AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

The Poetry Magazine Podcast: Esther Belin in Conversation with A. Van Jordan

(If you notice a mistake in the transcript, please let us know by emailing [email protected])

(MUSIC PLAYING)

A. Van Jordan:

(READS EXCERPT FROM “Such Sweet Thunder”)

Who said no Blacks allowed in orchestra seats?
Leave the balcony empty tonight; let that be jazz.

Esther Belin: Welcome to the Poetry Magazine Podcast. I’m guest editor Esther Belin, coming to you from the four corners of the United States. Today I’m speaking with A. Van Jordan. Van is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, and a Pushcart Prize. He was born in Akron, Ohio, and his poetry is influenced by music, film, race, history, and pop culture. Today, we’ll hear two poems from his forthcoming book, When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again. The title comes from The Tempest. And the book celebrates Black youth, while also linking how narratives about Black youth today intersect with Black and mixed-race characters, and Shakespeare’s plays. Van, welcome to the podcast.

A. Van Jordan: Thank you. Great to be here.

Esther Belin: First off, I need to tell you that I am awestruck that you accepted my invitation to talk about poetry. I consider you a master poet.

A. Van Jordan: Oh, thanks for having me. Thanks for, thanks for saying that.

Esther Belin: And as I get to know your work, I sense this great intensity in your process, and a very humble honoring. And I say that because I feel that your work uncovers history in a very tender way. We have so much to talk about. And so let’s get started with your latest work, which is a book that incorporates Shakespeare and maybe his poetics, and definitely some of his characters. So how did that project start?

A. Van Jordan: I have to say that it really started in Marfa, Texas. I was fortunate to get the Lannan Literary Award. And what came with that was some time in Marfa. And while I was flying over there, my WiFi had gone out on my laptop. And I just didn’t have the bandwidth at the time to read anything worth reading, so I started looking at things that were already downloaded on my laptop, and The Tempest by Julie Taymor, the film that she had done, where she changed Prospero to Prospera.

(AUDIO CLIP FROM FILM PLAYS)

Lie at my mercy, or mine enemy’s

And had cast Helen Mirren in that role.

(AUDIO CLIP FROM FILM PLAYS)

shortly, shall all my Labor’s and thou shalt have the air at Freedom

A. Van Jordan: I was curious about the way in which she changed the language to match this female Prospera. I was sort of obsessing over that at the time. And while all this was happening, you know, I was also watching the news. And so we had you know, Tamir Rice happening, Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown before that. And, you know, I think like a lot of us, we see all the stuff happening in the world, and I think if you’re an artist, you sometimes, you feel like you want to get involved, but you also might feel a bit ineffective.

Esther Belin: Hm.

A. Van Jordan: And I know that was some of what was happening inside me the time. You know, so sometimes you have to feel like, you know, there’s a war going on in Ukraine, people are out in the streets protesting what’s happening with George Floyd, there’s folks in some town where they don’t have water, all this stuff is going on. And I’m somewhere writing a poem.

Esther Belin: Mm-hmm.

A. Van Jordan: And it just seems a little precious. And so all of that was part of the meditation that was I was dealing with, and in this lovely home I was staying in, The Complete Works of Shakespeare. And I don’t know if I would have gravitated to that, in the way that I did, had I not been thinking about that, and had it in the form of my mind from the trip. But I did, I was all into it. I was like, combing through the language, and.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

But then I also started taking note of the characters, and particularly Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus and Caliban in The Tempest. And of course, Othello. Just thinking about the ways in which when these characters appear on stage, they’re all these presuppositions that are already sort of baked into their character from the other characters on stage. Or they have these reputations that precede them.

Esther Belin: Yeah.

A. Van Jordan: There are all these assumptions that are sort of given to the audience. And it seemed a lot like what was happening when I would watch the news. Like before we would hear anything about who these victims were, we would first hear about the police encounter, about some record they may have had when they were juveniles or something, or who they associated with, anything that besmirch the character of these figures. And so, I remember the first thing people mentioned when they talked about Tamir Rice was that he was big for his age. And he looked like a grown man. And that the gun that he was brandishing looked like a real gun, and, you know, and then you find out that, you know, he’s 12 years old, and he’s got this cherubic little face, and that the gun that he may have been playing with, this toy gun, he didn’t even get a chance to pull it out for the police to make the assumption that he was carrying a real weapon. You know, before the car that they were driving up on this grass in the middle of this park, before the car came to a complete stop, they shot him. And so, less than two seconds. You know, for me, there seemed to be a parallel. It was just something I couldn’t shake.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Esther Belin: You wrote a poem about that scenario, you wrote a poem about what happened, “Airsoft”. Would you read that for us?

A. Van Jordan: Sure, I’d be happy to.

“Airsoft”

Like a whisper from a friend
telling a secret, the gun
reveals itself only to invite—

not start any trouble, mind you,
just to invite—the boy
who listens to come out to play.

And the boy knows not so much,
what the gun’s pellet says
as he understands what the pellet

will mean to say, whistling
through a windy afternoon
past onlookers who neither hear nor see

the streak of inhuman
intent searing through the ether,
so he takes his Airsoft pellet gun in hand

as he might take his laces in hand
to tighten them more securely
around his juvenile ankles—

that’s to say, without much care,
but just out of habit before taking off
to run; everyone runs faster

with tight laces. This makes sense,
of course, and the hope to run can excite
as much as hitting full stride with wind

washing over a boy’s face.
And toy guns masquerade as lethal guns
in a boy’s dreamland where no one dies,

where they simply lie down and play dead,
but they live to play on.
As mysterious as a cat in a box,

a toy gun in a Black boy’s pocket,
the gun neither dead nor alive,
unless offered a chance to empty

his pocket to solve the paradox
of what a day might hold.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Esther Belin: You know, I feel an urgency to tell that story, and to give it a chance to be told in a very, a way that unfolds just in a tender way, like unwrapping a package. And you know, it is a gift. And you know, makes me think, you know, this November will be the eighth anniversary of his death. And as you mentioned, he was 12 years old when he was killed. You know, how did that incident in Ohio, connect to your—connect to the Ohio that you know?

A. Van Jordan: You know, I grew up not too far from where he grew up. I grew up in Akron, Ohio. It was a great place to be young, particularly at the time I was growing up. But, I mean, there was still a good deal of racial tension. There were parts of town that you just didn’t go to because, you know, it was known that Black folks weren’t welcomed there. You know, so, when I was a kid, my brothers and I, we were in a part of town called Cuyahoga Falls. It’s like a suburb of Akron. And Cuyahoga Falls was known and still often, you know, called by people Caucasian Falls. Because it was where, you know, they still have the covenants where, you know, if you’re Black, even with a GI Bill, you cannot buy property there. And my one brother and I, we were out in that area because my mom went to a seamstress there and we were sort of in the same plaza kind of walking around killing time, and it was a Sunday afternoon after church, and this police car pulls up, much like the way it pulled up on Tamir Rice, came in hot, the cops jumped out of their car with their guns drawn. You know, I’m in a little suit.

Esther Belin: Wow.

A. Van Jordan: In third grade, you know what I mean. It’s like, so these guys are questioning us and saying they gotta report that it was shoplifting. You know, it was one of these moments, I think about now, and realize how fortunate we were.

Esther Belin: Mm-hmm.

A. Van Jordan: But it’s also one of those things where you, you think about how often these encounters happen, how we have, over time, have kind of taken it as par for the course. You hear that, the joke of Richard Pryor about being stopped by the police, and I—it’s too profane to go into here. But you know, like, he goes through, you know, getting frisked and they tell him, you know, “Have a nice day” at the end of it. He’s like, you know, “How the F am I gonna have a nice day after all that shit?” you know.

Esther Belin: Yeah. (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

A. Van Jordan: So it just kind of goes on. And so it’s just like one of those things like you’d hear about it, you grew up with it. You know, by now, most of America also knows about the talk that happens in African American families. It’s just that the rest of the country has gotten hip to it now.

Esther Belin: Mm-hmm.

A. Van Jordan: Because of cell phones and body cam footage and things like that. When I look at Tamir Rice, he becomes emblematic of the perils of being in the Black body, even as a young boy. He should have the opportunity to play and make mistakes and be a kid, whether good or bad, or, or brilliant and precocious, or whatever, he should just have a chance to do that.

Esther Belin: You know, when you mentioned emblematic, I think, you know, when does a Black person, a Black child, become a threat. And now that’s part of our history. And I feel like that’s something you have built up in your work. You know, there’s a courageousness there to not only confront that, but I think confront it in a way that is more of an offering. So tell me about some of the research or the different journeys that you include in this new book.

A. Van Jordan: Yeah, so it’s varied. Some of it, you know, I have to say, sometimes when I say research, I feel like I’m putting on airs or something, because some of it’s just, I guess there’s an intellectual curiosity, but a lot of it’s just boyish curiosity as well. Like, it’s just kind of like, there’s something I want to know more about and filling in the gaps of my ignorance. You know, I’ve had a thing for Shakespeare since I was an undergrad. I did a study abroad at the University of London and that kind of planted a seed. So I’ve been going to plays for some time and, and over the years, I’ve seen a number of plays and with Black actors in them. You know, like I saw Denzel as Richard III and Mary Alice as the Queen, David Oyelowo as Othello, playing opposite Daniel Craig as Iago. When I think about some of those performances, and I think about what it would take for an actor to inhabit these characters, you know, when you have a character who’s Black playing one of these sort of moorish characters from that time, what does it take to get in that mindset?

Esther Belin: Mm-hmm.

A. Van Jordan: Because I think sometimes people assume well, you know, if you’re Black, of course you can play Othello. (LAUGHING) You know what I mean?

Esther Belin: Yeah.

A. Van Jordan: You know, but I mean, you see, Harry Lennix play Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus, he’s inhabiting this attitude of 16th century, like this moor. He has the sort of sagacity and the audacity of that character. And he’s holding all of that in him and presenting all of that in this, at the time, you know, 20th-century body. And I felt the same way watching Denzel on stage as Richard III, playing a character that wasn’t meant for a Black actor, but, you know, what does it mean to bring that in that body?

(MUSIC PLAYING)

A. Van Jordan: There’s a Black Shakespearean scholar, Patricia Akhimie, who just really opened up a window into thinking about the ways in which humor is used to create stereotype. And, you know, you go into a theater, audience is, you know, predominately white and a certain class. And then there’s a character, you know, a person of color or Jewish characters, who may not be in, a part of that audience. Those characters are depicted on stage, and they’re often the butt of jokes or demonized in some way.

Esther Belin: Mm-hmm.

A. Van Jordan: And then people leave the theater and they go out and encounter this moor, or this Jewish person, and they’ve carried with them this sort of caricature of them. And so she sort of talks about the way in which that operates. And it’s not just Shakespeare, but just a lot of what was going on in the early modern stage at the time dealt with that. And also it coincided in the late 1590s, it coincided with Britain’s interest in slavery, in the slave trade.

Esther Belin: And it’s so interesting, because I think we’re talking about something that’s hundreds of years old, but those constructs, like affect us now. In pop cultural references, film, music.

A. Van Jordan: Yeah, yeah, it’s all still there. You know, that’s the thing about it. Like, we think we see this stuff happening around us, and I hear people talk about, “Oh, it’s gotten so bad,” I’m like, you know, think about how bad it was in the late 1500s. You know what I mean? It’s like, we’re seeing now, we’re seeing the vestiges of what was then. And we think about the construction of race and things like that. And this is, this is all a part of that. It’s, you know, we think about having to go into a sociological text for that, but it’s in the literature. It’s in the arts. And it’s been there for time immemorial. So it’s, it’s not new.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Esther Belin: So let’s hear a poem from the last section of the book, which references A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the incredible Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn album that borrows from the line, “I never heard So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.” Can you introduce and read the poem, “Such Sweet Thunder”?

A. Van Jordan: Sure. So the album Such Sweet Thunder is a Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn amazing collaboration. And the music is in response to the work of Shakespeare. And both Ellington and Strayhorn are invited to play at the Stratford Shakespearean Festival in 1956. They partake in the landscape, as well as watching the performances. They took the invite very seriously. And they read the plays and sonnets, and they composed a whole suite of songs based on Shakespeare’s works. And so, Such Sweet Thunder is the title of the album. I should also say this is a ghazal. You know, ghazals are usually, traditionally sung, so it just seemed like a great form for honoring Ellington.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

(READS POEM)

“Such Sweet Thunder”

Stratford Shakespearean Festival, Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, 1956

Minor chords ring across Stratford farmland. We jazz
wherever we’re called. Local ears lift to see jazz.

Their hearts hear in places their minds roam.
Oh, if the bard could be Black! She’d be jazz.

If the hogs across the way, just for a moment, were swans
released in a lake, they’d think, this is the sea: jazz!

Tell me, if Cleo walked in here right now,
would her stride, royal to her jeweled toes, be jazz?

Britt Woodman’s Hank Cinq and all them
octave jumps! Slide your trombone, man! Free Jazz!

Now, wipe the sleep from your eyes. The time has come:
Your ideas must speak the language that be jazz.

Who said no Blacks allowed in orchestra seats?
Leave the balcony empty tonight; let that be jazz.

Emmett Till’s body found floating in the Tallahatchie River.
Emmett Till’s name still rises, and, believe me, that be jazz.

Schools in Topeka, Kansas, threw open their doors.
Integration? Call it what you want, but, shit, man—that be jazz.

Tamora’s baby came out Black, you say? Damn. The more
I hear of Aaron the Moor, the more I think: don’t that be jazz?

A note above ~ A note below ~ The note between ~
The tonic ~ Enclosed ~ Pivoted up ~ Octave ~ That be jazz.

Oh, if the bard could be Black! Her stride would be royal, jeweled toes ... 
your ideas must speak. Aaron and more. Till’s name still rises! That be jazz.

The circle of fourths comes full circle now. You bards,
Duke, Billy, the children are dancing! Enough: Let that be jazz.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

A. Van Jordan: Ellington, he was a genius. So, I think he connected with the genius of Shakespeare and he could see into it and, you know, and then when he was, in 1956, at this Stratford Shakespeare Festival, that was, it was a big deal that he was able to be there. I’m a jazz head anyway, so I love Ellington. I think he’s one of America’s great composers. I think what he’s doing is, is jazz, is big Memphis, also like America’s classical music, you know, so it’s beautiful.

Esther Belin: Let’s listen to some of the music from the album, Such Sweet Thunder. Here’s University of New Hampshire professor of English, Douglas Lanier, speaking with interviewer, Barbara Bogaev, on the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast.

Douglas Lanier: He really does manage to sample Shakespeare’s greatest hits. So there’s Midsummer from the comedies, there’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Douglas Lanier: There’s Taming of the Shrew.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Douglas Lanier: From the tragedies, you’ve got Hamlet and Macbeth.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Douglas Lanier: Antony and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Douglas Lanier: What Ellington had done, was to create a melody line that mirrors exactly the 14th-line iambic pentameter that Shakespeare has. In other words, what he did was he wrote 14 small melodies that were of 10 notes each.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Esther Belin: So I’m thinking you were aware of the technical aspects that Duke Ellington, that he worked in. So, I mean, did you incorporate some of the more traditional poetics in your book?

A. Van Jordan: I wasn’t really trying to replicate what Ellington was doing, but I was more thinking about how to honor what he was doing. And, and so the ghazal was the form that, just to bring his voice in, I just thought that was the way to go with that. And there’s some nonce forms in the book, and there are villanelles and things like that in there as well. I don’t know if people would always notice them as villanelles, though, because some of them are kind of dispersed. They’re fragments, Sapphic fragments and things like that. And I guess they kind of form-light or so, I don’t know how to call it, but.

Esther Belin: I like that.

A. Van Jordan: Yeah, they’re—I just feel like any time you’re writing, even in free verse, there’s the shadow of form beneath it. I think it’s hard not to have, you know, some kind of formal gesture, whether it’s just thinking about, you know, how your line works, or, you know, how your stanza is structured or something.

Esther Belin: Yeah, that’s definitely in our DNA as poets, I think, we always have that sort of shadow of traditional forms. Let’s hear a little bit more of the album Such Sweet Thunder, and hear how some of the Shakespearean characters are referenced.

Douglas Lanier: At times, it’s almost musically experimental.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Douglas Lanier: The lovers are represented by four different instruments that are out of tune and sort of chatter with one another.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Douglas Lanier: At the end of the piece, you have almost the most single recognizable moment where you know it’s Shakespeare. On one of the takes, Clark Terry, in a little section at the very end of the song, basically uses his trumpet to say, “Lord, what fools these mortals be.”

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Esther Belin: Yeah, I think—so writing about race and writing about history and the complexity of it, you know, sometimes in my own work, I have such a difficult time knowing when and how to craft things. And really just, you know, wondering how you manage that, like how you make those decisions on, you know, when to introduce these things, and in what format?

A. Van Jordan: Yeah, that’s always a tough question. What I’m always thinking about is, is there another way, another angle that we can bring up, that might jar people into awareness.

Esther Belin: Mm-hmm.

A. Van Jordan: You know, because I think what happens is that, particularly now, particularly with social media, folks get sort of seduced by the common language around a subject and the jargon that’s kind of thrown around. Then it becomes like white noise, you know, like you don’t, after a while, I don’t think people hear it.

Esther Belin: Mm-hmm.

A. Van Jordan: Well, how do you wake them up out of that, the state of being almost anesthetized to what’s being said, and what’s going on around you. You have to try to think of, is there another way to talk about this? And sometimes we think about this in our most common language, in our, like when we’re talking among ourselves. You know, it’s like being in a Shakespeare play or something, you know, I mean, it’s just, you realize, like, you know, there are different things that happen. This high drama, it’s like, it’s already, the stage is set.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

A. Van Jordan: Part of the research, I had a conversation with Arthur L. Little Jr., who’s a wonderful Shakespearean scholar, just boundless knowledge on The Tempest. And one of the things he pointed out to me was the relationship, you know, between Caliban and his mother? Sycorax, who never appears in the play. So, many people know that, you know, Prospero, he’s kind of cheated out of his seat, he’s in Milan he’s duped by his brother. And he ends up on this island that he, with his daughter, Miranda, he ends up there, and basically takes the island captive with his magic. And the person who was there before him, was Caliban and his mother Sycorax. They’re indigenous to the island. What we know of the island, what we know of its inhabitants, what we know of the story, what we know of the storm that supposedly set everything in motion, is that it’s all from the hand of Prospero. He seems to have a strange kind of animus for Sycorax, which is kind of unexplained. Like, why, like why does he care about Caliban’s mothers so much? And so it made me start, I started thinking about why it was so important to besmirch all the way through legacy in that way and what that means, why is it so important to turn everyone else on the island, the spirit Ariel, the other folks from Milan who get shipwrecked there, everyone has to be turned against Sycorax and turned against Caliban. And Caliban has to be demonized and made into this monster. You know, there are things that don’t always add up. Kind of going back to your earlier question, Esther about like, how do we, you know, how do we, you know, manage all this stuff and write about it, it’s kind of the same way you’re asking yourself, “Well, what—how do I, how do I make sense of this thing that doesn’t make sense?” You know what I mean, like, “What can I do to sort of put some order to this?” And often, you just kind of have to call it and say, look, it doesn’t make sense. Like, you know, this is BS. Like, you know, like, this is, this is what happened, this is just what you’ve been told. This is just what was said about this person. This isn’t their actual experience, this isn’t their actual spirit. This isn’t even what happened. And so you’re going through, trying to figure out, well, how now can I render that, and approximate some of that confusion that we’re feeling when we know better?

Esther Belin: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot to consider when you’re building this cast of characters, and also modernizing it, making it accessible for people to really kind of say, “Pay attention right here, like, things are still happening.” And especially around, you know, you said anaesthetizing that numbness around the numbers of people who have perished.

A. Van Jordan: Yeah.

Esther Belin: Right, in such similar ways in this country. And so I could see how the momentum has faded. And I feel like the beauty of writing and the poetry and the art, that’s foundational.

A. Van Jordan: Yeah.

Esther Belin: So we can always go back to it. I love being part of that process. I love how you’re contributing to that process. And I’m excited hearing about your work.

A. Van Jordan: Thank you. Thank you.

Esther Belin: It was great chatting with you and, very honored.

A. Van Jordan: Well, thank you for having me. Thank you for the work you’re doing with Poetry as a guest editor. It’s been an honor to be a part of this, so I really appreciate it.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

(EXCERPT FROM “Airsoft” REPLAYS)

intent searing through the ether,
so he takes his Airsoft pellet gun in hand

as he might take his laces in hand
to tighten them more securely
around his juvenile ankles—

that’s to say, without much care,
but just out of habit before taking off
to run; everyone runs faster

with tight laces. This makes sense,
of course, and the hope to run can excite
as much as hitting full stride with wind

washing over a boy’s face.
And toy guns masquerade as lethal guns
in a boy’s dreamland where no one dies,

where they simply lie down and play dead,
but they live to play on.
As mysterious as a cat in a box,

a toy gun in a Black boy’s pocket,
the gun neither dead nor alive,
unless offered a chance to empty

his pocket to solve the paradox
of what a day might hold.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Esther Belin: A big thanks to A. Van Jordan. And another big thanks to Rachel James. I’ve had the pleasure of working with her the last few months on these podcasts, and she is a big part of their success. A. Van Jordan’s fifth book, When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton. You can read three poems by Jordan in the September 2022 issue of Poetry, in print and online. We’d also like to thank the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast from the Folger Shakespeare Library. You heard an excerpt from “Duke Ellington, Shakespeare, and Such Sweet Thunder” from January 2019. If you’re not a subscriber to Poetry magazine, there’s a special rate for podcast listeners. For a limited time, you can get a full year of the magazine for $20. That’s 11 book-length issues for just $20. Visit poetrymagazine.org/podcastoffer to subscribe. That’s poetrymagazine.org/podcastoffer. Okay, signing off for now. Until next time, be well, stay safe, and thank you for listening.