By Jacqueline Johnson
On October 31, 2004, Dr. Tony Medina and I met via telephone. It was the beginning of daylight-savings time, Halloween, and the eve of
the presidential election. We spoke for more than four hours. In that time we had more of a conversation than an interview and covered a variety of subjects.
Tony Medina is currently a creative writing professor at Howard University. In a relatively short amount of time, he has published to critical acclaim over a dozen books in three genres: poetry, children, and anthology, while contributing numerous essays and fiction works to a variety of media. Enigmatic, satirical, multi-faceted and always on point, Tony Medina functions like trickster in the poetry and literary community creating publishing avenues for both emerging and established poets. What follows is a sampling of that marathon session:
Jacqueline Johnson: I want to start from when I last saw you out at the Furious Flower Poetry Conference at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Can you talk about what you thought about Furious Flower?
Tony Medina: I thought it was a fantastic experience. For me it felt like it was a family reunion. You had people of all different aesthetics, academic and poetic backgrounds across generations. It was just like a calling together of the tribes. It was invigorating for me and a great experience. One of the best times I have had in the many years of going to conferences and festivals.
JJ: Did you get a sense of what’s new in terms of poetry and who are the emerging poets?
TM: A little – there was not enough time for that. Not enough reading venues for the emerging and up-and-coming poets. Maybe, if there were a few more open mics and general readings and stuff. But in a venue that huge and spread out across the campus it’s hard just to handle logistics. Otherwise, there just has to be more of a push and initiative taken by the younger generation of poets, who are emerging mostly in their thirties and forties, in taking a leadership role in creating such venues and picking up the torch where the elders have left off. We need to try and get our own institutions but it is hard to do that.
JJ: There’s a moment in Furious Flower where a young man is presenting on spoken word. And you get up and start to ask him questions and in the process start to teach him from the audience. I call that the “Tony Medina moment.” You want to talk about that moment?
TM: I did it in a way so that I didn’t attack him. Maybe a couple of years ago, I would have chopped him to pieces.
JJ: You were very loving about it. The whole business of asking him questions was very loving.
TM: I just used the Socratic method but it just comes naturally you know. The thing was, in his talk as a critic, I don’t know why he was there. He didn’t seem to fit, but maybe it was important that he was there, because it brought up a whole big discussion that needed to take place. He was making gross generalizations on what poetry is and the demarcation between poetry and the spoken word. And I was just completely baffled. I have always been baffled by the term “spoken word” poetry. I just thought it was a contradiction in terms. Anybody that knows anything about poetry, knows poetry is meant to be recited and read aloud. If you write it down and publish it and read it to an audience. That’s doing spoken word! I was always in contention with the term because I thought it was a misnomer and I thought it would be used for commercial and exploitative purposes. I asked him clearly, I said, “Well the reading that we saw yesterday afternoon and last night at 8:00 on the two different panels, would you call that poetry?” and he said, “Yes.” “Well would you call that spoken word?” And he looked again and he said, “Ah, Ah, yes.” And I said, “Then what’s the difference? Is spoken word poetry written by people who feign reading? (laughter) Or don’t read or don’t want to claim any type of influence?” He says, “Yes.” And I said, “That’s a sad situation.”
We come from a generation that was influenced by reading other writers and they became our heroes. These kids today they get influenced by seeing somebody in a performance or seeing a rapper on a video – you know what I mean? They’re not getting influenced primarily on the written word. The best of the spoken word artists go back to the drawing board and start reading.
JJ: It is a point of origin –– of where you meet the art first.
TM: Yeah, the glorification of this shit — it’s like saying I started writing on Tuesday and by Thursday I should have a cd and a book – without studying or any notion of history, movements, and respect for tradition or those who came before you. That becomes the problem and you can tell by the writing or by hearing the work. So, it parallels this whole push in black literature, with the commercial fiction and so called urban fiction where the literary, artistic integrity of the art is undermined for what sells, what’s salacious and what’s bullshit. Then you see the parallels of course in film, television and the music.
JJ: On another note, you started off reading the writing of children. It was such a completely different, unexpected yet wholly political moment. I watched Yusef Komanyakaa, who had a hint of a grin on his face. You were switching the energy of the reading and directing it in a different way.
TM: I think [Yusef] was chuckling at the kid’s voice, but also the kid voice talking about such a heavy topic like 911 and war. With him being a Vietnam veteran, I think I influenced the stuff he read that day. I feel compelled to bring these kids with me. Where my dawgs at?
I want to bring these children to the forefront. I guess that’s another reason I gravitated towards children’s and young adult literature. To bring the voices of these kids who are the forgotten to the forefront. I try to walk the fine line that poets before me walked, and who are still out there dealing with social and political stuff. Having social relevancy and responsibility – as a social critic, as an artist and as an activist. But also making sure there is a balance between content and the aesthetics, the style and the craft. It’s easy to fall into cliché and rhetoric.
JJ: As I look over your books the thing that really struck me in Smell of a Carcass, No Noose is Good Noose, and Committed to Breathing was that your voice was not compromised and remained unflinching from one book to the next. Of course the writing changes from book to book. Can you talk about “voice”? Are you conscious of it when you write? I am also equating voice with vision.
TM: Well I’m glad the writing changes. One must evolve. In Emerge and See, I think there is a nationalistic, anti-capitalist urgency there. Those observations are more like biting satire and vicious attacks. There is this machine gun style of poetics where you have rapid imagery, lines, and word play. No Noose Is Good Noose, is more of a concentration on attacking capitalism head-on.
JJ: It also seems more autobiographical?
TM: A little. Then the voice shifts in Sermons of Carcass Condemned to Begging, because I am taking on a whole persona in the character of “Broke” a home- less everyman. That voice is more like a street corner Socrates type of guy. He is the outsider poking fun through irony and pathos. It is little more toned down and more poking at the ribs.
JJ: And also dealing with the absurdity of being a black man?
TM: That is not distinguished. He is an everyman. This type of poetry was influenced by reading the works of Chilean poet Nicanor Parra, who is a contemporary of Pablo Neruda. He invented the anti-poem.
JJ: What do you mean by the anti-poem?
TM: It was poetry written in a more conversational style. It was stripped of all its over-sentimentalized language. It was basically poetry against that whole school of Spanish poetry with highfaluting language and airs and the school of poetry that Neruda comes out of. It was just a different direction. Anti-poetry is very satirical, very straight forward, coming from the voice of a character poking fun at the system of capitalism, imperialism, neo-colonialism all that stuff but from everyman’s point of view. The everyman could be an intellectual or the Christ of Elke, Nicanor Para created. It is a way of poking fun at religion; Christianity or the middle class, or like Richard Pryor’s “Mudbone” character. So that’s all in the voice of Broke and that is the first of four volumes. Two of them are unpublished and the fourth is not completed. Pictures of Broke, Broke on Ice, and then the last one New Man in the Oven. I just latched on to that form and that was a way of dealing with social-political issues but not so blatantly coming from my voice or my perspective.
JJ: Do you see any shifts in voice from Sermons to Committed to Breathing?
TM: Well the shift in voice from Emerge and See, to No Noose, to Sermons is that those previous volumes were more blatant in your face boom boom boom and Sermons, is more indirect and has more irony and humor.
JJ: The humor is raw and stinging in Committed to Breathing. In the poem “In Search of Saddam Hussein“ “I know that’s his draws, but that might not be him,” or “Do you know who shot you? Yeah, you.” There is the poem “The Way We Move,” in which this line struck me that calls to the present “….but this is not where we were meant to be, not on the operating table of extinction…. And we are not supposed to move this way slow mumbling suicide in quicksand and defeat we must refocus, we must see again.” I see in your work a dialogue with what griot Arthur Flowers would call the “tribal soul.” It is a way of speaking to the communal spirit. Do you recognize that aspect in your work?
TM: It comes from the whole position where you don’t talk to the masses or above them you talk from them. So it’s the “us” and the “we,” talking as a voice, as a witness. Employing all of the racial memory (laughter) you could possibly employ. Assuming that griot energy and talking to the generations. We are supposed to be elevating, we are not supposed to be moving backwards.
JJ: I think that is what we were talking about earlier when we were speaking about the co-opting of the hip-hop generation. They are the dissonant poets and that has its own function. Do you agree with that?
TM: I am operating from the whole position of the poet as messenger, the poet as a warrior – the fighter. The poet on the front lines using poetry as the tool or weapon to raise consciousness but not in a way that is rhetorical or beating people over the head, but coming from the voices of the tribe. It’s like you always have to keep reminding people in the tribe where they come from. You got to do that as a teacher, you got to do that as a person, you got to that as activist and artist. You’re fighting against all these forces that are trying to strip away all your identities and all your legacies. You have to keep fighting for them to recognize your humanity.
It’s like the narrative voice is in a conversation with the self but also with the mass. Are we not thinking about these things? Are we not looking at what is happening? Don’t we know what happened in the past? What’s the vision for the future? And it’s challenge to each other and challenge to the self and a challenge to the generations, particularly the artists who are coming right after us. In the introduction to Def Poetry Jam, I just laid out what I thought was the peculiarity of poets like ourselves. We come out of the oral tradition, we come out of the activist aesthetic, we come out of a tradition where we read books. We are literate. We know that it was against the law at one time for us to read and write. We know how reading and writing has transformed a place like Cuba. How important it is to be literate and to be conscious and aware. We are faced with people who are just scoffing at that; it’s the same struggle, we are always constantly embattled within the group and outside the group.
JJ: In different historical moments poets were heads of state. Poets lead the Nicaraguan Revolution and the Salvadoran Revolution. In the 1980s, I had just come back from Brazil, and Amina and Amiri Baraka had hosted some Nicaraguan poets at their home. It was a wonderful moment in the sense that we were all gathering to meet each other but these poets were going back home to fight and possibly die. Can you talk about marrying the political and poetry?
TM: When I got into this whole poetry thing, of course I was driven by the literature. I was driven by the love of the word and what words can do, language and the places were books transport you. It was that whole solitary relationship between you and the book, and the writer and the narrative voice. The things that make you fall in love with reading and literature and wanting to be a writer but as I got more and more politicized and as I saw other examples of writers like James Baldwin, I saw that poetry was a way of fighting. You can use your art as a way of challenging society and challenging oneself and saying something relevant and changing the world. So I always approached it with this mission.
I wanted to have a range as much as I wanted it to be known that I love the art form as well as revolution. I love to be able to fight against the oppressors on every level and to join forces with other people. Loving the literature means that I can appreciate all different types of aesthetics. But when you draw a demarcation line in the sand and you wear your politics on your sleeve, nine times out of ten it works against you in society and in the literary world. I stuck to my guns because I felt it was the right thing to do and I’m not going to change that. But my palate has expanded. I have always, from day one, written poetry of all different types but I have not published everything.
JJ: Some forms have their own times or their own moments. I like what you do with haiku. It’s like Amiri Baraka’s “Low Coup” – those wicked one or two liners.
TM: A little jab.
JJ: I think of you as the workaholic poet. I remember the first time I came to your apartment in Harlem. It was after Safiya Henderson Holmes’s funeral. You, Sheree Thomas, and I were wandering the streets of Harlem and you invited us to your place. I remember seeing the piles of papers from the different anthologies. I think you were working on Role Call and Def Poetry Jam, and I remember trying to figure out your system. How many books have you produced?
TM: About twelve.
JJ: And you have about how many that you haven’t
published.
TM: Oh god. It’s at least four or five.
JJ: Are you writing all the time? Do you get a book idea and write to complete that idea?
TM: I use to just work towards filling up a folder of work. But then things happen and you learn to split your mind into two and you have several projects going at the same time. Some manuscripts get published and some get pushed onto the back burner.
JJ: Do you want to talk about your process, about splitting your mind in two? (Laughter).
TM: I think it’s almost akin to working in various genres at the same time. Your mind works in a certain way when your antennas pick up certain poems or you’re thinking as a poet or looking at the world as poet although you may not be cognizant of it. And then when you want to write a story or essay you have a different mind for that but also the doors are open enough so you can let in the poetry. Because poetry is the foundation and you want to always aspire to write poetry even in your fiction and non-fiction.
I just remember writing the poems for No Noose, while at the same time writing poems in the “Broke” voice. I would look at things his way and speak his way – in his syntax – giving it my full concentration. The busier you get and the older you are, the further you get from your work and you always have to fight to get back to that or else you get depressed.
JJ: Even if you are in love, teaching, or whatever – if you are not writing, it is all for loss.
TM: Yeah, or I end up being miserable. Working on projects keeps me invigorated. It makes me feel like I’m doing something. The one thing that writers always fear and have guilt about is wasting time. You are always guilt ridden and wrestling with yourself to get the time for yourself to read, to fill your well up, and also to create. The hard part is after you create how do you get the shit out there. And after it is out there how do you push it and sell it. It’s a kill-kill situation. There are people that work nine-to-five jobs, people that have whole families and children they have to deal with, yet they manage to conduct their lives as writers and poets.
I’m a single cat. I don’t have any kids. I have decent enough job to maintain myself. I have enough time but it seems like I don’t have enough time still. It’s just crazy. If I had a family how would I work around that? Everything takes hard work. Every relationship. Writing is a relationship that we have with this art form – kind of like having a wife or a husband or child. Even if you were in a heavy-duty relationship you still have to cater to your muses needs. Your muse is not going to let you sleep. Your muse is not going to let you rest. Your muse is not going to let you think clearly. So you have to always find the balance. It’s an ongoing process of finding balance in your life. Then your body starts saying, “What’s up, man?” Everything is working against you and you have to find ways of sustaining your energy, keeping your mind clear, not getting sucked up into drama and bullshit. It’s hard in a society where you are sensitive to the geo-political landscape.
JJ: You are fond of bookmaking. Can you talk a little bit about being an editor? You started out with “In Defense of Mumia?” What is it that you like about the editorial process?
TM: The anthologies bridge the commitment to the literature with the commitment to community. Where in a sense you’re creating a community with the anthology while at the same time you’re creating this tool, this instrument and also this weapon. If you look at Bum Rush the Page, from cover to cover it is shaped in this political instrument. Where you’re thinking; all these different poets and different backgrounds and ages together, are making individual statements and making this tremendous collective statement. From the table of contents – everything is a message.
I started with In Defense of Mumia. Then I helped out with Catch the Fire. And then I did Bum Rush, and Role Call. I have edited other poets’ books like Jessica Care Moore’s The Words Don’t Fit In My Mouth, and Sharif Simmons book Tragedies and Objects that Burn. I like to publish people for the first time.
JJ: You have a collaborative spirit as an artist. You have collaborated with illustrators, artists, children, and other poets.
TM: The control freak as collaborator. Isn’t that ironic? (Laughter). You have ideas that you want to keep pushing – being a perfectionist and keeping to my vision. There is a point where you say, later for that, and you have to trust the other folks. You got to work together. Trust that everybody brings something to the table. I have been fortunate in most of my collaborations – everything has been cool.
JJ: What convinces you that this is a project you want to be a part of?
TM: It’s the idea and you share it with somebody and they get just as excited as you do and then you both run with it. It is that simple. I’m always coming up with ideas. That’s the thing that kills me, too many ideas not enough money – not enough time.
JJ: Since you are a poet from the Bronx can you talk about how place figures in your children’s books?
TM: My first children’s book is called DeShawn Days, about a ten-year-old living in the projects and telling his life through poetry. I basically grew up in the projects – Throgs Neck section of the Bronx. That experience comes to life in that story. DeShawn has asthma – I had asthma. One of the people that helped to raise him is his grandmother – my grandmother raised me. Then DeShawn has his extended family of cousins – I drew from my own family to create that story. The descriptions of the hood come from my childhood growing up in the Bronx. “Follow-up Letters to Santa,” comes from different parts of the country.
JJ: Were those actual letters?
TM: No, they were fictional. There is going to a follow up to that book.
JJ: A follow-up to the follow-up?
TM: DeShawn’s new book is Yo, Santa, Why You Dis Me Like That? Place figures in Love to Langston, when you deal with Harlem and places Langston Hughes traveled. As a writer, the Bronx is with me at all times. New York City is with me at all times. I think recently I’m finding it harder to write in D.C. and Maryland, because I am so used to the energy of my Harlem crib and New York City and it feeds me. Most of my writings have been done in New York City. Not being able to access New York would be a blow to my psyche. Living in the Bronx, growing up on Simpson Street there was always a sense community in our neighborhood and I think I bring that to the writing community and to also to places like Howard University. There is a process of building community – of working together to achieve the ends and the means of art and activism.