2018: The Year According to Douglas Kearney
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2018: The Year According to Douglas Kearney

Douglas Kearney. Photo: Bao Phi

Douglas Kearney has published six books, including Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award, the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry, and silver medalist for the California Book Award (Poetry). M. NourbeSe Philip calls Kearney’s collection of libretti, Someone Took They Tongues (Subito, 2016), “a seismic, polyphonic mash-up that disturbs the tongue.” Kearney’s Mess and Mess and (Noemi Press, 2015), was a Small Press Distribution Handpicked Selection that Publisher’s Weekly called “an extraordinary book.” He has received a Whiting Writer’s Award, residencies/fellowships from Cave Canem, the Rauschenberg Foundation, and others. Kearney teaches Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. In 2015, he performed in the Walker galleries in conjunction with the exhibition Jack Whitten: Five Decades of Painting.


 

1.
“…THE BLACKNESS HAS REALLY MADE ME DROWSY.”


I ran across this quote in a Quartz article called “A Torture for the Eyes,” where Echo Huang reports on some of the negative response the film Black Panther received in China. Y’all: this quote. If it were aural in origin, I would produce a beat just to sample it. I’d have it on half the pads of my Ableton Push. I have already worked it into one very bad poem draft. But fuck that. It will be an epigraph to something I’m writing. I promise you.

2.
LETTERS TO THE FUTURE: BLACK WOMEN/RADICAL WRITING


Erica Hunt and Dawn Lundy Martin edited this dynamo of an anthology. It left me gobsmacked and nodding. It’s a battery of possibility and already done did, of provocation and balm, of briar patches that bloom orchids. I’m going to quote the press site here: “A collection of poems, essays, elder conversations, and visual works, Letters to the Future: Black WOMEN / Radical WRITING, celebrates temporal, spatial, formal, and linguistically innovative literature.” It also celebrates complexity and range, genealogy and splinter. Please stop reading this here and read that there.

3.
BLACK AND BLUR BY FRED MOTEN


Back already? You must like reading! OK then: this! Black and Blur by Fred Moten is the first book in a trio called Consent Not to be a Single Being. It’s Black thought like the bad lieutenant off of Snyder Avenue. A series of essays, the book also is a kind of apostrophic dialogue with the brilliant Saidiya Hartman. As Moten writes, “I can’t get started any other way.” What this gesture shows me, what I stay learning, is how to be in community, even in the so-called isolated acts of writing and thinking. The essays themselves are certainly galvanizing, intricate shedding, instigations and investigations of aesthetics and politics in the Black diaspora. But in its antiphonal nature, the book makes me think hard about whether a multiplicitous being is ever soloing, the nature of call and response in a textual medium, and how, as Moten suggested in a workshop, art’s purpose is not to confirm but to mess you up.

4.
HEAT ROCKS
 EPISODE 10:
B.SLADE ON JANET JACKSON’S RHYTHM NATION 1814


Morgan Rhodes and Oliver Wang curate and host Heat Rocks, a podcast in which artists and writers dig into albums they find epochal—personally, publicly, whatever. This episode in particular is a clinic in devotion, music nerdery, and cultural study. Multi-hyphenated artist B.Slade knows Rhythm Nation 1814. Can chop it up on bone marrow and lecture hall levels. Plus: the episode is live, so there’s the feeling of a public conversation. It’s from last year, but I heard it this summer and have been feeling it ever since. If, like, I was ever asked to do an episode, B.Slade has made the model. If I was ever asked to do an episode. Like, if.

5.
FISH LAKE, MAPLE GROVE, MINNESOTA


Preparing for my episode of Heat Rocks (IF), I’d probably go to Fish Lake Regional Park. Have that shit in my headphones while I run, on some Creed training montage. But with book learnin’. About tunes! From what I understand, in Maple Grove, we are on the occupied lands of the Dakota people. I talk about that when I take my daughter fishing. Coming from LA’s more arid San Gabriel and Santa Clarita valleys (Tongva land), I’ve tended to associate fresh water and deciduous trees with a particular kind of privilege. The nature of that privilege is different in Minnesota. But it’s present. Under and through all the beauty everywhere. I run better here than anywhere. Maybe it’s because I’m almost all the way to Canada!

6.
LA ESTRELLA TACOS #2 ON FAIR OAKS, PASADENA


Since leaving LA this summer, I’ve wanted an asada burrito from La Estrella. No rice or beans. Crema y queso. Spicy sauce. Lime and radish. Jarritos mineragua. Damn.

7.
“AMPLIFY”


The word, I mean. I like that it indicates work on someone else’s behalf, but it also expresses a sense that something important happened. As in, “I want to amplify what __________ said.” Before I started using this word, picked up from some critical essay or something, I think I was stuck with “echo” or “piggyback” or “re-emphasize”—the first feels redundant and static, the second is all about someone else doing the heavy lifting for you, and the third suggests a point has been made that you are now driving home, which is a bit more prescriptive than is always sensical. But amplify! That’s using your energy to hold up what you found significant about what someone else said. It’s: “I was listening; did you hear this, too? Well, here’s what it was.” I suppose it could also be used to make some subtle flaw shit more apparent. I’ve never used it that way, but I could see it. “Let’s amplify the dog whistle xenophobia in __________ policies.” SO MANY names could go in that blank.

8.
DENICE FROHMAN PLAYING WHITNEY HOUSTON’S “I WANNA DANCE WITH SOMEBODY” AT CANTOMUNDO’S FAREWELL PARTY


Here’s a thing: I love to dance. But my vocabulary of moves pretty much got tongue-tied in, like, 1995. So it’s helpful for my self-esteem that ’80s and ’90s styles are coming back kinda.

Anyway, in June I was lucky enough to be the keynote at CantoMundo, a workshop/retreat for Latinx poets. At the last dance of the farewell party, fantastic poet/magnificent human/empathy DJ Denice Frohman cued Whitney’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.” Lit. The. Floor. It was a tremendous moment of community and pleasure, curved, of course by a sense of who we lost when Whitney fell. But then there’s some magic, in that after that I started hearing that song all over. That was Denice who done it. And my uncle-ass dancing was contextually appropriate. Nice!

9.
CHAI “N.E.O.” VIDEO


CHAI is a Japanese band. I think they started playing near Nagoya. Their music is mad propulsive, joyful, and raucous. My first experience of them was through their video for “N.E.O.,” a song about subverting kawaii tropes. I think my favorite part of the clip’s visual grammar is when they do these kind of tableaux compositions, abstracting their band roles and the performativity of a video. But the song itself is awesome and spiky.

10.
BLACK WOMEN ALUMS FROM CALARTS

Lauren Halsey, We Still Here, There (installation view), 2018

I taught at CalArts for 14 years—it was an amazing time for me. I was honored to work with some great people among the students, staff, and faculty. But I want to shout out a particular demo. So many of the alums repping out here in 2018 are Black women, y’all. Artist Lauren Halsey—who had dope-ass shows at MOCA and the Hammer in LA. Playwright/performer Aleshea Harris, whose Afropunk vengeance tale Is God Is and community ritual What to Send Up When it Goes Down, have earned strong notices—plus, Twin Cities actor Dame-Jasmine Hughes starred in two different productions of Is God Is. Then there’s the work I need to see—filmmaker and writer Nijla Mu’min premiered Jinn. Playwright/actor/vocalist Dionna Daniels’ Gunshot Medley is making noise. Artist/filmmaker Elizabeth M. Webb steady exploring race, passing, and family down south. Plus there are those folk who have had recent years of note. Writer/artist/performer Kenyatta AC Hinkle. Artist Sadie Barnette. Actors Condola Rashad and Dana Gourrier. Film director Lydia Marie Hicks. I know there are more out there I’ve missed. I’m sorry. Even so: big ups, y’all.

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