Guest
The Valley. His debut essay collection
Before the Earth Devours Us will be published by Split/Lip Press in late 2021. He is the Interviews Editor for the
EcoTheo Review, an Assistant Poetry Editor for
AGNI, and a regular reviews contributor for
Heavy Feather Review. He lives in Austin, Texas.
Transcript
music: “Praise the Rain” by Gautam Srikishan]
Pádraig Ó Tuama: My name is Pádraig Ó Tuama, and for years I had a recurring dream. The dream was always that I was about to walk into a large cave and that I knew that something waited for me in the cave and that I was very frightened. And the whole dream would be building up and building up to getting to that mouth of the cave, going in or waiting or not. And then I’d wake up. And something happened to me, when I began to go into that cave, in my poems, in my imagination, even. Something new occurred.
The pandemic memoirs began almost immediately, and now comes another kind of offering a searching look at the meaning of the racial catharsis to which the pandemic in some sense gave birth and voice and life. Tracy K. Smith co-edited the stunning book,
There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis, a collection of 40 pieces that span an array of BIPOC voices from Edwidge Danticat to Reginald Dwayne Betts, from Layli Long Soldier to Ross Gay to Julia Alvarez. Tracy and Michael Kleber-Diggs, who also contributed an essay, join Krista for a conversation that is quiet and fierce and wise. They reflect inward and outward, backwards and forwards, from inside the Black experience of this pivotal time to be alive.
Reginald Dwayne Betts — Essay on Reentry | The On Being Project onbeing.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from onbeing.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
between behemoth granite shafts, shove
my body by their force, leave me roadside
and wandering fields. Little is funny
when you’re Chicana and walking
a Civil War site not meant for walking.
Regardless, I ask park rangers and guides
for stories on Mexican soldiers,
receive shrugs. No evidence in statues
or statistics. In the cemetery, not one
Spanish name. I’m alone in the wine shop.
It’s the same in the post office, the market,
the antique shop with KKK books on display.
In the peach orchard, I prepare a séance,
sit cross-legged in grass, and hold
Transcript
Pádraig Ó Tuama: My name is Pádraig Ó Tuama. And when I was a teenager, late one evening I saw my father come into the kitchen, grab a slice of bread, and eat it. I think his blood sugar had dropped. And there was so much about that moment that struck me. I was a teenager with angst about myself and everybody around me, and noticing a moment of vulnerability in somebody else struck me. And I think that was telling me I needed to be a poet, because I had to do something with what I’d seen. And over and over again, the more I’ve written poetry and read poetry, the more I realize that moments, simple, observed moments, are calling out to be written about.