Welcome to the first episode of Season Seven of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry podcast.
Season Seven is comprised of lectures written and delivered by Douglas Kearney during his tenure as a Bagley Wright Lecturer. We begin with Kearney’s talk, "I Killed, I Died: Banter, Self-Destruction, and the Poetry Reading." This talk was originally given September 25, 2020, at Cave Canem, via Zoom.
While reading from early drafts of Patter, a collection about miscarriage, infertility, and making a Black family in the U.S., Douglas Kearney’s relationship to audiences at poetry gigs changed. Informed by stand-up, improvisational music, and artists from Nina Simone to the Black Took Collective, Kearney began engaging the time between poems—the banter—to activate the imaginative space of association, mess, and discomfort he pursues in his written work: live. This lecture will get into the tension between pain and its performance, comedians’ ideas of “killing” and dying,“ along with tips on how to sprint into a stone wall without getting hurt much.
There are two brief moments where the audio cuts out in this recording. At around nine minutes, Kearney says, "'Miscarriages' were the sum of the takeaway that I couldn’t, then shouldn’t, make anyone feel what I had felt. And why? I would love to say that it would be to avoid cruelty…”. At around fourteen minutes, after "Just pay me for writing the damn poem!" Kearney continues, "Banter is of unknown etymological origins...".
Visit us at our website, www.bagleywrightlectures.org, for more information about Bagley Wright lecturers, as well as links to supplementary materials on each lecturer’s archive page, including selected writings.
Douglas Kearney's book based on his BWLS lectures, Optic Subwoof (Wave Books, 2022) is forthcoming in November, and is available for preorder here.
Music: "I Recall" by Blue Dot Sessions
from the Free Music Archive