Nick Makoha:

Let’s talk poetry. The times that we’re in, you and I are talking to each other via Zoom, as two black men, two black bodies, one in the States, one in the UK. You’ve just had a new president. Let’s talk a little bit of, for want of another word, ‘politics’ and the times that we’re in, and let’s also talk about life.

Terrance Hayes:

The connection for all that, though, is quarantine, Covid, 2020. So, you and I have continued a conversation about how you would create a poetry community in this kind of space, how to make a poetry community like Comic Con. Everybody right now has to be asking the same question that you and I were already asking, which is, how does one create a community in quarantine? How does one create a community under siege when you got people shooting you when you walk down the street, when you have leadership – that’s true for y’all, and it’s true for us – leaders who you don’t trust? So here we are trying to talk on Zoom about these questions. How do we really communicate in this space – in 2020, digitally, in Covid quarantine? I’m saying poetry is a metaphor for that. How do you get a bunch of poets together in quarantine in the UK and help them create a community? How do you get a bunch of students together in quarantine to communicate? How do you get a bunch of parents or protestors? How do you get a bunch of politicians? You see what I’m saying? So anything we talk about is really about how people are trying to live right now. Because that’s what poetry is. It’s a metaphor for all of that stuff all the time.

Makoha:

I was talking about this in my barber shop. The thing about my barber shop is that they’re always talking about community. That’s what they’re interested in.

Hayes:

That’s what other barber shops across the world are, they’re like a central place for community building. I don’t think August Wilson did a play in a barber shop, but you could almost imagine he could because it’s such a such a reliable space for that.

Makoha:

You’re right. I think probably for the last six, seven months, the most important area to me is just my local community, where my daughter and my son go to school. Everything else is just about making sure the family is okay, making sure the local community is okay. I haven’t been to the city, like you. You live in the city, right?

Hayes:

That’s like the stuff I’ve been telling my students too. When you’re trying to be an activist, or when you’re trying to make change really happen: do I write a poem and send it to the New Yorker or do I leave my house and go to join the protest? That physical space of dealing with the protesters is an immediate community. When people are going into the street protesting, those are communities. Most of this other stuff we get, like that stuff you get on Twitter, even with stuff you get on the news, I just don’t think of that as community building –  it’s doing a whole other thing. So that’s what I tell my students, impact the people you can touch because that’s all you can do really. Otherwise, it’s abstract. To me, it’s really about this kind of intimacy.

What I know about you and your mentors and your students is that you’re having communities regularly anyway. So Obsidian makes perfect sense. I wonder, where do you think that comes from? The relationship you have between being an individual poet, and then having all of these networks, like Malika’s Poetry Kitchen. Seems like throughout your whole career, you’ve had groups of people. Not all poets do that. I think I’m mostly like, let me just be in my own little thing here.

Makoha:

That’s a good question. I’m a bit like you, I like my own company. It’s not that I don’t like other people’s company, but I can chill with myself. I think because I was born in Uganda and lived in many countries as a child. As a child, you don’t have the full authority of your existence as you do as an adult. So I’ve been in places where I’ve had to learn, oh, this is how they do it here, that’s what’s different here. So I was living from suitcase to suitcase all the time and I had to learn, it was just kind of in my DNA, how do I make a community? Who can I trust? Who can I love? Who can I talk to?

I think the other layer of that is I think poets are discovered. Or a poet discovers themselves. There’s a part of you that was always a poet, but you have to figure out that you’re a poet and then you have to figure out that there’s something to do about that. So there’s the time you write your first poem, which might be as a child. Then there are the poems that you write, which you don’t even realise are poems, and there’s the thoughts you have as a poet. I think there’s a poet mind. Then there’s that time when you say, you know what, I’m gonna start doing this, as seriously as somebody who wants to be a surgeon. You suddenly realise, if I’m claiming this space called poet, what is my community? A poet comes from somewhere.

Once I say I’m a poet, in that lake is T.S. Eliot, in that lake is Auden, in that lake is Gwendolyn Brooks, in that lake is Rumi, in that lake is Shakespeare and so on. So, the minute I utter poetic words, I belong to that lake. So my initial community were poets I’ve never seen before, or poets that were dead. So I have to acknowledge where I came from, but I also have to acknowledge that people will be acknowledging me. I read your book How To Be Drawn so many times. The reason I was doing that is because I was looking for gestures that I can recognise, that give me the confidence to say what I really want to say, or say what I don’t know that I wanted to say.

Then there was this community that I got when I was in my early twenties, when people would call on me as a poet. That would draw other poets like Malika Booker and Roger Robinson to me, and they’d invite me saying come to this, check this out. That was good. I think that’s how it started. I was performing my poetry more and I was reading but I wasn’t reading much poetry. Reading is like an engine. So my engine felt low. And then Malika and Roger said join us at Malika’s Kitchen. It was just good to read poets I hadn’t heard of and to write with freedom. That was my first move from a virtual space into a real space and from those other spaces opened up. I became really good in Malika’s Kitchen and Peter Kahn was part of that when he was here. So when he went back to Chicago, part of the thing that he’d do is invite the most improved poet to go to Chicago, to stay with him for a week to teach in his school and stuff like that. That happened to me. So I was getting all these opportunities, because of this community. It would be ignorant of me to think that I got here by myself. So, I’m trying to be the space that other people were for me.

Hayes:

There’s so much you said in there. I’ll just take one little piece of that, this idea of the poet. Today’s my birthday. I turned forty-nine today, and I was like, when did I start calling myself a poet? When I was in my thirties, certainly, I did not call myself a poet. I knew what it was because I wrote privately. I did other stuff: I painted, played basketball. It was just a really slow, isolated process. I took an intro to creative writing class when I was in college, but I never took any poetry workshops. I never talked about poems with anybody other than a few teachers.

But from high school until my senior year, for four years, I worked on this paragraph about working in the yard with my dad before he left for a year, to go to Korea. Before he left, we just got out in the yard. He said, I gotta get all these weeds up so that they won’t grow back. We did all of that, he left, I went to college, and for four years, I worked on this paragraph. When he came back – I never read it to him – all I said to him was, ‘I was thinking about when we worked in the yard before you left.’ First of all, my dad is in the military. So there was no hugging, there was no ‘I missed you.’ I said ‘I was thinking about that poem, about working in the yard with you.’ And he said, ‘I hated working in the yard, I have not missed that while I’ve been gone for these four years.’ I worked on it for four years and it’s called ‘The Earth Guy’. That’s a side story. Here’s the point: it was an isolated thing. When I got to graduate school, the teacher said send some of those poems you’ve been writing, in addition to that one, to some programs. I got in the program, and suddenly I was in this community.

Part of the thing that I love about poetry is taking my time. I like having a poem that I can work on. There’s a poem, ‘Pseudacris Crucifer’, it was in the New Yorker, I wrote that for my son two years ago for his birthday. I kept working on it, I worked on it a year before his birthday to read it to him on his birthday. Then two years later, after that, I published it. I said to him, I revised that poem but I think it’s better. That kind of time is what I appreciate in poetry.

But that also told me that I was not a poet, because I was taking this time. I was a professor, that’s what my mother calls me, but I don’t talk about my poems in the classroom. I’ve never sold any of my own poetry books. I just want to think of it as a thing that I can just do on my own. But when I got in my forties, I really started thinking about what a poem was. Not what a poet was. I would never say that was what I was, because I was still figuring it out. I think in my forties, I started talking about what makes a poem move, what makes a poem moving, things about heat. I do have a way of thinking about what a poem is, but it’s only because I’ve been teaching for twenty plus years, that I can say that. There’s the relationship with me saying, I think I’m a poet. It’s because I can teach you what a poem is, that’s what makes me a poet.

The final thing I think about it all is what I say about painting. I still paint but I don’t call myself a painter because painters paint. Once or twice a year, I’ll make a painting. That does not mean I’m a painter. So if you go around talking about it, or even teaching it, only in the act of writing a poem are you a poet. Only in the act of painting are you a painter. As soon as you get up and walk away, you’re something else. So the more you want to be a poet, the more you got to be writing poems otherwise you’re not. Sitting here talking to you right now, I ain’t no poet, you see what I’m saying? Even if I say I do understand what a poem is. It keeps me humble.

Makoha:

I like that notion of the practice because I look at it as a practice. There’s a romantic idea of what a poet is, right? We all have our version. There was a time when, even inside of my own version of that romantic vision, I was awakened. Suddenly in my mid twenties, part of Malika’s Kitchen, I was leading more workshops than I was writing poetry and it was getting to me. I was teaching Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and he gets to a section where he says, how do you know you’re a poet? Well stop writing. If your life is good, you’ll never want to begin. He goes, but if you can’t, if when you stop, there’s an ache, turn your life around. I was reading that as I was going to a self-development workshop. I was late because I was reading this book. They asked me a hard question. What would you do if you could never write again? I didn’t really take it in. I’ll be a journalist, filmmaker, boom, life done. What would you do if you could never write ever again? When what they were saying dawned on me, I burst into tears as if I’d lost my mum, or my dad, or my wife or daughter. It tore me, I was weeping. It was almost like I saw myself for the first time. This is not a romantic thing, I thought. I gotta take this poetry thing a lot more seriously. I remember my life changing, I got home, started clearing out all the books that weren’t about poetry, like my life just started to move.

Hayes:

It’s about talking to other people that aren’t poets too about this your idea of the revelation and the romantic poet. The people who don’t feel that fire ain’t never really been able to access this very important thing that we’re talking about. From the perspective of a teacher, once you understand what it is, you can show people how to access it. I’m just more practical because neither one of my parents graduated from high school and my mom had me when she was sixteen. Weren’t no New Yorker magazines in my house. I say that all the time. So I did not have any romantic idea of a poet. I just didn’t even know. That’s like asking me if I know some creature I never heard of before.

So I never thought about it, even in my senior year of high school, when I was about to fail an English course where I had made all A’s and wrote all kinds of stuff. But I was leaving school at lunch to go see my girlfriend, So my teacher said ‘These absences are gonna really get you’, and then I said ‘But what if I told you I was going to be an English teacher?’ She chuckled. I didn’t fail the class but that was the first time that I’d ever uttered such a thing. I was a senior and thinking I don’t want to work in the prison which is what my mom does. I don’t think I’m going to go to the army as my dad did at the time. So I think I’ll probably be an English teacher because I like English. That’s all I thought about. Even when I got into college and realised that I actually liked painting, I then said maybe I’ll get a job at the prison because then I could paint at night. I’m like a night owl because my parents worked at night. So I was very practical. That’s how I treated it.

Makoha:

I want to be a poet. Once you say it, that’s an utterance. I get that. But then there’s the doing of it.

Hayes:

I know that there’s a romantic and true and spiritual and magical and enchanted part of the thing that we do. When I’m doing it, I ain’t got no control over it. When I’m really doing it, it is pure magic. But there are tricks to get to that point. I had to learn them because I never questioned how to get to magic. This is years ago, in high school, before I called myself a poet. I said I think I’m gonna be an English teacher, not understanding what that really meant, which is a commitment to language, a commitment to reading, a commitment to words. So that was the first utterance until I got to about forty. All that time in between, I’m figuring it out and showing other people how to do it but saying also, I can’t really teach them what I’m really doing because I don’t really know what I’m doing. So I’m just trying to get around the magic part that makes other people that don’t understand poems and can’t do it, think that they can’t do it.

So much about poetry for me is like listening to yourself so that you can really be clear on what you think. You got to write poems, you got to study words because otherwise you’re gonna just believe everybody else’s shit. You’re gonna just let people tell you what the words mean. Then there’s this other question about poems, like what makes a poem moving? The thing I’m most interested in is subtext. That’s the magic. That’s the stuff that you can’t teach people. If you’re doing everything you’re supposed to do, that subtext is going to be there. Having done all of that work to convince people what a poem is, or how it works, when I’m actually working on a poem, all I’m doing is problem solving. It can be an emotional problem, it could be an image problem, it can be anything but ultimately, you’re just in the words, working at it that way. Then you sit back and you recognise it as a poem.

There’s the arc from a beginning person, to where I think you are and I think I am here in my forties. We have developed these tools and weapons to solve the problems presented for us, whether it’s 2020, whether it’s Covid, whether it’s my wife don’t love me no more. That’s what you’re working towards. So what we’re trying to give your Obsidian people, what we’re trying to give undergraduates at NYU, what we’re trying to give our parents too, if they really are open to the idea, is that words will be able to save them, words are a way to solve their problems. Poetry is one way to think through those problems, see those problems as metaphors for other things.

Makoha:

What a problem suggests is that there is an unknowing and that unknowing is where poetry begins. I would say the poem is the master. Even though I am the poet, the poem knows more than I know. So you’re not problem solving but what you’re trying to figure out is: how do I let go of what I think I know?

Hayes:

How do you teach that though? How do you get somebody that has not had the same kind of work? I wouldn’t punish the person because they didn’t know that words could do that. They would need somebody to show them. I didn’t know it, either. How do you communicate that to other people?

Makoha:

I don’t know. What I do know is that I believe poetry is a process. Ultimately, as you’re saying, it is about writing the poem. If you were to sit down every day and write something, just that act will teach you something. And then if you add reading to that, it will teach you something. If you add to that life experience, it’ll teach you something. I think a lot of times we don’t connect all those together. You can’t stop your life, it’s always happening. At the same time, a page is always present. In other words, there’s always a space where you can say what you really want to say but we live our lives not having to. I think what you’re trying to get a person to understand is that the ‘you’ that you think is so important, is the least important thing in the poem. That’s a hard thing to learn.

Hayes:

The poem is the thing. You have to be doing the thing to really understand the thing, otherwise you’re talking about it.

Makoha:

It’s like being a mechanic. You got to get dirty or you can’t be a mechanic. It doesn’t matter what you do with a car, you’re gonna come back with your hands messy, you’re gonna come back with the overalls in dirt. So, I think what you’re trying to teach people is that it’s not this perfect thing. Your subconscious is always talking as much as your conscious self is talking and they’re not always saying the same thing.

Hayes:

Our conversation just leads me back to my most current issues. I’m thinking about the last poem I wrote. When I get off the phone, I’m gonna probably go through it again. It’s not a poem that I think is done because, in some ways, it’s a mean poem. I’m still trying to articulate something about my mother. I was watching The Misfits, this old movie from 1961, with Marilyn Monroe. It’s sort of overlayered for some reason with these thoughts about my mom and some other things. But when I look at it, I know that I’m still trying to get somewhere and that I haven’t quite arrived. Or maybe I have. I was up until three fucking with it. At some point, you read the poem, and it’s there, but it’s gonna tell you. I’m waiting for the poem to tell me if it’s done or not.

It’s funny to talk about it like this because I would never do this in a reading but. . . there’s this line that Marilyn Monroe says when they’re going to wrangle these horses at the end of the movie. She says to the guy who’s driving her, ‘You could blow up the world and all you’d feel is sorry for yourself.’ As soon as I heard that, I really just thought about the idea of victimisation versus privilege. I thought it was a great line and then I started digging around and thinking about all these other facts about the movie. Somehow, somewhere my mother falls into it, and that’s the thing that I can’t quite figure out. Maybe I need to not let it be my mother, I don’t know. Anyway, here’s the poem:

After the Misfits. For a brief period, your mother sits with a gun and keys jangling softly as barbed wire and wind with her prison guard uniform patches, and her skin tight, uniform pants and Jheri curl talking shit at the Waffle House with new friends. But after a while, she grows tired of the same. You dream the theme the same night she runs off a couple of brothers or burglars shadows poking at the edge of the driveway with a tiny hand pistol she calls her coat, falling so deeply asleep. You see Montgomery Cliff in the Misfits Mustang wrangling scene and old Clark Gable acting with all his heart before it gives out for good less than a month after shooting. While offscreen bloodshot John Houston and Arthur Miller writer and soon to be erstwhile spouse, eyeball Rosalyn, a name Miller devise as as a subtle portmanteau of mushy Marilyn Monroe who dies within a year also, except instead of a horse in the dream, Cliff, and Gable throw their lasses at your sidestepping body. I’m not saying you’ll be sorry, you didn’t bless the meat if it chokes you I’m not saying pain doesn’t care about your feeling. I’m not saying you have to lie to dream. Your mother’s known to muse, it’s hard to say whether she’s the mad one or you, given your impression of her is confused inexact and exactly correct. Your dream the thing, you can run faster than anyone across the dried out lake along the spit of country road or down a starless path with the armies of man riding into dirt. In the Misfits Mustang wrangling scene, Monroe’s acting is a poorly constructed paroxysm of tantrum and madness, when she learns the captured horses will be sold for dog food. Come get this coat. You hear your mother say outside your window, waking to a gunshot or warning shot at every shadow galloping away.

It’s pretty close. In writing the poem, I realised that Rosalyn is like a portmanteau of Marilyn Monroe. There’s all the stuff that I’m working out in this poem, which is something about my mother that I’m still trying to resolve. Between that and The Misfits and the burglars, even that little thing of Rosalyn being Marilyn Monroe, I was like, that’s enough, the poem has rewarded me.

Makoha:

It’s what language is, it’s about finding parallels. I’ve just written my first proper poem, probably my second poem, about my mother. Whereas the first one which was in my first collection was based on a real event, this one was total imagination. But it sits inside a part of the world I’m trying to go back to. Does that make sense?

Hayes:

Yeah, it does. When I was thinking that I was failing in the poem, and it wasn’t letting go, I thought maybe it’s not my mother. I’m always writing about my mother. Maybe it’s my father. If I rewrote the whole poem, and all I did was make it the father who’s got the little coat, what would that do for the poem? Maybe you think your mom is like your father, should it say that? And then me and the poem would have that understanding that if I said my father, I was still thinking about my mom. You just never know. You wake up every day saying has the poem agreed to cooperate today or not?

Makoha:

I look at a poem like when you play with model airplanes and you’re trying to get it the right weight that it can fly. A lot of times you want to load it up with a lot of things and it doesn’t need those things. Or not giving it enough for it to not just to fly but to really glide. But you can’t just construct it, you can’t go, ‘I know how I make the wing.’ It’s almost like walking on a tightrope in the dark. You got to be willing to fall on either side to get to the other side, if that makes sense.

Hayes:

Falling goes back to the regular failures that one learns to accept in writing poems, and useful to people who don’t write. If you don’t think about it as product, then falling is just exercise. Falling is not failure. Falling is like when you stumble and get back up. If you don’t think of it as that, if you think it as a product, falling means something has been broken. What we’re doing has to have a lot of room for failure. There has to be all that space on opposite sides of the tightrope because that’s kind of the lesson. What you really learn is to be humble before the word. You know that most of the time, it ain’t gonna work out. If you can get a good poem out of every three, for me anyway, I feel okay but I throw a lot of stuff away. Sometimes I come back to it and realise that maybe I shouldn’t have thrown it away. I found a poem that was ten years old on an old computer the other day that’s not a bad poem. It’s better than something I could write right now. I never published it. I would trust that though. I’m better off for letting good stuff get away from time to time than publishing a whole lot of stuff that’s not good.

Makoha:

I totally agree with that. Like you said, it’s about being at the coalface and I struggle getting there. But once I’m in there, I love it. I don’t want to come out because the longer I stay in, the more likely something that resembles a poem will exist.

Hayes:

Right, right. Just to have a sentence in my mouth like, ‘Marilyn Monroe is a portmanteau of Rosalyn’, that’s sometimes the best you can get. You write five pages of stuff and you just get one little sentence that’s going to work.  I would not throw that away. Beggars can’t be choosers. The key thing is recognising that all that other stuff is not going to work. That’s what you work on. That’s revision, the things that don’t bend for you. Sometimes it takes a couple of years, sometimes it takes a little bit of time. That’s why I go back to before I knew what a poet was, before I knew even what poems were. It was this one place where I could manage my own time. So I could go as slowly as I want, make the sentence just like I need it to be. It’s very similar to painting. You could spend a whole day just doing gradations of blue because there’s an infinite number of blues. I think about language in the same kind of way. Super overwhelming, but also not a bad way to pass the time.

Makoha:

I’ve been reading a lot of stuff about Basquiat, looking his pictures and listening to documentaries. But every time I watch it, I burst into tears. I guess everything is emotional.

Hayes:

When he was in jail, Tupac Shakur was complaining because he said, people say my music isn’t spiritual. He said, it’s very spiritual, it’s all about emotions. I think it’s one of the smartest things he ever said, the notion that emotion is directly connected to being spiritual. Makes perfect sense. Nothing about religion in it. So when you say that, you’re right. It’s got to be in the spirit.

Makoha:

 I have to wonder if Basquiat saw himself as a painter, like we see him as a painter. What he was doing was living all his experiences. So we look at his art, and we see, because everything is symbolism. What he understood was how to bring it all together. In hindsight, we can say what he was thinking but actually what he was doing was – (because ultimately what you’re doing from birth to death is) scripting your life. So what the poet knows is that if I talk about this in a certain way, it will resonate beyond myself.

Hayes:

That’s so fucking true. Look at Basquiat’s work, all that writing, all of the scribbling, all the layers of paint, all the erasures and paint on top of paint. That’s all problem solving. So when you say, did he think of himself as a painter, I think it was something else. Had he lived for another twenty, thirty years, what would have come of that? He certainly seems to be, in a way that’s different than a lot of other painters, working out shit. The canvas is evidence of a process of discovery for him. You see that in the work and maybe that’s the appeal. Did he know he was painting? I think he was solving something, doing something else, other than making a product.

Makoha:

When I’m writing, I’ve got to be reading poems. That goes without saying. Like a basketballer watches other basketball players. I’ve also got to listen to music. But also, I have to listen to music in different ways. There’s a way that you listen to music when you want to sing the song. There’s another way to listen to music when you’re going for a run. And then there’s another way that you listen to music when you’re angry at your kid.

Hayes:

I’m with you. Music is poetry, they’re the same thing. One has words, one has notes, but they’re essentially the same as far as I’m concerned. Music is a kind of language, language is a kind of music.

Makoha:

I think the time I realised I was becoming a better poet is when I could hear the music. Not just in other people’s work because you can hear it in other people’s work more readily but it’s when I started to understand it in my own. It almost became like cracking the code in the second world war. That’s how it felt like. I guess what I’m trying to say is that there is a language and there’s what the words mean. That’s subtext. But then there’s another layer:what is the music of that language? What does that mean? That’s happening at the same time.

Hayes:

Yeah, that’s subtext too.

Makoha:

I want to know, what is New York to you? Because it must have changed in the last eight months.

Hayes:

New York is in a bubble. Even our treatment and response to Covid has been different than the rest of the country. We surged at the front when other people thought it wasn’t real. Now we’ve been able to level off, so much so that I have been meeting my students at NYU (unlike most places) and it’s been fine. But as the surges go back up, I need to stop. So we’ve been back on Zoom.

I was talking to Claudia Rankine about this the other day – it’s a question about where we are in the country in America right now. For me, the question is, are we at the brink of some kind of civil war? Let’s say what we have right now is something like a cold Civil War or we are at the brink of it. Hence, you have people doing coups, like people lose elections and say they’re not leaving, those people who think they’re at war. They’re not participating in a political process. They’re like, we’re going to undo the system, because you are the enemy. That’s what this whole Trump administration has been about.

That’s the first part, either we are at the brink of a civil war or we’re at the end of one that started right around the time that Barack Obama got in office. And all these people of a certain stripe, they used to be called Tea Party people, now they are Trump people, MAGA people, a large part of the population that was still lined up with this idea of the first Civil War, where people were resisting state rights, federal rights. I want to own my slaves and my body. You can’t tell me what to do. I’m thinking about that versus the UK. One hundred and fifty-five years ago, we were having a civil war, and it looks very much like either we’re at the end of one, where Trump wins, because his side has won. These people who are ostensibly nationalists or ostensibly like, white people have always been right, this is our country, you don’t take it away from us.

That struggle began, maybe when Barack Obama got elected, but we just didn’t know it. We had not realised that there was this real conflict that was beyond. You asked me how things have gone, I don’t know the answer. Or it means that we need to wake up if we don’t realise that this dude is not a politician, he’s bleeding the masses, and he’s doing stuff that’s for his Cold War, not for America. As soon as you realise that, then you got to drag him out of the White House, you got to treat him like you would treat a person who’s declared war on your country, which I think he’s done – the Putin stuff, the Helsinki stuff, undermining morality codes, sleeping with porn stars. That’s eroding and total destruction of a democracy that really can’t be restored, unless you recognise that that’s what’s happening here.

It feels like we’re watching something be burned down. And if America is doing its usual thing, we should be able to build it back up. It’s gonna take a little while. But it definitely feels like the sooner people recognise that this dude is not playing politics. He’s waging war on civil society. I wish I could be on some television show saying it because I feel the sooner we acknowledge that, the sooner we can take it more seriously.

Makoha:

I come from Uganda and people know Uganda for Idi Amin, a dictator. They know Africa for many dictators. But if I was to change the location of our Prime Minister and your former president, and put them into a black body and put them in Africa, keeping the same dialogue, they’ll say, oh, look, there’s another dictator. Or they’ll say, look, you know, these people shouldn’t be leading. It’s weird how when you change the context it’s perceived in a different way.

Hayes:

We’re still talking about being in a burning house. So I’m gonna say to you very seriously, we don’t need fucking metaphors right now. It’s happening. So you don’t have to be like if this dude was black, this would happen. He’s white and it’s happening. It’s not like a theory anymore. So that analogy would be great if this motherfucker wasn’t worse than them. He’s worse than those dudes, because he’s white. He’s worse than a black dictator, because he’s white and he’s rich and he’s president. So to me, no metaphor will fully access the great horror that seems to be happening to what we think of as a civil society in America. I said this at the beginning, and I’ll get back to it now. The poet’s role is really to let people know that words are tools. They’re not just weapons. Words can be used to build shit, not just to tear shit down. But what we’ve witnessed is eroding the belief that words can actually mean anything, that words actually do anything, that they’re actually any kind of material. Any poet would be offended and frightened that such such a thing could happen.

Makoha:

What are you reading right now? What are you working on right now?

Hayes:

I read you what I was working on. That’s from last night and here a minute ago. I’m glad I read it, though. I didn’t feel embarrassed to read it. So I think it might be close. This is how I live, I just put my nose close to the poems, which means I’m putting my nose close to everything that we talked about.

Makoha:

I’ll end on this. The way I’ve been relating to writing is like climbing a mountain. Climbing a mountain at the bottom is very easy. Most people can climb it. When you’re trying to get to the top, as you get closer you need oxygen, you probably need some tools. It’s going to take all your body to get you up, you might move slower. If I think about that, I don’t want to climb the mountain.

Hayes: 

I’m gonna take your analogy and make it even more challenging, because it ain’t no mountain bro. It’s a mountain range. You climb one, you go up, you climb one, you’re always doing this all the time. It ain’t one mountain.

Makoha:

Every poem is that, every book is that. But I guess what I’m trying to say is that there is no credit… That whatever the last poem you did, who cares? Whatever the last book is, who cares? And on one level, I love that, because it’s humbling.

Hayes:

Yeah, that’s right.

Makoha:

But on another level, it’s fearful because you sometimes you feel like the most stupid guy in the room and then people read my poems and say I like the poem, but you don’t realize when I was writing a poem, I was the most stupid person in the room. I don’t know if that makes sense.

Hayes:

Yeah, yeah, that’s the only way to live, bro.