Michael Lee Writes
  • About
  • Performances
  • Poems
  • Blog
  • Voice Overs

Interrogative Essay​s & Critiques

After Tamir Rice, What Does Video Evidence Even Mean?

12/30/2015

0 Comments

 

​Everyday America commits unacceptable atrocities in the name of our safety. Mosques and black churches burn, unarmed black and brown folks of all ages, gender identities, sexualities and classes are gunned down with impunity, and the tapes which record each moment continue to roll across the country in a procession of loss, a möbius strip of grief, and yet we accept these things. We accept them, have our coffee, and go to work.

It has come to the point where I believe that if there were a video of a cop shooting a black child, and this cop said that it wasn’t him in the video, that it never happened. Though we see it, though the police reports show it, though it was radioed in, and witnesses watched it happen, and his partner confirms it was him- he would get off. Not because he didn’t do it, but because his word holds more weight than the bodies of the dead.

For Tamir Rice and his killers, I thought there must be something this time. Never mind the track record of grand juries not indicting police-the chilling video evidence, the past violent and emotionally unhinged behavior of the firing officer would surely lead to an indictment, the fact Tamir was only a child. No. Nothing. Not because the evidence didn’t show anything. It did. But what good is evidence to a justice system designed to do exactly what it did?

Upon the non indictment announcement, I immediately thought of Jamar Clark in North Minneapolis. I’m not a Northsider, but grew up in the Twin Cities; I worked for six years only a couple blocks from where he was killed, both in a youth shelter, and a local high school running after school poetry workshops. I was in Boston when I heard Jamar was killed by police in Minneapolis. Before I heard his name, a sickening wave of youth, who have been brutalized by that very precinct that killed Jamar, who I love, ran through my head.

Over the next few days, I watched from the East Coast as 94W was blocked, as the 4th precinct became surrounded by protestors, some Northsiders, some not. Across the street from where Jamar was killed there is a security camera that likely picked up the entire event. From day one “release the tapes” was one of the rallying cries. Eye witnesses all agreed he was handcuffed and shot “execution style”, all the while the two officers are on paid leave of absence (vacation).

Yes, the tapes from nearby security cameras need to be released to the public, without a doubt. However, I am worried about the emphasis we put on demanding footage as an integral part in our pursuit for justice. Somehow, perhaps because humans are reckless in the way we hope, we still believe that a video showing everything the witnesses say happened will lead to a charge and then prosecution. Yet, historically where is the evidence of this? We saw every second of Tamir Rice’s death at the hands of Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback, and once again the tired words were uttered, “no indictment”. The problem with such a focus on video evidence is that it centers the demands around the moral compass of white legal institutions constructed not to protect all bodies equally, but to protect white bodies and what white bodies own. The justice system did not fail Tamir Rice on Monday. It succeeded for the officers. It’s that simple.

In the case of Jamar Clark, we can’t hope that if the video is released, that finally the jury and the cops and Twitter trolls and the news anchors and reporters and pundits might just give a shit. After all these years, after all these tapes, so many miles of tape spreading across America like a darkened highways, etched with frame after frame of murder, documenting the endless destruction of black and brown bodies by the enforcers of white supremacy, whether that be police, self appointed neighborhood watchmen, or a civilian with a gun at Florida gas station.

I’m not saying don’t demand the tapes, but we can’t hinge a movement on the justice system actually acting justly, even when it has documented evidence. Even when it’s all there, killers walk. The police were not indicted on Monday not because they were justified. No one believes that, not even them. They were exonerated because they could be, because the grand jury and the prosecutor and the defense team and the chief of police, and the police union, knew they could get away with it, because we trust white institutions, made to protect whiteness, more than we trust our own eyes. More than we trust our intuition, our guts, and our heads. Worst of all, we trust these institutions and their agents more than we trust the voices of those who disproportionately witness and experience the bodily harm and terror of the police in this country each day. “How many black voices does it take to convince a white person of anything?” America asks again and again, though it does not answer. It just continues to count. We will always believe a single white police officer, any officer, over an entire neighborhood of black witnesses.

Even when we know these words are hollow and weightless we let ourselves believe the lie, then we become it. The lie becomes intrinsic to our lives, how we view and move through the world. It becomes woven into our sense of reality, and to that extent we defend the lie. Actively and passively. By saying Tamir deserved it or by saying nothing at all. As white people, specifically, we defend the lie because we know, either consciously or somewhere deep within us, that this lie shields us. It allows us to believe the world is as fair as we need to believe it is in order to sleep. It allows us to believe we are responsible for nothing. This lie is a fortress in which we sleep, and the sleep grows deeper each non indictment. It grows deeper as malls and roads are shut down and whole city grids swell with a tide of hoodies and iced tea and tears and teargas, and still so many of us don’t stop to wonder, or ask, or question, what is really going on, why is this happening again, in another city? Rather, we demand the protests take on a different tone, that they take up less space, that they shake us a little less from our terrible sleep and the little white picket fences by which it is encased.

We accept these murders, these executions (not tragedies for “tragedies” are not preventable and these deaths always are) despite what we know and what we see. I won’t demand any more tapes. Several witnesses all said the same thing about Jamar Clark. As many about Mike Brown. His hands were cuffed. His hands were up. I simply don’t believe in white people's ability to see the truth more than I believe in the ability of people of color to speak it.

Every time we demand the tape and that becomes our focus, we are reacting in a way which hinges justice on the moral compass of the institutions of whiteness. We are asking white juries dedicated to upholding white supremacy to feel more for Tamir Rice’s family than for the officers that killed him. We ask them to feel more for what was taken from Tamir than they feel for what the killers have left. The truth is always being spoken, and yet we do not listen. It comes from a local barbershop owner leaving the Elks Lodge across the street the moment Jamar Clark is killed, from the woman who held the party Jamar Clark was at, from a 10 year old boy who watched Clark die close enough he saw the smoke rise from the gun. Ze’Morian Dillon-Hokins said, “Clark was ‘face down when he was shot’ and the officers ‘flipped him over’ after the gun and been discharged.” I will always believe in Ze’Morian’s ability to see the world honestly more than I will believe in a white Jury’s ability to perceive it. Before anyone says anything about him being only ten, remember Tamir was twelve, which is apparently old enough for him to be twenty, and that is apparently old enough for him to die.

If Tamir was old enough to die, then this child is old enough to be a witness, to be believed, to be as much an arbiter of truth in the public eye as the cop who pulls the trigger. I don’t believe any movement in the world can, or has, hinged its liberation upon the systems designed to subdue it; demands must center on the humanity of marginalized peoples, not on the ability of the dominant culture or its institutions to acknowledge this humanity. I want a justice system which listens to its people, not silences them and their pain. I want a country whose citizens believe each other and their experiences, especially when those experiences are ones we ourselves have never or could never understand. Yes-give us the tapes, but first give us a police force and justice system more interested in the truth then they are in concealing it.







Picture

Michael Lee is a Norwegian-American writer, performer and educator. He has received grants and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the LOFT Literary Center, the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, and Intermedia Arts. He is an Ed.M candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. You can help support his writing HERE.
Follow Michael on Facebook and Twitter

0 Comments

Shutting Down Malls and Airports In Protest Not Only Makes Sense, Its Necessary

12/24/2015

71 Comments

 


Shutting Down Malls and Airports Not Only Makes Sense, But is Necessary
Nonviolent protests are performances. I don’t mean that in a disingenuous way, I mean that in the way that nonviolence requires an audience. Injustice is upheld in equal parts by those enacting immediate violence and discrimination (whether that be interpersonal, ideological, internalized or institutional) and by the silence and averted gaze of the “unaffected” masses.
​
When Black Lives Matter Minneapolis shut down 35W last year after Mike Brown was murdered, there was a chorus of white folks yelling “but why do they have to block traffic?”, “I sympathize, I just don’t understand why they have to inconvenience innocent people”, “I’m sympathetic, but this just isn’t the way to go about it”. First, I hope we can all see the irony of those of the oppressor/dominator class suggesting the oppressed protest in a more convenient way. Second, in the systemic oppression of anyone there are no innocent people. Every day each and every one of us either reinforces or deconstructs systems of oppression by what we say or do not say, what we do or do not do. To voice support followed by “but” is not really voicing support, because the question is most concerned by the moral compass of the dominator than with what is the most effective way to achieve justice. There should always be room for critique, but the majority of folks leveraging critique against BLM aren't leveraging critiques against police violence. If you aren't speaking to and fighting against systems and circumstances of oppression then you don't have a right to complain about the tactics being used to fight back against these systems.

Last Winter, after a slew of extra judicial killings of black and brown folks, and as many grand juries and non indictments, BLM Minneapolis and supports shut down Mall of America. Again, the same chorus of, “but why do you have to ruin people's shopping experiences?” or “this is private property, this isn’t right!” came flooding in through social media and the doldrums of the comment sections. Never mind that taxpayers are responsible for much of the construction of the mega mall, and will be for its proposed addition, and thus the idea of what is or is not private property should be interrogated, as should the idea that our laws are valid, or inherently valid, metrics for mortality-last I checked Slavery, Jim Crow, the internment of the Japanese during WW2, Voter IDs, and the war on drugs, were all technically legal. I digress, let's return to the notion of convenience.

This year, after the murder of Jamar Clark in N. Minneapolis by a historically violent, brutal and racist police force in a state with some of the worst wealth and educational disparities, along racial lines, in the country , BLM Minneapolis took to the Mall of America again as well as the MSP International Airport. Again, the complaints. While it isn’t the focus of this essay, the sheer and astounding narcism and privilege that allows (mostly) white Americans to complain that their commute or their shopping experience was made unpleasant while black and brown folks are killed and brutalized by police at an exponentially greater rate than white folks, is staggering. However, not surprising. The list of young men and womyn of color who will not be celebrating any holiday this season, or any season ever again, is longer than any and all of our collective shopping lists, though apparently not more pressing nor longer than our list of facile complaints. The outrage over inconvenience shows a great lack of empathy and humanity, but also of an understanding of social movements and non-violent protest.

Nonviolence is equal parts performance and spotlight. Privilege is in part defined by our ability to look away, to be silent, to not attend the play without repercussions or interruptions in our lives. Anyone who was at the MOA or MSP or on 35w, or 94w shortly after Jamar was killed, who didn’t know much about police violence inevitably knows more now. If they didn’t know the name of Jamar Clark, they do now. The protests either alienated them or brought them to the light and made them question their roles in systemic oppression, but required them to witness the reality of police militarization for even a brief moment. It made them audience members, it required they look, it required they say something. Anything. Even if what was said was racist, hateful or unproductive, they revealed themselves, they interacted, and they watched, and they witnessed. If nonviolent protests does nothing at all it should reveal just who we are, to ourselves and to those around us. Nonviolent protest must disrupt “business as usual” it must disrupt “status quo”, it must not allow the silent, privileged ignorance and optional gaze of white people to continue while black and brown folks are murdered by police, charged and incarcerated at nearly 8 times the rate of white people for the same crimes (committed at nearly identical rates). While cities continue to close school after school and build prison after prison while the the wealth gaps grow larger, brunch and shopping day cannot and should not be enjoyed in the way that they have been enjoyed. 

Shutting down Malls is essential as it disrupts the flow of capital and demands an audience, progress never seems to be made until money gets on the table. The bus boycott worked because it nearly bankrupted the bus company and demanded an audience. Imagine if the MOA was shut down every day, it would take less than a month to entirely re-imagine police forces in Minnesota. Imagine the Vikings went on strike. It would take days before those who don’t support the cause would be demanding justice not in the name of justice, but in the name of their own comfort and wealth. Never underestimate the power of the privileged desire for comfort, for it is always held in higher regard than the livelihood of the oppressed. As Assata Shakur says, "Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them." I’m not sure what world those who “just wish these protesters wouldn’t inconvenience innocent people” believe we live in wherein justice has ever been given by the oppressor, but there are two options for resistance, violence and nonviolence. Inconvenience or blood. Justice is not an option, it is a necessity and a right.
​
Yes it is inconvenient to miss a flight or have your errands for the day messed up, it is inconvenient at worst, the way that taking a wrong turn or hitting traffic is inconvenient. Inconvenience is a reflection of privilege, let’s not forget the privilege of owning a car are having the capital to shop for our loved ones. Or have or loved ones still alive to be shopped for.

Regardless of what you feel, that inconvenience made you say something, it made you look, it made you an audience member in our political theatre wherein some of us have the privilege to opt out of, and some of us are born into. In response to the last 400 years of systemic violence, of slavery and lynchings, and police violence, of redlining, of building power plants in black neighborhoods, of burning black neighborhoods to the ground to make way for parks or malls other measures of white luxury, in response to a history of inequitable access to education and housing, employment and health care, in response to a racist war on drugs and mass incarceration, any action would be justified. With knowledge of history, blowing the Mall of America up would have been justified, and yet the masses are in arms because they were late to work or getting home, because their christmas shopping wasn’t done on time. White folks should consider ourselves lucky that folks of color have never done us like we do them day in and day out.

In the age of distraction, in a country founded upon genocide and our collective, subsequent amnesia, nonviolence demands you look, demands you to be, at the very least, an audience member in the systematic subjugation and murder of black and brown bodies. To be inconvenienced, only, is a privilege, and the anger present in the inconvenienced, is rooted in a lack of understanding of both local and national politics and history. Protests demand of the silent masses that they speak, that they say something, even if it is hateful and awful, even if it is violent, because then it is in the open, then they are participating, they are watching, they are forced to look, they make it clear which side of history they are on and just what those of value justice are up against.

Things often get worse before they get better, but nonviolence, disruption, protest, forces the majority to understand that things are bad now, that they have always been. If the same precinct is shut down and the same street marched, the audience is no longer demanded, the protest is easily silenced, it becomes a part of our convenient, daily lives. Nonviolence must up its stakes, it must shut down the flow of capital, it must inconvenience those who have the privilege to look away. When white folks ask for black folks to be “peaceful” what they really  mean is silent, is convenient, is protesting in a way which does not disrupt the luxury of whiteness. Sorry, not sorry. If folks of color can survive white people, I think we can survive missing a flight, a sale at The Gap, or getting home a little late.
​

Picture
Michael Lee is a Norwegian-American writer, performer and educator. He has received grants and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the LOFT Literary Center, the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, and Intermedia Arts. He is an Ed.M candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. You can help support his writing HERE.
​Follow on Facebook
71 Comments

The Works Upon Which the Work is Hinged:An Exploration of Personal Literary Game Changers

12/22/2015

0 Comments

 

The Works Upon Which the Work is Hinged:
An Exploration of Personal Literary Game Changers
Michael Lee
Harvard Graduate School of Education


When I am asked about my favorite books there are three primary ways I can answer this question. I can talk about the authors and books which I enjoyed reading the most, the ones which kept me up all night, the ones I wept during, the ones I threw across the room because they were so damn good-some of these include Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!, Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore and most recently Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. I can also respond by talking about the books or the authors which maybe were not the ones I enjoyed reading the most, or ones I thought were the best written, but the ones I found to be doing something truly unique, something which made me return to them again and again to study their craft-such as Denis Johnson’s Nobody Move, Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper, Louise Erdrich’s Round House or Jorge Luis Borges’ Labyrinths. The third way to answer this question, and the one I am perhaps most interested in talking about, is from the positionality of a writer, one which reframes “favorite” into the light of “importance” or “influence” to my own craft. At times the books which pushed my evolution as a writer are within both of the aforementioned categories, at times they are in only one, but they are all of them some of my favorites because they allowed me to be who I am as a writer, they added to the construction of my artistic lens and framework. In this essay I will examine and discuss seven books which changed, clearly, the way I wrote and significantly reoriented my artistic trajectory. This list is not comprehensive, every book I have ever read has to some extent affected my writing, nor are these books are necessarily the books I think to be most valuable to the world, or the ones I think are perhaps the best written, but they were, for me, the perfect books at the perfect times, books which granted me access to a new world of thought and artistic expression. These books, in examining and reflecting upon my artistic journey up to this point, act as signposts showing me exactly how I got to where I am now.

The first book, while I was late to come upon it compared to many of my peers, redefined what I then understood about a book’s landscape, the sheer topography and scope of its world. It was the 8th grade when I read J.R.R Tolkien’s ‘The Hobbit’, and I read it in one night. It was during this time, my 8th grade Winter vacation, I began to write a fantasy novel entitled, “The 19 Brooches”. Before I read The Hobbit, my novel at the time was taking place almost exclusively in a small town mirrored after a town in Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydian series. I seemed to be unable to stray beyond a few miles from the town within my writing, and yet after reading the epic journey within The Hobbit, I was given permission to craft a massive world within my own book. Before, I wasn’t sure how to write across years of miles or even leagues-I wasn’t positive I could, at that time I believed I had to chronicle the complete day to day life of my characters from waking up in the morning, to going to sleep.
I spent weeks drawing out maps and designing continents and nations within my story. I developed three languages and nine mythical races complete with histories, cultures, and traditions. After a few weeks time I had nearly one hundred pages of histories, languages, maps and races developed and my novel was more than 40,000 words spanning each of the continents I had created. While I was still mimicking much what I was reading, The Hobbit allowed me to remove all fear and boundaries from the geography of my writing. I began to trust my fourteen year old imagination and vision in a new way.
The next year, a freshman in high school, I was feeling rather stagnant in my writing and reading. I had been fully engaged in fantasy books, but was yearning for something deeper than plot and character, my life had grown more and more tumultuous and I needed a way to better understand it; in my freshman English class we read “Haroun and the Sea of Stories” by Salman Rushdie. In Haroun and the Sea of Stories I was able to engage in a fantastical world I was accustom to, and yet I was provided layers of text I was had not received from Lloyd Alexander or J.R.R Tolkien. The number of references and parallels within Haroun and the Sea of Stories to my own world opened up the way I understood the membrane of a book’s ecology, what could leave, what could enter, the dialogue between the world of the book and the world in which the reader was situated. Several of Rushdie’s characters were pulled from songs by The Beatles including a Walrus by the professional title of “I.M.D Walrus” and an “Eggman”. Until that point I had been reading and writing as a means of escaping the world and my reality rather than critically engaging it and using literature to inform my existence and the contexts in which I lived. I began to write more about the world around me, both in my fiction and my poetry, though I still employed magic and fantasy. I retired my first novel and began a second which paralleled the Israeli and Palestinian conflict, but re-situated it in a mythical Northern setting inspired by my explorations of my Norwegian heritage.

The next book which shifted my work was also a part of my freshman English class. We read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which provided me the opposite lessons from Hobbit, but again stretched my understanding of layers within a story. The book takes place in an afternoon and yet spans years within the memories and recollections of the characters. At the age of fifteen I was blown away by levels employed by Woolf, how the book felt as expansive as The Hobbit, and yet happened in one day surrounding a single social engagement. I recall enjoying the poetic language used in the book as well as the way Woolf discussed time within her writing while simultaneously playing with time in the movement of the book. Inspired by the book, I wrote my final essay for the class as an epic length poem about the fragility of time attempting to play with time as I wrote about it wherein the world of the poem spanned only minutes but hinged upon years of personal memories and dreams.
Over the next several years while I read frequently and wrote often, I did not find another book which affected my writing so clearly as The Hobbit, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, or Mrs. Dalloway had done. The rest of my high school years and my first year of college were marked by my addiction, alcoholism and severe depression, insomnia and anxiety. It wasn’t that I was not affected by what I was reading, but that I was so emotionally high, low, or numbed out that it was nearly impossible for me to really engage with what I was reading on a deep level. Shortly after I got sober in 2008 at the age of 20 I began writing another novel about addiction and insanity-a professor gave me the book “Jesus’ Son” by Denis Johnson. I’ll never forget reading Johnson’s description of an overdose as “my muscles grabbed”, perhaps it was because I knew just what he was talking about, but his simple use of a simple verb in a way I had never read changed how I related to language. In that one line he personified the very fibers of his body, provided them agency, used simple language in a magical way which commented deeply on the ways in which addiction becomes us and we become addiction, the ways in which our bodies, down to our muscles are no longer ours. I recall sitting on the porch of where I lived at the time, clean and sober around seven months, having just read that line looking out onto the Spring street feeling as though for the first time I could see who I wanted to be as a writer. I wanted to use accessible language in unique ways, I wanted to show people we had not even begun to achieve what was possible with language.

That next year was a massive year of growth for me as a writer and a person, I moved through book after book after book, writing and reading at every chance I could. My style was changing so fast I felt like I didn’t have any control over my writing-everything felt like a freestyle montage, something like a theatre troupe moving through a city erecting itself around them as they moved, and danced, and sang. The year after, 2010/2011, as I decided to take only one class so I could focus on work and writing, I read Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Coinciding with this book was a greater control achieved over my writing-The Unbearable Lightness of Being was, in many ways, a perfect aggregate of lessons gained from the aforementioned books while also intertwining my passion for philosophy with my passions for poetry and fiction.

Kundera, manages to write poetically, play with time, while creating a fictional world that is integrally entwined to the real world and its history, all while seamlessly incorporating personal philosophies of time, love, sex, art, politics, and violence. I had previously been majoring in philosophy, but left it as the major at the University of Minnesota felt masturbatory and poorly incorporated to contemporary questions of justice, morality and truth. Kundera manages to employ philosophy and poetry within his fiction to such a great degree I began to demand more and more from my fiction and my poetry. It seemed to me then that our understandings of genre came from a place of desired precision within a certain mode of storytelling, but also perhaps from a place of inadequacy. A poet’s inability to tell a story, a novelist’s inability to provide consistent surprising metaphors. I became convinced that the membrane of genre is more malleable than perhaps a dominant narrative leads us to believe.
In the Winter of 2012, while living in Norway, I began reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, not only would this book become one of the most influential books to my writing, it would become my all time favorite novel, and in my opinion one of the greatest novels ever written. Marquez was my introduction to Magical Realism, he provided the poetic language and philosophy I so often yearned for in fiction while, unlike Kundera, applied a scope that was reminiscent of Tolkien, my first literary hero a decade before.

Marquez showed me how to craft a magical world without the escapism of fantasy. While One Hundred Years of Solitude is indeed fantastical, it takes no part in fantasy. The heartbreak, the war, the family dynamics are inexplicably real, and not simply because the writing is some of the best writing ever printed, but because every major event that happens is realistic, the world itself is realistic, its history and its people, and yet the details surrounding it all are magical. This magic is never out of place, but allows the reader to realize just how magical our own world is, just how impossible our lives, and our histories actually are. Marquez showed me how to use magic as a tool for exploration and illuminating truth rather than a tool for escape.

Interestingly enough, as someone who is best known as a poet and whose only published work is poetry, there is only one book on my list of my most important and influential books that is a book of poetry. Larry Levis is easily my favorite poet of all time, with the previously mentioned writers and books acting as a foundation, Levis opened the horizon and pulled me through it with his work. All of his books hold something irreplaceably important to me, but his book Winter Stars is the one which changed me as a writer forever. Of the many things that Levis does, his merger of lyric and narrative is one of my favorite. He approaches poetry with the mind and meter of a novelist, and the pen of a poet, he is a wanderer gazing out onto the horizon from the window seat of a train arcing over the world during an endless sunset. He writes in such a way wherein I feel as though I’m on this journey with him, one wherein I don’t always know where I am, but I never feel lost, I always feel as though the destination is just beyond reach, just a line away.
​
In part, his use of lyrical spinouts has been most influential for me. For instance, he might-in describing a woman’s eyes in a poem-describe the eye’s in relationship to the dim lights of a motel, and then he might enter the motel and describe the clerk, the patrons who stay there, what the walls are like, what music is playing, he then might recall a time he himself stayed within a motel similar to this one he has imagined and what happened there. Levis takes us deeper and deeper into the imagination, into what might be seen as a tangent, but isn’t, all without us ever losing the woman’s eyes, without forgetting where we are in the poem. In so doing he builds level after level and we see, in his poetry, the way our brains really work, and think, and remember, which is to say associatively. What thought do we ever have that is uninterrupted and not affected by memory, or context, or related idea?
Levis, in his long sweeping style, his controlled lyrical spinouts, his perfectly placed philosophies and vivid language allow us to move through time and landscape while moving through the hearts and memories of his narrators and his subjects. Often, in taking the reader far away from his subjects to then return, I leave a poem feeling closer to the the characters in one of his two or three page poems than I ever have in a six hundred page novel. Levis’ work gave me permission to take a journey as a part of my writing process, to wander but not be lost, to follow the associations until they return.
I have become fascinated by his use of lyrical spinouts, within my own writing I seek to see just how far I can take this construction, I want to know how far into a person’s eyes we can travel without ever losing sight of where we began. I want to write in a way that is not linear, because no life is linear, no thought, no recollection. I want to make magic out of simple words, and I want this magic to pull away from and then shine a light onto the world. I want to enter the mind and come back carrying gold and my own heart. I want to leave this place without ever going away, I want to go forever and always come back. I want each word to have its own echo and apogee. If each dark letter here is a shadow I want to find the source of light and then become it; I want to be so honest in my writing that even the lies tell some kind of truth. I want to dig up my grandfather’s grave and give every reader a single shard of bone. I want to locate the moon in the splintered ash of my memory, and guide us all home. I want to write both the map of the world and the fire which burns it. I want to say, we don’t know a thing about language yet-each letter is still a distant planet which we can barely see, though we swear we can feel each word humming at our fingertips. I want each word, even here, to be the smallest vibration against the hands.
0 Comments
    Picture

    Writer. Performer. Youth worker. Educator. What I know is eclipsed by what I don't. Working and writing for justice in all the ways I know how. Radical imagination. Deconstructing Whiteness.

    Support my writing HERE

    Archives

    August 2017
    July 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015

    RSS Feed

    Picture

    ​Order Michael's Book


Proudly powered by Weebly
  • About
  • Performances
  • Poems
  • Blog
  • Voice Overs