual spaces? TN: Sure. And you know, all credit to that creative team that pulled it together. It was right as California was shutting down and so I was scheduled to shoot that music video live in person in LA and then that shoot was canceled. So all the dancers that you see were meant to be in the actual video. And this was, we caught it right before everyone got so tired of Zoom, I think. I mean, there was just like a very short window, right? Where, where it was not gonna be lame. All I knew was that I still wanted to dance and I wanted that energy and “Phenom,” that song in particular, it's right on the edge of, of rage and optimism. I think that's kind of the last one where I was skewing more towards rage. And I'm trying to skew away from it just for my own sake. But I wanted that energy to be palpable. And there are lyrics within it, you know, there's a line that's “when the scorched of the earth come back” and it's very much influenced by Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler, like the idea of eventually time will bring justice and there will be forces to reckon with, and you will pay for, you know, (laughs) you will pay (laughs). That's my, that was my hope. Yeah. Yeah, there was like a dress rehearsal one day, and then the next day everyone logged on to Zoom at like a Sunday or something. And, and you just had to be really free and pretend you are not performing in front of a screen. LC: So this “Phenom” video, to see it again was amazing for me because it was definitely, I remember it being at the very top of the pandemic and still doesn't feel lame to me! TN: Oh, great! LC: (laughs) TN: (laughs) That's awesome! LC: And it, it continues to be a joyful memory of the pandemic in a weird way. Like, oh my god, look at all of us in our little boxes! And I think that the emotion of rage was not one that a lot of us were conjuring at the time. So that also felt kind of joyful, to feel like, right, we're in our little boxes now, but we're still coordinated somehow in our, in our social lives. And I just thought it was fantastic and I remember sending it to people and people sending it to me. So thank you for that. TN: That's awesome. LC: Yeah. TN: I'm so happy to hear that. Thank you. LC: (laughs) TN: I'm so glad to hear that about the rage too, ‘cause it was a really great outlet, I will say. I remember needing it for myself. YI: There's something in the lyrics of “Phenom” where I think it says something like “I'm a feature of the future.” And I was struck by that, especially with the sort of refrain of, “I'm an old phenomenon.” So again, there's this idea of being the future, but also being, like, old. So I, I think that that also resonates with a lot of what your, all of your work talks about. Trying to break down past, present, future, just in terms of linearity and instead talking about the ways in which you sort of collapse time, in a way. And this is a gigantic question, but like, why is that, why, why do we want to do that? (laughs) Why are we trying to, to collapse time? Can, can you all answer that? DJ: I love the way you talked about your decision to be done with rage to a certain extent. And I don't know how we inherit a past or how we inherit memory without having to feel all of the feelings that it comes with, right? And for those of us who do come out of traditions where there has been a violence that was so cataclysmic that a generation couldn't talk about it or didn't want to deal with it. In my case, it was the fact that my, my father's family came from the South with the Great Migration. And we're only now being, I should say, the broader public is only now being made aware of exactly how deep and how thick that violence was, how many lynchings there were, how many rapes there were. So when they wouldn't talk about where they came from, I was, I was like, well, why won't you tell? And I had a very similar question to you about like, is it ethical to push and to prod? But I realized it’s like I had to, I had to go into those places and say, if I'm gonna inherit the gift of that culture, the music, the philosophy, the resilience, I've gotta also inherit the rage. I have to inherit the shame, I have to inherit the places I can't, I can't hold. But I have to. That then lets me make the choice so that her choice, as you described, to be joyful, is not an empty joy. And so I think that, to come back to your big question, it's like, why do we collapse it? I really think a lot of it has to do with what my friend Helga Davis always says: People don't wanna feel their feelings. They don't want to feel all of it. And so, it's like, if I can, if I can condense it, I can make it into like a vitamin of, of information, but I don't have to actually go through the dark nights of, of what it really means to think about that rage and to not think about but let it go through the body. It makes you murderous! (laughs) At least me. I know it makes me——(laughs) TN: Yeah. Yeah. For sure. I'll speak to those lyrics in “Phenom,” that idea, the: “I am an old phenomenon, but I'm the feature of the future.” To me, it helps the travesty of the legacy of abuse of power to just know that whatever is sacred and strong outlives all that would desecrate it. And that's the collapse that I want to, to draw strength from. YI: Lisa, did you have something to add? LC: Yeah, I'm just sitting here feeling envious (laughs) for Thảo and Daniel's——the multimedia dimension. I don't know if Kweku feels this, but——being able to both write and send out a visual experience. That is always something that I'm not, I can't do. But I think that feeling of the collapse of time emerges in certainly in “Temple” with the, this almost ritualistic choreography. And then in Daniel's this figure walking through space and time. And that I feel like is a collapse moment where like, I could hear the lyrics, I could hear the music, but the bodies were, were doing something that were pulling it all together. So it's a kind of like a nonverbal collapse of time, I guess for me, is what I see that movement. And to be able to focus on that movement in your pieces was really cool to me. KA: The moments I want to collapse time are the moments that I feel the most agency. It's like all of the sort of like systems that have been made control or to let you know how much time off you have, like how long your lunch break is. All of these rigid structures, the ways in which we can collapse time can be achieved like through joy. Kinda like something that, I saw both in like Daniel's piece, like with Saturn's rings and even scenes in the music video where the Polaroids are being like, organized in a circle. This idea of cyclicality and eternity. I think the cycles that we create, the rituals that we hold near to us can be a way for us to keep certain practices alive for an eternity. My most recent work is dealing with dance circles as eternal spaces, right? Like there's no beginning, there's no end, only a middle. When I dance, that's one of the times that I feel the most present. There isn't any distraction of like, what am I gonna do next? Or what am I gonna do before? It's like, what am I doing now? And all the ways in which people in the space of a dance circle can also be, be present and also have to respond immediately to what they're hearing. I think one other thing is this idea of collapsing time and spirituality. A lot of the research that I've been doing in like West African dance deals with how, the repetition of chants then leads to certain ways of transcendence. Which I think is a weird tension, right? Like, we get this thing over and, and, and over again, and at certain point, boom, we hit the, the border, we hit the threshold and a new mode of, of time is now available to us. DJ: And Lisa, I'm thinking about, you know, your description of the artist with the, with the punch card, punching in every day, you know that, that hourly punching in and, and that is the power of taking that imposed system and then somehow imbuing it with attention and, and intention. What are all the other things that kind of unconsciously I'm, I'm doing that have been programmed by someone else or by the society and how powerful to be able to take agency and say, you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna actually be present to it when I do it, and then I'm, maybe I'm gonna do it more, or I'm gonna do it in a different way. And, and those, those disruptions also feel to me, you know to come back to Kweku and Thảo what you were saying about, about improvisation and about the spontaneity and the dancing even. That, that there's a way that we can always, we can always disrupt it if, if we bring that attention to it. And I do think, especially here in the US, there's just so much it's like a bludgeoning of these habits that, that it's like you, you forget that you sometimes can have agency where it feels like you have none. LC: One of the things we've been talking about is what it feels like when we're making the work. Daniel, as you were saying, it's like, I, I, there's a feeling that I have to do this. Like I try and work through something for myself as a human, as a human being and as an artist. And then we're kind of, we're done. It's different for, for Thảo who, who then performs it over and over in front of, of an, of an audience and gets the feedback and reaction. And then Kweku in your dance. But for writers, I think it is this weird delayed effect where like, you've kind of worked it through, you've made this thing, you're done, the editor has done their thing, and then like literally like a year passes, (laughs) and then, and then suddenly you have readers. You're pretty distant from it already, and there's an argument to be made. And it's, it's made in, in, in the book that I wrote that even by creating a, a project or an art piece, you've created a, a place to, to put that, that feeling. As, as you were saying, Daniel, about Tehching Hsieh, like he took this arduous labor thing and then turned it into art, you know. Before he made a performance piece in New York, he worked in restaurant kitchens for like four and a half years just trying to make it. So he really was like, how do I, how do I make this, you know, into the work I’m gonna, the, the art I’m gonna make? How do you guys deal with——you know, the project is done, you've worked through your emotions, in a way, and then you're, you're kind of like, your, your thoughts and minds are kind of to the next project, but then your audience is sort of experiencing it for the first time? DJ: Most of my work was in theater, and theater is like a dinosaur. It's so slow. It just, and it takes so long to make it, it took so long for people to understand what you, they think you're doing and you have to create——it's horrible. And then they want to know before you do it what it is. And I'm, I'm also more improvisatory, so I, like, I, I want somebody to agree that we’re set conditions and I can just find what I find in real time. LC: Yeah. DJ: So I found myself being so impatient with it. And that's partly why I began to break out of that medium as my, as my sole medium, because of this very reason. I needed the immediacy of connection. While I, I was proficient at making something that could then live on without my being right there in the room with it, I love being in the vital moment with it. So it's a challenge. It's interesting cause I, I haven't really figured that out and I think I'm, I'm still have a lot of discord, in, in relationship, Lisa, to what you're describing so perfectly. That when it goes away, I kind of go away too. I'm like, come over here. That's, that's cool, but taste this cake! You know, like, (laughs) LC: Right! It’s most alive, but it's a mess. I guess for Thảo, it's like, maybe it'll, maybe it'll be a mess every, every time we perform, I'll still have some of that like live. TN: Oh, it's a mess every time. I love that question and I think I, I have to make my peace with whatever I wrote the song for, or wrote the, wrote the album for. The shows, they are listening to it. But if I want it to exist in that realm, then I have to let go of what it means for me. So even when I'm presenting it, and even if it's deeply personal. I don't necessarily wanna cry on stage. I have to get to a point where I’m not, I’m not sort of reliving or retraumatizing myself if I go into, like, a really vulnerable song. That's just a matter of like playing it enough, talking about it enough so that you can develop a layer of immunity and protection from the thing that compelled it, because it’s, it’s just, once it crosses into that realm, it's a different obligation, it's a different agreement that you have. Because as a, as a performer and as an entertainer, I want to create a safe enough space that they can feel comfortable in absorbing it however they will. And it becomes more about them and less about are they worried that I'm gonna (laughs) freak out and—— LC: Wow! TN:——try to Zoom my therapist. KA: What you just said, Thảo, like, it makes me think about like privacy and kinda like what Daniel was saying too, like when you have something that you cultivated for a while that it's like just yours and maybe like yours and an editor or like yours and some like close friends who are reading it. And then there is that distance that comes. I'm in the midst of that now cause like it's my first book forthcoming, so I'm like, oh, I wrote this so many years ago. I have to wait and I'm getting very impatient. But it's all good. I think that the, the way that I addressed that is just like going into like performance spaces. I started doing open mics for the first time, this year and this was probably because most of my MFA experience was virtual. It was very like shocking for me to, okay, now I can, interact with an audience with this work that has been a welcome jolt. You know, I think it's brought like new energy to my work and it's just made me more excited for those moments of connection with the work. TN: Kweku, what you just said reminded me that one of my greatest joys is when I'm writing a song, I'm envisioning what it will be like live. What the connection will be with the audience. And it, it, it shows up in almost like incantation. If I, I make decisions to repeat lyrics over and over again because I know that we're building or I can feel how the moment will build live. With each cycle we're, we’re bringing the audience in further, and that is like a very communal, beautiful energy. DJ: One of the most beautiful examples of this is, Joni Mitchell and her song, “Both Sides Now.” When she first recorded it versus when she rerecorded it much later in her life. And it's the same song. But it becomes a completely different world because it's now in- infused with imbued with all of her life experience. That’s the only way I can repeat something, is if it's new every time. That is a very different thing than, and I'm gonna use some bad terminology here, but like Western ideas about something being repeatable and it's, it's supposed to match what it was before versus in most other traditions around the world, it has to change, to adapt to the moment you're actually in. I've challenged myself to say, you know, okay, what does it need to be now? And how do you, you know, how do you have to sing it today? Because you're in a different room and, and it doesn't erase what it was before. And you can listen to both of those recordings by Joni Mitchell and they each have their beauty. YI: I have one last question for you. I know that all of you are, in different ways, engaged with live performances, but increasingly we're, we're in all these virtual spaces and, and I think time works a little bit differently there. I guess my question is: is there anything interesting or, or good that comes out of virtual, virtual time or virtual spaces. Besides “Phenom,” which is amazing. (laughs) KA: I was gonna say “Phenom,” but also I was thinking just like we're transcending time zones, which I think is something that's like really also wonky because time zones are these real things that we have now, but certain countries are just like, nah, I know that China is like one time zone. I know that certain parts of the world also don't have daylight savings. So it's just an imposed form of time that technology can also mess with. And I think that one thing about “Phenom” that I really liked was that when we see the boxes interacting, when like someone's pouring some water and like someone else is able to drink it. I think that that also makes Zoom a more intimate space. It's like, okay, even though we are separated by space, for safety sometimes, sometimes just for proximity, et cetera, there are ways that we can utilize this technology to like create unity despite this distance. TN: I appreciate that sentiment a lot. And I was gonna say, yeah, this is an example of, tracing everyone's experience with a virtual space like Zoom from the beginning where very few people were, were familiar with it and there was like a self-consciousness around it. Now we're, we've all done it enough that it is possible to have a really intimate, thoughtful, present conversation, which is something I'm so grateful for. You know, this couldn't happen otherwise, but the, the fact that everyone has done it enough so that we've figured out how to navigate what is potentially self-conscious and what is potentially uncomfortable with, with time lapse, with delays, whatever it is, and we've gotten good enough that we can have such a meaningful exchange. DJ: It's a, a virtual version of the library. Whenever I would go to the library, as a kid especially, the best books were always the ones that were next to the one that I was looking for. And I feel something about the way that the delivery systems for a lot of virtual material in terms of work, like the videos we make or the, or the readings we give that then live on a, a platform like YouTube or Vimeo or something. The possibility that you then will begin to curate a kind of experience through other material. Yeah, there's an algorithm at work and there's advertisements at work, but again, we still, you know, back to the punch clock, you can have a little bit of agency there. Thinking about some of our great speculative and sci-fi writers: if we invite spirit into the, into the tech, how does it surprise us from within and say, you looked at this, you love this. Now, you know, I want to go watch the other videos from that album, but while I'm doing that, I'm gonna see something else that I might not have thought about. I remember when Beyonce did the, um, the Lemonade album. And she did the, she did the thing where she came out in the vestments of, of Oshun, right? Like she had the yellow dress and the, and her bat. And she was moving around the street doing whatever she was doing. And friends of mine who are in the tradition of the spiritual tradition were saying, well, you know, “Is she using Oshun?” I was like, “No, Oshun is using her.” There's a way that the spirit will show up and deploy itself and we'll get talked to by the ancestors in whatever medium we're working with. So I think what I like in the virtual is we can be surprised, even though it seems like it's all a, an equation that's been locked. LC: I'm having a, a weird time with this question because I'm feeling very negative. (laughs) But I think I'm thinking about mediums. It's not just, it's not just digital, it's Spotify or it's all these different ways that we experience quote unquote content now. It, it makes it hard to experience the intent of an entire album, for example. We get the song, we kind of get stuck on the one song. For me as a writer, it's frustrating because we have to constantly produce an extract of our work. And one of the things that makes me a bad novelist——'cause I come out of poetry——is I'm not that interested in linear progression. And that the, the moves that are retained from poetry and that I hear in albums or longer works is, an, is the feeling of recursion or a meaning that you, something that you experience at the beginning of the piece then comes back, you know, just like you were saying, Daniel, if we we're all Joni Mitchell moving through text and time. That's what's hard to do in this format. I'll just start calling it the Joni Mitchell effect. And it's one of the pleasures I think of standup too. I guess it's called the callback? Is that what it is? The comic says something and by the end a whole ‘nother meaning has been created. So that's what I'm missing these days from these types of digital encounters, which is both a fault of the medium and my own mental synapse at the moment of sitting down and listening. Let's be real. It's gonna be hard for people to turn on this Lab, right? Or catch up with a live reading. Oh, I can't do the livestream, but I'll, I'll catch up sometime. You have to concentrate more, right? Cause you're really committed to being in it virtually versus sitting in a room where, where you're not gonna move, or Kweku, as you were saying, not only were you saying your poetry on your Zoom classes, but something was even lost when you couldn't be in the physical room with people that you couldn't hear how it landed. That's my hot take! Still happy to be with you all. YI: Sorry to make you make an extract, Lisa. (laughs) * CG: Thanks for listening to the Graywolf Lab podcast, with our guests Kweku Abimbola, Lisa Hsiao Chen, Daniel Alexander Jones, and Thảo Nguyễn. We’re looking forward to our next episode featuring Dark Days author Roger Reeves talking to Terrance Hayes, Solmaz Sharif, and Rosa Alcalá on the subject of cultural criticism, so make sure you subscribe to the podcast wherever you’re listening to it. Our music is from “Expiation,” from the album Terrain by Jacob Cooper. There’s a short feature on Jacob’s music on the Lab site. Check it out, and check out all things Lab, on graywolflab.org. Thanks to our podcast producers Edie French and Paul Auguston of IDream.tv. And thanks to the donors who have generously contributed to Graywolf Lab. Graywolf Press is a nonprofit publisher of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and genre-defying literature whose aim is to foster new thinking about what it means to live in the world today. We champion outstanding writers at all stages of their careers to ensure that adventurous readers can find diverse voices in a crowded marketplace. Check out our books at graywolfpress.org. 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