What is An Artist’s Duty in These Strange Times? With Poet D. Colin

WHAT IS AN ARTIST’S DUTY in these strange times? In any times? What do we expect from an artist when the world is in turmoil, and how does that differ from what we expect, day-to-day, from those who are the first line of response? Listen in and read along as I take on the topic of an artist’s duty with poet and performer D. Colin. This transcript has been slightly edited.

Marion: Today my guest is D. Colin. She’s an author, visual artist, teacher and performer whose work I’ve read and seen on several platforms. She’s the director and MC of Poetic Vibe, a weekly poetry open mic in upstate New York. These days that happens on Zoom, but one of these days it will be back every Monday night in the Troy Kitchen in Troy, New York, and the crowds, again, will be whooping it up.

D. is the author of two collections of poetry, Dreaming in Kreyol, and Said the Swing to the Hoop. She is a fellow of Cave Canem and of the New York State Writers Institute. Welcome, D.

D.: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Marion: I’m delighted to have you here. I’m such a huge fan of your work and I’ve seen you read and perform. And wow.

I recently had the fine poet, Ellen Bass on QWERTY and we talked about a question that I guess I’ll now ask everybody, whether we’re on the air or before we go on. Because we talk a lot about identity these days, thank goodness, and I think we’re making slow but at least a little progress toward learning the language of who we are and who others are and learning how to be respectful and accurate. As I said to Ellen, I expect poets to be good at this. So how do you identify yourself?

D.: I identify myself with a bunch of different ways.

Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

D.: Well, one I’m a black woman and I come from a Haitian background. My parents came here from Haiti to start a new life and I’m first generation American, born here. I’m an artist. I think I’ve been an artist my entire life and took me around about way of identifying that as a thing that I want to pursue full time. And I’m a writer.

So there’s a lot of different ways to identify who I am. But at the core of me is arts. I’m very proud to be black. I’m very proud to be a woman. Yeah, I think all of those things, those layers, feed my writing on a daily basis.

Marion: Yeah, I think they do too. And I think perhaps the very best way we might be able to ask you to identify yourself after that is to have you read something for us. I’m going to ask you to do that in a minute.

But I was really struck reading a recent blog post of yours and rereading that wonderful quote from the ever-great Nina Simone that says: “It is an artist’s duty to reflect the times in which we live.”

D.: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Marion: That seems to me to be also a tremendous identifier for you. You seem to have a great agility for the time and the moment. I think it’s important. These times are so debilitating, and while I live by the adage that we have to participate in the conversation, it seems to me the choices you’re making right now about what to respond to is difficult.

So how do you do that as an artist, a performer, a poet? How do you choose amid the myriad things that are pounding on our heads right now to respond to?

D.: I think, one, I’m very present in the moment and I’ve always been that way and very observant about what’s going on around me. But also I feel things heavily and especially when there are things that are affecting me on a personal level. At times, I feel the need to write those things out so that I can take care of myself.

So sometimes I’m writing and it’s really for me to exhale more than it is about writing a piece for others to read. What happens is when I write a piece that’s about what I’m feeling at the time, it ends up helping other people, because other people are sometimes feeling the same things that I’m feeling. So I just rock with that, I roll with that and it’s helped. It’s helped guide where I go with my writing.

So I’m very aware of what’s going on in the world and there’s so much going on in the world. When I look at the news and think about the protests that are happening or participating in protests, it’s important for me to talk about that. It’s important for me to talk about my life mattering as a black woman. And also to speak to the intersectionality of both of those identities.

Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

D.: Even experiencing being at home and losing work because of COVID and that kind of thing. All of those things are, they’re not just things that are happening. There are things that I can talk about. And for the people who are searching for the language to talk about those things but don’t have that language, I always hope that my work is something that can resonate with someone who’s looking for the words but can’t find them.

Marion: Oh, it’s just perfect. I love that: “I feel the need to write things out so I can take care of myself.” I may need to put that up on a wall, actually, but I think you’re right. And extending that language out into the world allows others to move, metabolize, integrate, and have the experience too. That’s great.

My own education as a writer began in poetry and my parents read aloud poetry to me. Lots of epics, lots of those Midnight Ride of Paul Revere kind of stuff.

D.: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Marion: And then with lots of nature thrown in. Then I discovered Emily Dickinson on my own, and that just slowed me right down and taught me to look at each word.

But right there in that short intro to my poetry education, there’s lots of privilege. Two parents, both college educated, both who read to me. So parents reading books in my house, time to study and read, and I was able, with that background, to become a professional writer and support myself.

D.: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Marion: So give us a little background on your own poetry education, if you would, please.

D.: I think all of it came from school first. My parents weren’t the kind of parents who read to me. What we read in the house was the Bible, but there weren’t any, like bedtime stories. So that there was that.

But my parents were very strict about me reading a lot. My mom made sure that I had a library card and I was always checking books out at the library. I had to read those books in addition to whatever I was reading in school.

Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

D.: So education was huge in my household. My parents expected As and a B-minus was like, “What is that? What is a B-minus?”

Marion: Just a B or B-minus. Yeah, I get it.

D.: Right. “What is the B-minus?” So I knew that I had to excel in school and part of that was reading a lot of books. I also read some of the books on my father’s bookshelf, and I think that helped me a lot too, because most of his books are in French. So I just read whatever I could get my hands on.

The first time I ever wrote a poem, I was in sixth grade and the assignment was to write a poem that included a metaphor and a simile.

Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

D.: My teacher loved my poem so much that she put it up on the bulletin board and I was so proud of myself. And I’ve been writing poems ever since then. So that was my first introduction to, one, my ability to writing poems and also me searching for other poets to read.

Marion: I love that. Up on the board, I mean, that’s it. I mean, if you get to a shrink and they say, “Give me three totemic moments in your life,” up on the board is definitely one of the positives.

I had the great experience at a 25th college reunion that two of my best friends, the guys that I was great friends with in college, came back. So we’re whatever age you are then; you’re 35 or approaching 40, and they behaved just horribly at our 25th reunion. They drank, they chased women. They both complained about their marriages; their wives didn’t understand them. And I was crushed because I loved these guys.

I remember I ran into my Shakespeare professor and I complained to him. I said to him, “My friends are so disappointing. I mean, I just don’t get it. They’re behaving so badly.” He looks me right in the eye and he says, “They didn’t read enough poetry in college.”

I thought, “I totally get what you mean.” They hadn’t read also enough John Cheever or enough whomever who lets you know that marriages do get disappointing after a certain point and you kind of step up and do your part.

D.: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Marion: But I love that: “They haven’t read enough poetry,” and I got it. I understood what he meant. So my question to you is, who would you like to assign to read a little poetry right now in the world?

D.: Oh, my goodness. There’s so many.

Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Give me three.

D.: Wow. Okay.

Marion: Give me a couple. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

D.: I think Audre Lorde is perfect for right now.

Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

D.: Anything by Audre Lorde is perfect for right now. I also think Langston Hughes, he has such a large collection of poetry and they’re very short.

Marion: Yes.

D.: They’re very short poems. So I think Langston Hughes for any kind of reflection or maybe a journaling prompt or meditation, Langston Hughes would be perfect. I also think Patricia Smith.

Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

D.: Poems by Patricia Smith. If anyone’s looking to read poems, I know there are people who are waking up right now and reading more to gain some understanding. And Patricia Smith has a book called Incendiary Art that is amazing. Is she has poems in there that are from the perspective of moms who have lost their children to police violence. So if anybody’s looking for work that can speak to that, to gain some understanding, I would really recommend that book.

Marion: Anybody in particular that you’d like to have read that poetry? Have you got a short list of people in power who you think should be sat down in a chair and read to at this point?

D.: I think that if anyone’s in the police force, they can read that book. If anyone’s in the mayor’s office, they can read that book. Anyone in some position of power should read that, because it really frames it in a way that I don’t think you can read it and not feel something. Yeah.

Marion: Good. That would be great. I agree with you. Let’s get to a common text of feeling. Years and years ago, somebody taught me the value of having a text in common. It was a humanities program that I was part of, and I watched while everybody settled into this same language space story.

While we all knew that from school, we didn’t, because school is competitive and weird. And as you said, your parents are demanding something of you, and you’re not really thinking about that shared cathartic experience in the room that you get with a shared text.

But that’s a beautiful suggestion, some Patricia Smith. Thank you for that. So how about you give us a little bit of a shared experience. Would you consider reciting or reading something for us and telling us what it is and which collection it’s from? Or maybe it’s something new. I’d love to hear something.

D.: I have two new poems.

Marion: Good.

D.: One poem is called Red Leaf Tree in Summer.

Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

D.: And it taps into some of my process of trying to write a poem. This poem came from me trying to revise a different poem that was about police brutality. So here’s the poem.

Marion: Great.

D.:

Red Leaf Tree in Summer

It is August & the trees stand still
green from summer because it is in fact summer
yet there is one tree, if you happen to
look from your car window
while riding or driving on the thruway,
with all of its leaves turned crimson, already
as if to say look at me & how I bleed
among the rest & I want to write a poem about
how summer doesn’t want to spend time
here anymore, how the earth changes
her mind & how the sun used to play
longer with trees, how strange
red leaves hang on branches in August
but there it is, this simile ringing in my head—
this red leaf tree surrounded by a forest of green
like a Black body holding on to what’s left of itself
& so often, I want to run from this type of poem

tongue swollen from biting too
hard on the words: Here is this Black body—
another one—shot—holding the wrong
object or /nothing at all/in a car/in a corner
store/on the side of the road/on the night
before graduation/or a wedding/on a regular
walk home /waiting to taste the rainbow
another Black body
bleeding
a familiar kind of death.

& I still want to write a poem about a red leaf tree
hold a remnant of it here
but instead I have added more Black bodies
to the Black bodies I was already holding in my mouth
I want to have this art whittled into submission
till it’s smooth like a bullet
till it chokes on its own dust
till this type of poem, in particular, becomes unnecessary
but a poem
can’t swallow a bullet
the way a Black body can

Marion: Perfect. Thank you.

D.: And I have one more really short poem, but I-

Marion: Yeah, go ahead. No, that would be lovely. Please read us another short one. That would be wonderful.

D.: If anyone is near The Arts Center of the Capital Region, this poem is on the-

Marion: In Troy, New York.

D.: In Troy, yeah. This poem is on the windows.

For the days ahead

I left this poem open

just for us

to climb into when

we’ve lost our keys,

to let the air in

when we’ve lost our breath

& the light, when we’ve

forgotten the sun,

to serve as a mirror & see

our own reflections

holding each other up.

On days when hope dwindles,

know this window is here

to remind us,

it’s not all gone,

that it never went away,

even if we had to press ourselves

against the glass

to find out

the hope

we’re waiting on

is us.

Marion: Aw, the hope we’re waiting on is us, isn’t it?

D.: Yeah.

Marion: Beautiful. Thank you. You open your first collection, Dreaming in Kreyole in a deeply autobiographical way. There’s a piece of memoir in it.

D.: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Marion: And it continues throughout the piece. I was stunned by you bring us in, in this context of memoir and the rest of the pieces continue to inform us.

But there’s this poem, Prayer for Her, in which we witness you extorting yourself to pick up the pen and write the music in your four-year-old voice. It allows us to know that you’re first gen Haitian-American and some of the conflict from the world that you now inhabit versus the one you used to inhabit.

D.: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Marion: It begs the question: What are we doing when we write? I mean, clearly we’re not exposing ourselves to reader. What are we doing in these last two poems that you just read for us. And in that poem, Prayer for Her, I was particularly struck by the revelations, but you’re not just trying to show yourself to me. What are you doing?

D.: In a poem, you have less time to express to the world what it is that you’re trying to express. In a novel, you have all these pages and pages of words and you have more time.

Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

D.: But in a poem, you have but so much time to capture a moment, and that moment speaks to a larger lens of things. It’s like looking at a pin drop, it’s looking at a drop of water to understand the whole ocean, so that’s what a poem I feel is trying to do all the time.

Like for me, it’s about tapping into, well, what is this poem trying to do? And what is it exactly that I’m feeling? Then what do I want the reader to also feel while I’m writing?

Also there’s another way of looking at it. It’s like channeling something else, that I am like the vessel and we get these thoughts and we get words that pop into our imagination. It’s like a patchwork kind of thing, of sewing those things together to create this craft. But letting it direct you.

Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

D.: And having a balance of when you go back to revise not to torture the poem, to just ask the poem what it wants, if that makes any sense.

Marion: It makes all the sense in the world, asking the poem what it wants. And what makes all the sense in the world. I love the pin drop. I love the drop of water to reveal the ocean.

Let me use an example of one of your poems that just literally vibrated on the page for me. For Every Black Woman Who Has Been Called Angry, well, you take on that. This is a topic that comes with all manners of cultural prescriptions and warnings. As a result, of course, is wildly unknown to us. We just don’t talk about it.

I was fascinated by it and I felt like I was being allowed to have a look, like finally, hold-in-my-hand, bounce-up-and-down way every black woman who has been called angry. I thought, it’s like, “Shame on me. I could’ve asked any black woman I know about her anger, but I haven’t.”

D.: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Marion: I thought, “What am I experiencing here?” And the word that popped into my head was “intimacy.” I thought, “It allows me some intimacy with this.” And you said, “pin drop” and I get it: this small moment of enormous power, of enormous energy. So my word is “intimacy.” You use “pin drop,” you use “drop of water.”

You already gave me your words for it, and I don’t want to put you on the spot and say, “Well, what else have you got?” But so let’s go back to that topic. What about that anger? What kind of fuel is it for poetry? Is it a better fuel than love? Is it a great fuel? Talk to me about that poem and just what you were allowing us to see there.

D.: For that particular poem, it’s really about … Well, it started with me thinking about my experiences of really trying not to be angry, you know.

Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

D.: Having to sit in a room, whether it’s with coworkers or with a boss or as a boss with employees or in so many different … or in a classroom. It’s happened to me in classrooms and writing workshops where I’ve been the only black person there and having to explain my existence and do it calmly or do it in a way that so people don’t feel intimidated.

So that’s something that’s been around for me for, I don’t even know how long, probably my whole life. I have no idea when it started. But I just know that it’s come with the territory of being a black woman and not being able or having to try to navigate conversations without coming across as angry so that I don’t get dismissed in what I’m trying to say.

That’s like a push and pull kind of struggle all the time in rooms, especially when I’m the only one. So that poem was just kind of like, “Well, why don’t I have rights to my own anger?” Everyone else in the world has rights to their own anger.

It’s okay to be angry and anger doesn’t necessarily have to be a negative emotion. Anger can fuel so many other things that are positive. Anger can fuel change. We wouldn’t protest that you weren’t angry.

Marion: Well, that’s what the protests are, right?

D.: Right. Exactly. So now people are probably going to be wondering about the poems. Now I want to share the poem.

Marion: I want them to go buy your books and read that poem. So I think because that’s where it ultimately ends up, which is a fascinating place. You took me into an intimacy that was also one of the revelation of the positive power, you think, that the anger can ultimately beget.

D.: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Marion: I love that. I love that. So they have to go buy the books to get …

D.: Yeah. It’s not that we’re not angry. There’s so many black women I could reference in history that I have to look at their life and say they had to be angry at one point to do the work they did.

Marion: Oh, yeah, I think that’s true. I really admire the way you deliver the language. And I say that in the very much using the word “deliver,” the active way you present. There’s a presentation here that’s very strong and very deliberate.

You have in your collection, Said the Swing to the Hoop, a poem called The Poem, which is now my new favorite experience of writing about writing.

D.: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Marion: In which the poem identifies itself in ways that I simply want to needlepoint onto something or tattoo onto some place in my body about the process of writing.

When you write that the poem be like you, the messenger, “I’m just here to make sure you speak,” the poem says. “I’m just here to make sure you speak.” I have to say that’s perfect as you describe the poem as “hallelujah language.”

You go on to show us what writing does for us, so that’s what I was saying before, the delivery of what the anger does for us. In the poem we were just referring to, you do the same. You deliver to the reader what the writing does for us.

So is that what writing does for you? It gives you this hallelujah language. But let’s just talk a little bit about your process of writing and what it really does for you.

D.: Yes. Poetry is definitely my hallelujah language. Oh, definitely. And this might be like, I don’t know if it’s over the top, but I want to say that poetry has saved my life in the sense of I’ve been through so many things. I’ve had trauma, I’ve gone through abuse. It’s just there’s so many things that I’ve experienced in my life that poetry became an outlet for. I really don’t know if I didn’t have that kind of an outlet, I’m not sure what my mental health would be like.

I mean, what it really does is it holds space. It holds space to hold the things that I don’t want to hold in my body anymore. There’s things that take up space in my mind. Sometimes you have stress. Stress will appear in your body in different ways and writing it down helps that.

Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

D.: Also professional therapy helps that too, I say.

Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Absolutely.

D.: But yeah, when I write things down, especially when it’s focused on a traumatic event or it’s focused on big emotions like anger or sadness or mourning, it allows me to have space in myself by putting it down on the paper so it’s not taking up space in my mind anymore, and that’s a relief. So writing for me functions in that sense.

Marion: That’s fabulous.

D.: The other way that it functions is that through my years of performing, I realized the importance of reading poems out loud. There’s part of the process is thinking about getting everything down on a page. But then also the other part of the process for me is how will this read? How will I read this out loud? And what do I want the takeaways to be?

Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

D.: So I always ask myself that with every poem, because there’s always one person in the audience that a poem is for, and people take what they need from poems and they leave inspired or they leave moved. I always say that if I perform a poem and nobody was moved in the room, then I didn’t do my job. So yeah, that’s how I approach it.

Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, I’ve been to your Poetic Vibe nights and they draw huge, enthusiastic crowds. I think your generation has brought poetry back into the, I think of it as the arena, it seems to me. My 25-year-old daughter goes to poetry slams. She’s the one that brought me to yours and to your Poetry Vibe.

You and I live in Upstate New York, an area that has only about 12% diversity, and yet those Poetry Vibe nights are also the most diverse cultural events I attend. Why do you think this is? Why do you think that this verbalization of the space we make, I love that idea, that you make space for things you no longer have to carry in your body.

Your generation loves the poetry slam, because my daughter went to them all through college in Washington, DC. What’s going on? Why is that? And thank you. I’m so glad they’re back.

D.: Well, they never really went away. I mean, one, poetry slam is a competition and that’s been going on for a long time.

Marion: That’s true.

D.: And then there’s been poetry open mics for a long time too. I remember when I first came to this area, one of the first things that I did was look for poetry open mics. So I went to Albany Poets. I looked at their calendar and I went to as many open mics as I could.

Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

D.: Now coming from Connecticut, I had already been going to open mics and I had been competing in poetry slams, and so I already had some experience with the poetry scene. But coming to the Capital Region, being brand new in this area, I was looking for a kind of the community that I left back home. What I observed was that the audience and the poets, it wasn’t a diverse community.

I was like, “Well, why is that?” It was I could go to an open mic and then it be just one demographic and then I’d go to another open mic and then it’d be only one other demographic. And I’d be like, “Well, what’s going on? Why aren’t we mixing together?” Poetry doesn’t have to be …

For example, I got an older, white audience and then a young, black audience. We can all have poetry together. So my vision for Poetic Vibe was to have all the voices on the stage. I wanted all the voices on the stage, because if we don’t have all the voices on the stage, then we’re only speaking to each other. And for me, there’s no progress in that.

And art is supposed to do some things for us. It’s supposed to help us be inspired. It’s supposed to help us have a critical lens on some things or re-examine ourselves, to move in the world differently than we did before we experienced the art.

But to do that, we need all the voices in the room, so I really pushed for that. And I’m happy that Poetic Vibe is what it is right now. We’ve really had every voice on stage. It’s amazing.

Marion: It is amazing and I’m so grateful for it. And I think that’s the best description, “every voice on stage.”

So as we wrap this up, I just want to … You’re another one of several interviews that I’ve done in the last couple of months where you clearly did not get the memo when you started out to be an artist. Or as you said, you’ve been an artist all your life, but that you’re supposed to specialize.

You have been involved with community theater since 2009. You write plays, you act with Black Theater Troupe of Upstate New York and the Sandglass Theater and Creative Action Unlimited. And you wrote your original play, Simone, I know debuted with Capital Rep in 2019. And you’ve received the League of Women Voters Presidential Award for your astonishing reenactments of Sojourner Truth.

So that memo didn’t go to you where they said, “Just do one thing, young artists, and don’t try to get it all over and get good at anything else.” So give a little advice to the person who’s listening here and who’s saying, “I want to write a little memoir, I want to write a little poetry, I want to get up and speak my truth. I want to be diverse in my expression.” How did you allow yourself to do that?

D.: That wasn’t easy. Well, for one, I grew up in a household where the choices for a career were like doctor, lawyer, engineer. Art being a full time poet or writer, that just wasn’t one of the choices. So it took me a long time to be receptive to the idea of doing all the things that I do now.

But I had a professor in grad school and she was talking to us one day in her lecture. She just veered off the lecture and said that she used to write plays. She was in law school and trying to write plays, but trying to focus on law school. But she was miserable in law school. She had to ask herself why she was in law school.

And her son, who was three, she told this story about him going to the cookie jar. She asked him how many cookies he wanted. He said, “All of them.” She said, “You really can’t have all the cookies. How many cookies do you want?” And he said, “All of them.”

For some reason, it clicked in her mind that why do we always feel like we have to pick one thing? There’s so many things that we have gifts for, and we should be able to use all of our gifts.

I had a whole bunch of light bulbs go off in my head when she told that story in class. I was like, “Oh, I don’t have to pick one of my gifts. I can use all of them. If I want to sing with a poem, I can do that. If I want to act, I can do that. If I want to write something other than poetry, I can do that.”

So I don’t limit myself in that sense, because it’s a gift. And to stretch the gift means that I need to explore all the things that I’m good at.

Marion: Perfect. That’s a perfect answer. Thank you, D. It’s lovely having you here. I think I could talk to you all day long and I look forward to getting more chances to do so. Thanks a million.

D.: Thank you.

Marion: The writer is D. Colin. Her books, Dreaming in Kreyole and Said the Swing to the Hoop are available Wherever books are sold. Listen to her read her work on her website: dcolin.com.

I’m Marion Roach Smith and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overit studios dot com. Our producer is Adam Clairmont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marionroach dot com and take a class with me. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to subscribe to QWERTY and listen to it wherever you go.