transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] Hey, Tim Bidermias here. April is National Poetry Month, and to celebrate, we're returning this week to some of our favorite interviews with poets. Here's Andrew Limbong.

Speaker 2:
[00:12] Hi, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. In 1964, a 31-year-old salesman named Frank Stafford walked out into the streets of Harlem and saw two policemen beating up a kid. He asked why, and the cops turned their sights on him. James Baldwin wrote about this incident and what inspired it in a piece titled A Report From Occupied Territory. He wrote, No one had, as yet, been charged with any crime, but the nightmare had not yet really begun. The salesman had been so badly beaten around one eye that it was found necessary to hospitalize him. Perhaps some sense of what it means to live in Occupied Territory can be suggested by the fact that the police took him to Harlem Hospital themselves nearly 19 hours after the beating. That piece was a key bit of inspiration for today's author, Kwame Alexander, and his book of poetry titled, Light For The World To See. It's a lyrical reaction to the murder of George Floyd and everything else surrounding it. And he told NPR's Rachel Martin why he felt it was important to respond using poetry.

Speaker 3:
[01:15] This message comes from NPR's sponsor, Certified Financial Planners. Asking the right questions can greatly impact your future, especially when it comes to your finances. So if you're looking for a financial advisor you can trust, Certified Financial Planner professionals are committed to acting in your best interest. That's why it's gotta be a CFP. Find your CFP professional at letsmakeaplan.org. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Wayfair. It's Way Day at Wayfair, where you can score the best deals in home and upgrade your space that work within your budget. And the best part, everything ships fast and free during Way Day. Get up to 80% off with fast and free shipping on everything. Head to wayfair.com April 25th through the 27th to shop Way Day. That's wayfair.com. Wayfair, every style, every home. This message comes from Prolon. Want to look and feel your best this spring? Prolon's five-day fasting mimicking diet is a clinically developed nutrition program with the goal of promoting fat loss while protecting lean body mass. Developed at USC's Longevity Institute, it aims to assist the body in entering a fasting-like state that helps reset metabolism, target visceral fat, and support healthy metabolic markers. Get 15 percent off plus a bonus gift when you subscribe at prolonlife.com/npr.

Speaker 4:
[02:41] By now, you all are familiar with Morning Edition's poet in residence, Kwame Alexander. But Kwame is also an award-winning writer, a book author. And we wanted to spend some time with him this morning talking about his newest work. It is called Light For The World To See, A Thousand Words On Race And Hope. And I am so glad to have you here this morning. Hi Kwame.

Speaker 5:
[03:07] Hey Rachel. It's been a whirlwind of a year.

Speaker 4:
[03:10] It's been a whirlwind of a year. We haven't talked in so long. And I found myself over these many weeks and months, especially this summer, missing you, missing poetry and our conversations. And now I know why, because you were busy doing something else, doing something that took more time and thought, right?

Speaker 5:
[03:34] Well, I mean, as you know, Rachel, I believe in the power of poetry to engage with us, to inform us, to uplift us, to fuel our imagination in an immediate way that it can connect with us emotionally. I think that through the listening of a poem, or the reading of a poem about the woes of the world, and we got a lot of woes right now, we can be inspired. We can be inspired to find the wonderful in ourselves and in each other. I think the weight of being black was too much to carry for me for a long time. I didn't know how to find answers, to assert myself, to do something. And then a friend of mine sent me a quote by Tony Morrison. He said, this is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal. And so I wrote, I use my words to scream, to shout, to sort of lift up my voice, to shine a little light for the world. I wanted to write this as a reminder to black children and families to remember their humanity. I wanted to write it as sort of a wake up call to white Americans to acknowledge and know the truth, to fight against the proclivity, to maintain the hierarchy, whether conscious or not. I think of these poems as sort of Negro spirituals in a way, which are timeless in their comfort, in their guidance, in their roots, in praise houses and ring shouts and other informal gatherings of enslaved Africans who needed to express their sorrows and their hopes waiting in the water. Nobody knows the trouble I've seen. Steal away to Jesus. That's what these poems are for me. They are psalms and bombs for my soul and hopefully for our souls, so that we can get on with the business of making the world a better place.

Speaker 4:
[05:27] You wrote on the back, on the book jacket, that this is in the tradition of James Baldwin's A Report From Occupied Territory. I sat with that work over the weekend, read James Baldwin's words, and it is eerie. Eerie doesn't really do it justice, the parallels to this current moment. What did you see in that? How did it help you understand what you needed to write right now?

Speaker 5:
[05:54] Well, I think in the sense that Baldwin was crying out, it was a plea for our humanity, for the humanity of black people in particular, of oppressed peoples in general to be recognized. I don't know if I'm writing a plea more so that I'm sort of making a demand, and that I'm saying we've got to reclaim our own humanity and cannot allow ourselves to be defined by other people. The wound has been here. The wound has been here since Africans first arrived on these shores. These episodes of police killings and brutality, they've existed for 400 years. I wrote this to remind us of the tragedy, Rachel, while also showcasing the triumph. The only way, the only way for us to do things better in the future is to understand what we did wrong in the past. I do think that we are at a critical boiling point of resistance in America, and you see whites and blacks and all Americans coming together to stand up for what's right. We've got to all say that we're fired up and we can't take no more, and I think that's what's happening.

Speaker 4:
[07:05] This is a collection of three poems, and I wish we had the time for you to just sit and read them all. But if you could just read the closing poem for us.

Speaker 5:
[07:18] This is for the unforgettable, the swift and sweet ones who hurtled history and opened a world of possible. The ones who survived America by any means necessary, and the ones who didn't. This is for the undeniable, the ones who scored with chains on one hand and faith in the other. This is for the unflappable, the sophisticated ones who box adversity and tackle vision, who shine their light for the world to see, and don't stop till the break of dawn. This is for the unafraid, the audacious ones who carried the red, white and weary blues on the battlefield to save an imperfect union, the righteous marching ones who sang, We Shall Not Be Moved Because Black Lives Matter. This is for the unspeakable. This is for the unspeakable. This is for the unspeakable. This is for the unlimited, unstoppable ones, the dreamers and the doers who swim across the big sea of our imagination and show us and show us the majestic shores of the promised land. The Wilma Rudolphs, the Muhammad Ali's, the Althea Gipsons, the Jesse Owens' the Jordans and the LeBrons, the Serena's and the Sheryl's, the Reese Whitley's and the undiscovered. This is for the unbelievable, the we real cool ones. This is for the unbending, the black is the night is beautiful ones. This is for the underdogs and the uncertain, the unspoken, but no longer untitled. This is for the undefeated. This is for the undefeated. This is for you and you and you. This is for us.

Speaker 4:
[09:17] That was The Undefeated, a poem from Kwame's new book, Light For The World To See, A Thousand Words On Race And Hope. For information about Kwame's readings, check out his website, kwamealexander.com. My friend, thank you for this.

Speaker 5:
[09:31] Thank you for listening, Rachel.

Speaker 2:
[09:33] Thanks for listening. And remember, visit donate.npr.org to support your local NPR station today. And thanks.

Speaker 3:
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Speaker 6:
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