Well, we're here to talk about a poem in this book called Kith, is a marvelous book. And it's a great honor to have the writer who wrote the words that are in this book, Divya Victor, with us, hi Divya. >> Hi you all. >> Thank you so much for doing this. And Lenny Brown has joined us too, hi Lenny. >> Glad to be here, thanks for coming. >> My pleasure. >> This is going to be fun. So, what we're doing is we're talking about a poem that is the last poem of the book. It's also the last poem of a long alphabetical-ish section. [LAUGH] >> Called foreign terms, this is the front page of foreign terms. All right, so on the recto, we have English and Tamil. So it's exercise, it's not a dictionary, it's like a workbook for someone trying to learn Tamil. And one of the two epigraphs is from Samuel Johnson, who wrote, almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble. Which is really relevant and powerful. And when we get to the very end, to w, we get a poem called W is for Walt Whitman's soul. And since we're always so interested in what contemporary poets are trying to make of the complex character that was Walt Whitman. This seems like a perfect poem to talk about. So, if you don't mind, shall we begin with you reading this prose poem?. >> Yeah, that's a great idea. >> Okay. >> Yeah. >> Great, thanks. >> So this poem, W is for Walt Whitman's soul, has an epigraph from William Dalrymple, so I'll read that first. One of the very first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder, loot. It sits with a fork made from a lotus on an ivory chair eating an elephant steak in the company of bears and feral nautch girls on a monsoon evening. Incandescent with an appetite as mighty as railroads spann’d across seas and reclines, its cheeks burnished, its ass varnished by suns setting on bronze. And sugared with saltpetre, its torso a tableaux for the annals of rectitude, the theatre for roiling or robust passage. A veritable Suez Canal towards missionary victories which thrust from such bejeweled and oiled loins anointed by coin. That emission of plump plums, lump sums into the Ganges, that coiling coy virgin maiden winding her languid locks. Batting her lashes to its lashes, its spine a gentle wire. Supine, its belly swells with salt and figs with meat and treaties, it corks open a profound song. Itself it sings into books heavy with truths on the chair dressed with leather and raw hides kissed by ox blood smeared with beef dung. Lined with raw silk woven from worms plucked from boughs basted across its pious beaming eyes its spidery ghosted lids. And its byzantine glance unmoors from its Chinese porcelain and crosses the ebony table polished with lac secreted from the cloaca of the kerria lacca. Set with glazed cakes eaten by pinked mouths wearing crimson robes, to its guests polished and glossed. And stained by the ooze drawn to color the uncolored raw linen, the wood, the human. Then its wrist cuffed by gold and cowries and studded with coral draws a whisper-thin muslin veil dyed carmine, sucked from crushed scale of cochineal. Boiled in ammonia and bled into curds and rouge glinting sanguineous and turbid between bug and rug. Snug a thug in redcoat or a turncoat carrying urns of this stuff, from estates of cocoa coconut calico, across its face. While soft éclairs of chocolate bumble out from its plumed rump choked with gum and linseed flax and cassia cinnamon and peppa. Like so many lines of blood under writing the mutton and not the goat, so it can sell them with a name of a place like scarves, or garlanded whores. More to work suckled by mother of pearl or T is named after Earth and they withhold scores to settle. Settle for homemade cures nettles, ginger, turmeric, a paste or to taste. And it's steeled and sealed and letters scented with sandal, sent abroad waxed and pressed with carnelian gems honed from grounded, owns. And makes stone from their flesh eats ink from their sweat soaks Indigo in ly fermented with time. And makes color so it can bid for its own passage that passage of this soul to India. >> Wow, lady, how you characterize the language? For someone who may be not used to reading poetry, this is going to to be an overwhelming experience, what kind of experience is that? >> It's such a beautiful catalogue, it's so much sensual color, the sound is amazing. And I think that comes across, first it rushes on, this abundance and this bounty in this beautiful placid surface. But then it's juxtaposed with the context that this catalog is existing and being framed by, is such a great, such a powerful juxtaposition there. >> So, Divya, no poet puts this much attention into the sound of words, into words' thingyness or fecundity, without intending, sorry for that word. >> [LAUGH] >> Without meaning for something to be said through those choices. >> Yep. >> So it's kind of a $64,000 question about a poem, and usually there's not the poet right here, so we have the advantage of you being here. >> Yeah. >> What were you trying to achieve by choosing this kind of language? >> I think what ends up happening in the process of writing this, is that there is this kind of slippage or enjoyment of the slippage. Between the luxury of sound of the decadence that's being catalogued, which are both sort of these categories of excess and pleasure. But what you enjoy in the form ends up costing a lot in the content, that's in the catalog, right? Of all these goods exported by the British East India Company. Which were being sent out during the time that Whitman was writing Leaves of Grass. So for me it's about that, how the ear, how there's this sort of audition of luxury. And then, through the audition of luxury, how we might experience the cost of luxury and decadence in the capitalistic enterprise. That is that situation. >> And you're fascinated in this poem and elsewhere with sometime one-sidedness of the exchange. How does it manifest itself here? So the resources are being extracted by the colonial power, there's some linguistic trading going on, of course, as your epigraph implies. But the extraction is the thing that we feel. And yet you're restoring to the place where the resources reside all this beauty, the language is a double-edged sword. >> Yeah. >> How do you feel about the one-wayness? And what is the what is the hedge against it, how can it be? But lately fixed. >> Yeah, those are two- >> Big questions. >> Big questions. The one weakness has been really important for kids. I think about it as the sort of stairway that only goes one way and one bloody step after the other. From the 15th century when Vasco da Gama arrives in Calicut in India, which is where we get Calico from, all the way to now, India's relationship with the World Bank, it's a one way stairway. And the linguistic exchange that you notice happening here with Calico and loot that sort of, that exchange for me has been about sort of taking English back. Claiming an ownership rather than a sort of status of borrowing and sort of always remaining in debt to the language as a post colonial subject or a subject of the diaspora. So yeah, this whole section for in terms is about how English, even while it is lodged in the body as the sort of foreign substance, has borrowed so much from us in order to become itself. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Well, what would you think of that whole issue? >> I'm thinking about how the language itself, so there is this great catalogue of all these things that are stolen. But then the pieces also demonstrating how language itself can be used in this euphemistic way to create this beautiful surface where there's this illusion that there's no problem, when actually it's devastation. So that's happening simultaneously, I think. >> Mm-hm. And there's a lot of pleasure in the forum and I- >> Mm-hm. >> I work too much perhaps with puns as the basis of my ideas. So, assonance was very important to me, the sense of assonating the idea of resounding sound. And this is a poem about Whitman's ass, it really is very long and involved description in many ways of him shooting into the Suez Canal, the sort of the plump lumps into the Ganges and so on. Into these waterways, and trade routes, and holy sites. [LAUGH] And so, there's also that sort of mischief in that foundational pun there for me that I want to acknowledge in addition to the music of the piece. >> And calling him out for his own mischief. >> [LAUGH] >> And the title juxtapose with the title being his soul. >> Yeah, that's right. >> So, I guess we should talk, so the door has been open to Walt Whitman because you raised Whitman. So, I guess we should talk Whitman, how does a fan of Whitman's catalogs of Whitman's over the top, listy thingy, his love of things transformed into words. Where does he stand then? I love itself it sings which is very Whitmanian phrase. >> Yeah. >> Except that he's the one, in his view, who's doing the singing, and hear the plummy, lumpy, plumpy, summy- >> [LAUGH] >> That the place is doing all those things is sufficiently fecund and rich to do its own singing. >> I hope so. >> Kind of reversing Whitman's presumption that he is there to sing it. >> I hope so, because part of what the poem ingests in order to produce the lump sums, which are right next to the plump lump. So, like the idea of economic exchange, right, lump sums are in exchange for- >> Sure. >> Goods are right next to plump lumps. >> And near enough the Suez Canal, which made the whole thing possible. >> Yes, right. Part of what is necessary for the poem to make those objects, those lumpy sums and plumpy lumps, is the ingestion of Whitman's language. So, there's a lot of citation here from his passage to India, like itself. >> The poem. >> The poem itself. So, the mightiest railroads spanned across seas. >> Yes. >> And the very last couple of phrases that can bid for its own passage, the passage of this soul, right? He's referring to his own soul which now has access to India, because of the opening of this West now. So, there's this kind of transmigration, almost this bizarre reverse transubstantiation of physical goods resembling the soul itself. >> Yes. >> Or like- >> That's great. So can we spell it out among the three of us,sspell it out a little more for folks who are not familiar with Whitman's celebration of the passage of India. Whitman is happy that this progress, technological, and therefore commercial progress, has taken place. And now that we look back on it. That's a position that we, many of us, feel skeptical about, that celebration >> Right. >> So can we talk about, I mean, how does Walt's tendency to celebrate sit with you these days? >> Complicated. >> It is can we talk about- >> It contains multitudes. [LAUGH] >> Right. Well, let's talk about that complication. >> Yeah. On one hand, you have his celebration of the sort of the modern soul, which for him is this sort of egalitarian thing, right? That can access everything equally, like all of us can access everything equally- >> Right. >> Mm-hm. >> Because now if this was canal, but we know that globalization, industrialization doesn't allow for that now. It does not- >> Right. >> Played out, it's that one way staircase, right? Or stairway, and for me that his kind of celebration of early capitalism is interesting tension, and interesting play with his own views on race and American culture at the time. Which he's really well known for being this, sort of the celebrant of legality and equality. But his correspondence and his prose suggests some things about his own sort of complicity within his whiteness and privilege that his poems don't necessarily reveal. And his views were unambiguously racist concerning black folks and those of indigenous origin. So, for me both those things are in play, right? >> The question becomes how do we, what do we do with the theory of writing that because it's paratactic and unsubordinated and listy. And therefore it has theoretical democratic implications, which is so against typical 19th century, subordinated in clause dominated, qualified and restricted writing, he broke from that. So you have the democratic theory, and then you have the actuality of content of political views which goes against that democratic theory. And as poets inheriting that, Whitman's own plumpy plumb, lumpy sums. >> [LAUGH] >> Yeah. >> As a writer. >> Yeah. >> Mm-hm. >> We have mixed feelings about the blessing of Whitman's, the allowing of long lines and maybe even prose poetry in effect. Go over the top in terms of tonal enthusiasm at a time when that was not the cool thing. And, we just have to struggle with our inheritances. Literary inheritances. >> Mm-hm. >> You're not really a Whitmanian poet. >> No. >> So, maybe you're the wrong person to ask. >> I mean, I feel like the exuberance is good. And the idea of opening up poetry in this democratic way is really good. But it seems like it's always an important time, but right now it's an especially important time when people say everybody. >> Mm-hm. >> What does that mean? Or an idea of utopia or we or the world, it's problematic, I mean, there's limitations. So as I mean, I think it's an important time for everyone to kind of ask, well, what do I mean, when I say the world? >> The time that we are sitting here talking. >> Exactly. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> And that's why this is a great moment for me to turn to Divya and As I say, slash ask,Whitman's poetry, there is a speaker now, the speaker is kind of all over the place, kind of a monistic speaker, but it's still a speaker. And here interestingly, it sits with there's no speaker explicit, so you knew what you were doing in that, but I guess it's worth spelling out why, what is the meaning of your resistance to making this an obvious subject position here as a speaker? >> I think might be useful to point to a formal fact that many of the other poems in this section foreign terms takes up a pretty clear subject position identified with me, like the author and the speaker gesturing towards other people. It's pretty much identical, it's a very autobiographical section this departs from that. >> Yeah. >> And the gesture of pointing to the it, is very clear and it's sort of emphatic again and again. It's this kind of fetishization or this objectification, of Whitman's soul as if it were an operator like that I could purchase. I think that's part of the fantasy that I'm enjoying in the sort of pointing to that it quite disengaged from him right so the it is not Whitman, it's just a component of Whitman as a fantasy elaborated like a still life, like a montage of still life objects. >> In this utterly fascinating way, we don't know what it is. It is an x, can we all, the three of us, take turns trying to, I mean, you actually took your turn because you already sort of described what it is, but I think it's worth dwelling on this, so do you want to take a shot at it? >> I mean, I'm thinking of it as what Whitman saw literally, as a reversal of the problem that global trade, treats people as not human but objects. So it's kind of looking at a soul in that way, because people are being looked at in that way or being treated that way as a result of stealing. >> So people as part of the resources that are to be- >> And that I mean that's it in the catalog clearly. >> English it is the one you would use for such a objectification. >> That's right. >> And it's just the soul, I mean, it's obviously it's not a pretty picture of the soul it's, it's a ravenous, greedy,- >> Yeah. >> Insatiable,- >> Yeah. >> Clueless. >> So I'm going to take a turn, I mean, I totally that would be sufficient. >> [LAUGH] >> What you just said is so great. Let me add another thought though, so, It, it sits it's belly itself it sings, just now you described the kind of downside the seamy side of this extraction but Divya earlier use the word pleasurable, I use the word fecundity which is generally positive term. In other words, there's a certain richness. It seems to me that one of the things you've accomplished here is to take pleasure as a poet over the top in terms of an assonance internal rhyme, alliteration, all that kind of standard ploys of thickening language. And celebrating the pre-extracted the thing it was whether it's India, Sri Lanka, the thing that was before it needed to have some kind of Western, or quasi- westernized named everything. Which is Walt Whitman saying I point to that and I named that and I can name that and I can name that, and I have homogenize all the language and it becomes whatever I want, I can have it my poem. And it strikes me as the thing that that has not yet been named, and that you intervening after all these years, get to recover and taking your own pleasure in a kind of fantasy is the wrong word but an imaginatively past prior to Whitman, prior to Suez prior to extraction. Now I Divvy Victor get I love I Divvy Victor, sounds Whitmanian, get to decide how thingy I want to make this language or to put it in some, once it's all been named, it's been stolen and in a way we're kind of talking about things that are absent now. So the only thing we have are words like flax, and wharves, and gems, and lie and so forth. It's a celebration of the thing that was there, with a word that replaces a thing, and it seems to be that state, I don't know. >> Sort of before the fall. >> Before the fall before the linguistic fall, which was enabled by imperialism and technologies like Suez. I really enjoyed that reading, I think it's optimistic in a way, we were just saying that we need that sort of optimism sometimes, and yeah. >> Cued by you're saying you took pleasure- >> Yeah. >> I imagine this was a hoot to write. >> It was so much fun. >> Yeah. >> Yes. [LAUGH] >> So let's go around twice more, first time, another thought about Whitman and where Whitman stands at the beginning. He and Dickinson and others stand at the beginning of the US modern period of poetry, so let's take another sort of look at Whitman, and then go around one more time just to add final thoughts, things that we forgot to say. So, who wants to say one more thing about Whitman, and it might be just define Whitman again in the poem. >> Just as a point of context it might be useful to return to the Samuel Johnson, so we begin with the Johnson this section- >> We read it again. >> And end with the Whitman, yeah. >> Almost all absurdity of conduct, arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble. >> Right, so I think the word conduct, has been really important for me in writing this section which is about manner, behavior, and the kinds of material goods that are exchanged. That enable those manners and behaviors that help us resemble others who we can't resemble. And it ends on Whitman, because as a poet, it is his manner that I supposedly inherit at in the institution that is poetry. Right, so this is that sort of accounting for the absurdity and the pleasure that comes with absurdity of resembling Whitman, I think. >> That's great love it, Laine your thought on Whitman? >> I was going to ask the significance of ending the alphabet with Whitman or having it be the last poem in the book but you already spoke to that [LAUGH] somewhat yeah. >> It's sort of tempting to see it as getting the final word but of course that's not that's not what's happening. What was your thought about ending with Whitman? >> While I was thinking about the difference between our two readings of it, and then I thought of a third Third Reading that's kind of in between that's a little bit more neutral. Is that here we have this catalog is evidence. And here we have the question. Well, who does it belong to? It doesn't belong to Walt Whitman. So I'm kind of, we looking at the catalog and that it's evidence begging a question of who has the right to access and whose pleasure was the cost of somebody pleasure of access. And what's the role of language in bringing more consciousness to this problem of conspicuous consumption in our world now and all of the effects of that. >> Yeah. >> So, more question then. >> And how dare a poet, How dare a poet. Assume that one must go to some Far off other orient, steamy mess of a place to have to discover the pleasure of the thingness of language. One won't need only have as he did often turned to his left and Brooklyn to his right on Long Island in order. There was plenty of pleasure in the thing is and of course he had discovered it but in a way he sort of written all over. All that out by the time we get to passage to India super- >. Right. >> Excited to go somewhere else. >> Right. >> Which is what the colonial project is all about anyway, right? >> Yeah. >> You finished extracting everything you can from the local, so. >> It is the retirement phase of it fantasy. [LAUGH] That's what it's the soul it's yeah. It's about thinness, but it's also about this stuff that transcends that thinness. As a stuff that's going to last forever and that apparently is going to bid for the passage to India where all souls go. >> Yeah. Wow okay good. I have two Whitman thoughts real quick. One is the epigraph to the poem, which reminds us that, one of the first Indian words to come to English was lute. And it strikes me that a language theory that a lot of poets later and maybe it has arguably Dickinson right then and there. The language theory that Wall is naive about is that every gesture of pointing and naming is looting to some degree. And he did so much naming and he really thought of that as an innocent activity, a loving activity, a generous activity. It's actually quite ungenerous. If you name indiscriminately and you grab all those words and things that's looting. So it makes sense. And the other Wittman point kind of a minor point is the railroad spanned. Across season and reclines its cheeks burnished as far as railroad spanned. So. It's funny, in a poem about the Suez Canal, to be focusing on railroads, and really Wall is very slippery in his thinking. He really is still in Manifest Destiny on the continent of the United States, that's his thing. I imagine Wall lying down on the railroad from New York and looking all the way to California and saying that's cool. Even though that puts you in bed with all kinds of villains and thieves and corporatists and extractors. And he's really thinking about, okay, it's what we're talking about the retirement phase. We've already destroyed all the native residents of this thing by doing our Manifest Destiny so he's still got railroad on the brain. >> Yeah, it's almost like this mechanism right for then the fantasy of what Empire could do for you, which is to liberate your soul. If you are a Wiltman, or someone in witness, subject position. But the railroad stands in for that Or it's this sort of parallel demonstration of what could come out of it. And as an Indian, the railroad is a really important symbol. Because whenever the benevolent middle classes speak of colonialism they always say that they gave us the railroads. And it's this real irritant in our discourse. As if the railroads were done, were created as an act of benevolence. >> Yeah >> [LAUGH] And not to indeed loot the things that they could name. >> Yeah. Great. Okay so let's go one more time around, this time say anything that you meant to say in this conversation. But haven't had a chance to squeeze in yet a final thought. Laney final thought? >> Well, pointing to the bigger structure of the book. One of the things I love so much about the book is the structure and ending with the alphabet seems like such a wonderful beginning. [LAUGH] >> It's true. >> The alphabet is this sturdy. Basic. >> Yeah, let's start from the very beginning. It's a very good place to start. >> Right. >> [CROSSTALK] It's such a study is a great word to describe the alphabet, right? We've essentially had that order from The Syrian alphabet it's like fourth century BC or before. So the Greeks borrow it and the Romans and the Phoenicians and then we still have it. It's super sturdy. It's a nice ladder to climb. Final thought on your own phantom. I am glad you wrote up the alphabet for me in terms of the structure of the whole book. It sets me up to sort of relearn again the alphabet. Which is I think as a poet, something I like to do again and again to study the language that is so naturalized. That has become almost like a mother tongue but every time I recite the alphabet again, it's new to me. And I'm happiest when I feel like I'm learning English all over again. Which I think W's for Walt Whitman soul really made me feel like I was learning it again Yeah, >> That's very cool. Well, my final thought is very local. I'm obsessed with the little you section, soft crush, etc. Curds it's sort of toward the end I've turbid bug rub snug turncoat. What I really like about this section is two things. First of all, as alliterations and internal rhymes go, internal U's are kind of hard to do without seeming silly. And once I get to bug, and rug, and snug, I realize you're having a lot of fun. >> [LAUGH] >> because that's >> I don't know if you had a child at this point- >> [LAUGH] Not yet. >> But you're thinking about it right? >> Right. >> So we're of course referring to the kitty idiom of the snug as a bug and rug. And the delight that people get to talk about alphabet is going back to basics. Or you were saying the language keeps revealing itself as a new to you, and bug, rug, snug, it kind of gets us there. The second thing I like about that passage, which I will just read because I like the word sanguineous- >> [LAUGH] >> Is the way it ends with stuff. Which is kind of a nod to Walt But also of this stuff, it's very idiomatic. It's very non pretentious, as opposed to glinting sanguineous >> [LAUGH] >> And it's like of this stuff. Is something really funny about that, you were going to say, >> Yeah, I mean, and it's also stuff in two senses, right? Just in terms of like, yeah matter, but also stuff as a nonsense >> Stuff. Just Junkie yeah >> And also stuff something for the verb of it so much of it >> Yeah >> Yeah >> Yeah appetite >> Yeah exactly. Anyways sucked from crushed scale conquer Neil, is it conquer Neil >> Yeah. >> Boiled in ammonia and bled into curds and rouge glinting sanguineous and turbid between bug and rug snug a thug in redcoat or a turncoat carrying urns of this stuff. >> Right, right. >> And the rhythm changes because, of this stuff, is a three syllable foot here. And so much of it was either a lambic, or just redcoat and turncoat are both words that have equal stresses. And then of this stuff kind of comes in as like a little punch. I really liked it. Did you Victor, thank you for writing the poem. Thank you for writing this book, KIth. Yes, which I'm holding up again. And it's published by Fence Books and also Book Thug. thugs. >> Yeah. [LAUGH] >> No, they're not thugs. >> [LAUGH] >> Speaking of the word thug, and Laney Brown, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you >> This was a lot of fun. >> Thank you all, yeah, this was a real pleasure.
