We're talking about Jayne Cortez, and she has a piece that is available in a YouTube video of a performance that she did with her son, Denardo Coleman, on drums. I just thought we would have a wide open conversation about it, so I'm going to use this fabulous, random ModPo selection machine to pick out a name. Someone, other than me, will start us off. What's happening in this? Amber Rose Johnson. Well, okay. What's happening in the poem? Yeah. Well, how is it structured? Why don't we start with that? We don't have a text for the poem, it's a performance. It's done with this really beautiful jazz background but mostly I think it's only drums. Is that true? Only drums. Jayne Cortez is going through a series of lines that develop this rhythm. In the first half, she got something and she got hot, and then that will continue for a while and then it switches the focus to another subject; he got mean, he got rigid, he got cold, and so there's a duality that's being presented. But because the pattern mimic one another, she's asking us to think about how society expects certain things of she or women and certain things of men. Yeah. Great start, okay. Fantastic. Who's going to talk next? Dave Poplar. No, Davie Nuttall, different Dave. Along the lines of the gendered expectations, of like super binary gendered expectations, are kinds of actions or labor or emotional information that might come along with all the different things that hot and cold do. So one of the lines that stands out to me is, "he got fed before he got cold," where in some of the cases, getting hot or getting cold is explained by whatever else is happening. She got pregnant, she got hot; she got academically ambitious, again, she got hot, and in some cases, an emotional response is happening. He got cold but someone's still doing that labor, someone's still feeding him. He got fed before he got cold and that's something. Who has to do what kind of labor is something that feels like it's a big part of the poem. It's like some sort of domestic system between two people in relation to one another is really coming apart. Some folks are using their emotional orientation to excuse themselves or be socially excused because of what's happening with them emotionally, and he still has to get fed before he gets cold. Someone's still doing that labor. Before I pick another name out of the cup, the valences, the evaluations of hot and cold are typically, in the poetry world, hot, good; cold, bad, and that's probably true in socio-emotional life. Not always, but somebody could run too hot, but generally. So that we get the ratio of she, hot; he, cold, so the valuation of that binary of he and she goes along with good and not good. When you describe the feeding, the cause and effect thing, you may face of negative evaluation. I'm not saying what your point of view is, but you are going with that assumption. So what do we do with that assumption? Does that work? Does she interrogate that? Does it change? Why does he got thing? Why is that second? Why wouldn't we go from cold to hot rather than hot to cold? Allie, what are you thinking about this? It's a very opinionated piece, I guess you would say. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. Like hot and cold are adjectives but because they're put in context with so many things, like it's a very maximal performance piece, by the end of the piece, they've losed their modifying role or ability because they don't actually mean anything because they're inevitable and modify everything. So in that way, they lose their value. So I mean, there's certainly a statement being made between hot and cold, but for me, the poem becomes more about the trap of that modifier as opposed to any sort of value or statement in it. I would agree and I think in the way that the hot and cold ultimately flatten out in a way. But I think there are some moments where she's interrogating hot generally seen as good, cold generally seen as bad, right? Because in one sense, she got pregnant, got hot. That's like discomfort hot. That's like my body's too hot because I have two bodies right now, and he still gets fed before he gets cold, as Davie pointed out. I think part of what ends up happening then is, not only that we get this, the low repetition of she got hot, got something, got hot, got something, he got cold, got something, we end up with this weird sense of this being like a zero-sum game, that if she's hot, then he's cold. If she's getting something, then he's not getting something, even though he's still getting fed, as Davie pointed out, because there's this like, she's in many of those moments where he's getting cold, someone is still attending to his needs. Well, so it's zero-sum, it's a balancing? Yeah. Really? You think so? Well, I think it's better. What goes against what I was saying about the relationship? Well, it's one of the many things that happens in this poem because in the sheer force of its duration, we get a whole bunch of different registers and different valences, I think. But the sense that I'm left with as a listener and a hearer of this poem is this feeling that nobody is okay at the end. The person who gets picked up now is going to have to answer a question. Sorry, this is like cool, progressive, open pedagogy, and then answer the question. The question would be the poem itself. Is the poem itself aligned with hot? I assume so, and if the poem as a form is aligning itself with hot, then how does that help us? Gabe. I don't pretend I picked it. It's not. The poem isn't hot? It isn't aligned with hot. I mean, the poem might be hot but not in a way that the poem sets out the term hot. I mean, we might call the form hot but they're different. Jayne and Denardo are both hot, by the way, in the performance of this poem. Yeah. It's a very stifling auditorium. Yes, that's true. I think the cold for the he is like a state of frustrated apathy and that there's not a lot that's productive about it at all. But I don't think that the poem is exactly aligned with hot because the way that I think of the poem is that there's a sort of implied, intimate relation, like there's some kind of love story in some sense because the line that interrupts the form and switches it to the he is something along the lines of, excuse me, I have to paraphrase, because somebody didn't tell her "I will love you forever baby, don't be so hot, hot, hot," and then the line that ends poem is something along the lines of he did this because somebody couldn't break the ice and say, "I will love you forever baby, don't be so cold, cold, cold." So there's two people who are not getting a communication from something like somebody didn't tell them, "I'll love you forever." There's like a frustration of both people. There's a real state of being out of balance because there's some lack of this communication gesture, it seems. That's the thing that it comes out of the form, it really interrupts the form, and so it seems like a line that really holds a lot of weight. So I'm not sure it's particularly aligned because I think it's actually just really interested in having a wall between these two and seeing what is going on on both sides of these and aligning them with the state of being hot, which has this emotional valence, and then the cold, which also has like an emotional valence, and going from there. I think that's what's happening. Thank you, Gabe. Okay, so whoever gets picked next is going to please respond to either of two questions. One is, can we talk about the word God, because it's a very powerful and multiple word, and the other is, in what way does this performance, this piece, this poem befit it's location with the beats in ModPo? Because in some ways, it's an odd fit but other ways, it's not. I think Anne Waldman's performance pieces in that section too. So either one of those and Dave Poplar, you're up. You want to talk about God or beats? I have a question. You are going to ask us a question? All I have is questions. Could hot really be just about the subject getting exercise, getting annoyed, representing just not being complacent, not following those sexual stereotypes, and in that sense. If that's the case, I like the interpretation about it being zero sum because the second half seems to be he got cold as a reaction to that. So we're dealing with upending expectations and sexual stereotypes in that way. Is that a good interpretation? I think Davie wants to respond to that. I think it's is super good question because something that I'm curious about with Got is who's doing the assigning, from what gendered position is someone describing this behavior is hot, this behavior is cold, and what are the gendered scripture stereotypes in dialogue with that. Something that I hear happening in the first half of things that's happening to the feminine pronoun is that hotness is described to emotional, like large emotions are ascribed to all ranges of behaviors. It could be glossed as you're so emotional because you are pregnant, you're so emotionally because you're academically ambitious, you're so emotional because of these things. I'm reading these behaviors as having emotional content or like ascribing emotional content onto them, and interpreting by means of that application. So I wonder about the coldness being in response, not to the behaviors, but terrible anti-feminist interpretation of the behavior, like oh you're engaging in this totally normal behavior, but because you're a person who uses females pronouns, I'm going to assume that you're doing this totally different thing and this is available to me to interpret in these totally extreme ways. So Got sometimes creates, tell me if I'm getting this part of your point wrong. Got sometimes entails a cause and effect relationship that's fair to complete because it's the first step of the poem, everything's going to turn into hot. So it's retrofitting cause and effect, which participates in stereotyping about the gender in female because though they're so emotional and hot, they run hot as opposed to run cold. Sure. You can imagine that the whole poem precipitated by a person asking the question, why did your marriage fall apart? So their Got is very narrative. At a certain point, it came to be, he got, he became. Yeah. There's also something to add to Davie's point, something about that Got feels almost inevitable because no matter what situation this female pronouned person is in or the male pronouned person is in, they're getting to the same place, they're getting to the same emotional atmosphere, and so there's something that's just about well because you have this pronoun or because you're identified in this way, no matter what you do, this is the check that you are going on. Whether the guy gets a promotion, or he got hot, he got cold, he got self-righteous, he got cold. He got untropical, which means really ugly, he got rigid, he got cold. No matter what the he or the she is doing, the gendered assumption is that you are going to progress into this emotionally charged person, and that really exceeds anything that you do, and speaks more to how our society relates to how we see people. Really great. The last couple of comments have been fantastic. So in what way does this relate to the innovation that was brought on by first and then second generation of so called beats? How does it roughly align in that way? I mean we can just do a little popcorn here. Just throw something out. I'll start. One is obviously performative and interested in the oral interpretation of the piece. In this case, I mean she was reading from a script, so it's written somewhere. All right. Who wants to go next with that? Why is this instructive in our chapter on the beats? The beats of the taxonomers, and Cortez is really anxious about the misogyny that comes with a lot of that taxonomy. A lot of the beats deciding what women do and what women are like, and Cortez is not excited about that. So there's another one. Any other quality? What's interesting about this poem in the way that it's playing on the rhythmic qualities of the beats is that Cortez seems to be Cortez and Denardo. Is cold. They're are using rhythm as to not necessarily to set a pace but rather to unmoor the listener in time, which is a very classic jazz move. I think it's a little bit different from the way that the beats that we encounter in ModPo are using rhythm where it's aggressive in your face, like bam, bam, bam, bam. But here it's like, well, if you listen to it for a little bit you start to get confused about where the downbeat is, who's accompanying who. I think that really says a lot, it underscores some of this unmooring in meaning that we've been exploring just now, where we're getting a bit confused about causal relations, about is somebody becoming hot, is hot happening to somebody? Who is determining that? Are they acquiring the hotness? Are they acquiring it? Yes. So some of that I think ambiguity is really being sustained by the ambiguity in the rhythm and in the performance. Good, this is good. Let's keep accumulating, enumerating, beat qualities. Others. Well speaking of enumerations, listing. It's a list. It's a repetition. It's [inaudible]. I'll throw out one more with a little literary historical or musical historical footnote. How dare you? Yeah. Free jazz comes about between about 1958 and 1961, '57 if you really want to push it. Ornette Coleman is one of two or three people mainly responsible for that time, the beats were really interested in that age of jazz. Got really interested in free jazz specifically, Ornette Coleman, I don't know if Ornette had relationships with beat writers, but they certainly admired him. Ornette Coleman, well Jayne Cortez and Ornette Coleman were married, and Denardo Coleman is the son of that relationship. So there's a lot of complexity going on in there. I think that's an interesting connection back to the beats in the sense that I could have said this without doing all that historical stuff simply by saying the word jazz. Obviously, the first beat generation is very interested in jazz as a model to break the I am, to break the traditional way that you had to do meter. So free jazz was an invitation to openness, and certainly we have that there. Any other? It's really perfect that her son is accompanying her. But he is not cold. Is he cold? I don't want to address that. But basically, it's just really interesting. Cycle dynamic. Because when we get to that question of cause and effect, and what Gabe was talking about in terms of all because this didn't happen, and all because this didn't happen. When we look at the chronology of just the order in which we get she and hot first, and then we got he and cold, and she's the primary performer, and then he's accompanying her. But there's no actual real cause and effect and having her progeny like they're accompanying her. Either is or isn't responding to what she's saying. Exactly. Like what comes first, he's part of that cycle and loop, but he's both. It's just it all loops back and circles up, which is just an amazing part. There's so much that can be said about a work like this, and I guess I want to conclude, invite somebody to end up by responding to a detractor. There's no detractor in this room, indeed in this house, who would say, "How does this count as poetry or why does this fit? This isn't anything like a supermarket in California. Why is it here?" So what do you say to that detractor? Obviously, the detractor is wrong. We have talked for 20 minutes or 25 minutes about the extraordinary poetics here. But what would you say to that grumpy person? Gabe, what would you say? You so didn't want me to call on you. It's true. No. I would say that I think this doesn't have a text as a performance piece. I think what it does really well is play with the grammatical structure and really just expose everything that a grammatical structure can do. She got bought. He got bought. One that only exists in English really, and it would be really hard to translate this poem actually. But really, I think with so much attention to language and how much you can push on it is what makes this a productive poem and performance piece. I think it's very clearly as we've talked about in a lineage of thinkers, but it's taking some attention to issues in a very specifically Jayne Cortezian way. Perfect. Thank you all. This was great
