1 — Poet Talk about Beginnings featuring Jody Chan

Join us for the pilot episode of Poet Talk, a podcast where poets talk. In this episode, future cohosts Jody Chan and Sanna Wani delve into beginnings with questions like, "How does a poem begin?" and "What is the beginning of poetry?" Chan and Wani share some of their favourite poem beginnings, etymologies and more. From politics to gossip to lore, this epsiode is an introduction of what poetry means to us in community and in practice.

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Goodie Bag Alert! 🍭

Find all the things we mentioned in the episode below:

📗 Jody's books, sick and impact statement

📕 Sanna's book, My Grief, the Sun

📙 Where Things Touch by Bahar Orang

📘The Year of Blue Water by Yanyi

📓Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe

📖 “The Poetic Analytic: A Conversation with Zaina Alsous” in Adroit Journal

🤡 "No poets!" meme

🎙️ VS podcast

💬 Etymology of the word "begin"

📝 Solmaz Sharif's poem "Look"
 
📝 Fatimah Asghar's poem "Kal"

💬 "Poetry" etymology in English

💬 "Poetry" etymology in Urdu

💬 "Poetry" etymology in Cantonese

📒 The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron

📓 Dreams That Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination by Amira Mittermaier

📔The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study by Stefano Harvey and Fred Moten

📖 “The End of White Supremacy, An American Romance” by Saidiya Hartman in BOMB

🎙️ Fatimah Asghar's episode on the VS podcast

📝 Sanna Wani's poem "Tomorrow is a Place"

Transcript

Sanna: 0:02

Hello and welcome to Poet Talk, a podcast where poets talk. I'm your poet and host for today. Host poet, a poet with a microphone.

Jody: 0:14

Who gave a poet a microphone? Why would you give a poet a microphone?

Sanna: 0:19

Sanna Wani. I'm tuning in from so-called Canada, in the city of Tkaronto, also known as Toronto, meaning "where the trees are standing in the water" in Mohawk, who are one of the six nations who are part of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the people of the Longhouse who, with the Anishinaabe, formed the two-row and dish-with-one-spoon wampum belt covenants living treaties that were made between sovereign nations. Where I live and reside is also home to the Mississauga of the New Credit, the Chippewa, the Wendat and many other Indigenous and Métis peoples. These treaties are reciprocal agreements, living promises, which we must all remember and honor, live and abide by as treaty people on this land.

Sanna: 1:10

This week we're talking about beginnings and before we begin I want to introduce you to my lovely friend, future co-host and guest of honour of this episode, Jody Chan. Jody is a poet, drummer and organiser based in Toronto. They are the recent author of Impact Statement, out with Brick Books this year and previously published Sick with Black Lawrence Press. I am lucky enough to call them both friend and comrade and I can confidently say that they are one of the best people I know in the whole world. Just a deeply caring, deeply loving, deeply thoughtful and feeling person with a spicy chaos streak, a Capricorn moon and a very cute dog named Boba. Welcome, Jody.

Jody: 1:47

Should I introduce you? I didn't read your bio before this and now I feel like I should, but I am honored to be the guest and future co-host with poet Sanna Wani, famously author of My Grief, the Sun and many other poems, and leader from and of the heart. I think about this a lot. The word heart-forward always comes to mind when I think of you. Golden retriever boyfriend. Lover and a fighter. Spicy Aries baby. And speaking of beginnings, I remember like two years ago when I first went to your book launch in Toronto and heard you read a couple of poems about friendship and I thought I must be this person's friend. And here we are, two years later. I successfully schemed my way into this friendship and into this podcast.

Sanna: 2:49

So I feel like I've been scheming for months. I think we can get really get into the origin of all this, which is when I was at dinner at your home and your partner Myung-Sun said you two, you're funny and we were like, why, thank you, yes, I agree. But really that was it. I was like, okay, one person thinks we're funny. Let's make it happen.

Jody: 3:18

Let's make it happen. From one to the world. 

Sanna:
So why did you agree to do this podcast with me?

Jody: 3:33

great question. Um, yeah, I think two things are coming to mind for me. One is that um kind of in this, in this moment, like I think we've been friends for a year or so now, but for me it really feels like it was in  October or November of last year, during this moment of Israel's ongoing genocide in Palestine, that we started organizing this event together, Writers for Palestine, that had come through your relationships and your network, and came to this budding collective - Daybreak Poets Collective - that we're in. This anti-imperialist poets collective. So we've kind of just been like slowly building trust and relationship, I feel like with each other separately as friends, but then also within this collective, and that really, I don't know, I think cemented a level of trust or integrity. Integrity being our keyword of 2024.

Sanna: 4:35

Integrity is our word of the year, just like Kylie Jenner's realization.

Jody: 4:39

The year of integrity. Yeah, exactly. I feel like for me, my love language is collaboration or working with people on things, and so, um, yeah, just thinking about how relationships are so important to organizing and, um, yeah, I don't know, in the months since then, we've been been doing a bunch of organizing, also with other  writers and artists and and cultural workers, and sort of both feeling like, yeah, the collective power and potential of seeing ourselves like in solidarity with each other, like this, and demanding things of our organizations and institutions in a way that I think is not often part of the collective consciousness of writers and artists, but that really leans on relationships. It's like, you got to do things with people and so you have to have real relationships of care and trust, to a certain extent. And yeah, I was thinking also about Christina Sharpe's definition in Ordinary Notes, of care as shared risk.

Jody: 5:45

So, yeah, I think all of this kind of made me feel like I want to have more relationships with poets, like I want to actually be able to organize with poets and build power with poets. But to do that in a in a real kind of relational way, where we care about each other and get to know each other and have these spaces too that are not like we're sitting down in a meeting trying to do something in the next 90 minutes, but we have some space to actually talk about our practice too. Yeah, I'm like, in the tools that I'm going to use, in collective struggle or in this work, and so I'm always noodling on like well, what is it that poetry can do? What is it that poetry can't do?

Jody: 6:37

And it's like not a question that can be answered in isolation from other people. So, yeah, I just want to talk to people about the things I'm thinking about. Basically, yeah, selfishly.

Sanna: 6:47

Selfishly and selflessly, both, maybe both, because it it is uh, I don't know. A lot of thoughts are echoing in my brain in response, one of which is I've always thought that conversations feel like a well, like conversations are often a place, like a small place to dig really deep into, that do a lot of work, that like invisible work that I think is necessary and is like so important for all aspects of life, for like interpersonal  relationships, but also for larger organizing mandates or initiatives, like the kind of trust work, the everyday sort of connection work. And then I wanted to ask you, as you mentioned that poetry feels like an important part of the project, why? This was a question I had for later, but you know we've talked about this before. But what is important about the label of a poet, like what is important about the word, the word that signifies the being of a poet, that I think both of us have said, it's important to me when I introduce myself that I say that I'm a poet. It's a long question that I think I'll answer for the rest of my life. But, in this moment, when you introduce yourself to someone as a poet. Why do you do that?

Jody: 8:10

In this moment, I'm going to resort to the age-old technique of turning the question back on you. I will answer the question also, but now that you've brought it up, I'm curious why.

Sanna: 8:19

Why do I? 

Jody:
Yeah, when you say it's important to you to introduce yourself as a poet, yeah, and given the fact that we named this Poet Talk, Poets who Talk Talking. Poets with a microphone. Who gave a poet a microphone?

Sanna: 8:40

Because I think poetry has been laden with a meaning that, among the people that I respect and run with, I feel deeply attached to. So there is a world where maybe I would cringe at the idea of introducing myself as a poet, but because of the people and the poets that I've loved and learned to love, it's not a label. What is it? It's like a practice, it's like a way of life, almost like a religion. Like it means a lot to me, in the same way as those things I think mean a lot to people. Like it's the same as calling myself muslim. It's the same as calling myself kashmiri. It feels like a country that I come from. I stole that from Yanyi.

Sanna: 9:38

I have to confess, remember at the end of one it's like "womanhood is the country I come from?" Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that was completely, I just paraphrased that.

Sanna: 9:47

But it really does feel that way. It feels like an array of being. That was a gift that was gifted to me by the people I encountered, and it's not to say that it's not fallible and that it's not vulnerable or that it's somehow you know this like. I don't want to make it like sui generis, I don't want to make it like beyond. It's very of the earth, it's very like in our hands, but I'm attached to it, deeply attached to it, for the things it's brought into my life, even the people like you. 

Jody: 10:26

oh, what a nice answer. because I'm hearing also  poet not so much as a like, it's not a nationalist identity in that way, but, um, it's about situating yourself in part, amongst people that you respect and care about, admire, who also are poets or who call themselves poets or for whom poetry is a practice.

Sanna: 10:47

Yeah, I think it's the community that I think I've cultivated the most intentionally in my life. you're choosing to, yeah, you're choosing to be of, in and of this community by calling yourself a poet, yeah, which is why Daybreak also means so much because it feels like a culmination of that work, because I think the poets I align with are the poets  who hear the word poetry as synonymous with politics, who hear the word poetry and who think of a way of feeling or a way of being in the world that is pressed up against our convictions about how that is meant to be, like how that power is meant to be used or how that power manifests, like a deep, deep clarity maybe about the power that is. That is like trailing behind the word poetry. Solmaz Sharif, hello, she's already here.

Jody: 11:45

We are not personal friends, just to clarify. We just love her. 

Sanna: 11:53

and think of her voice like a ghost that follows us. At least I do um, but the the essay. Uh, what is it called? The essay on erasure? The beginning of it has something very beautiful that's said about poetry and power and where she's like in that scene where she's washing the dishes.

Jody: 12:08

Yes, Everything is, everything is about power.

Sanna: 12:11

Yeah, yeah.

Jody: 12:13

Like thinking about her work and how she often talks about form as an enactment or a manifestation of power, and how it acts on language, how it shapes or constrains and so, yeah, thinking about form and power as a practice together, yeah. I think when you said  the people that you  connect to as poets, or people who see poetry as synonymous with politics, it also makes me think poetry, for me, maybe, is where  language really touches the world in  the most direct way. Um and so, by touching the world, obviously touching power relations, touching these systems, touching the ways that we're in relationship and live alongside each other, so touching solidarity, like that. All of these things are bound up in the practice of poetry as a way of using language, or like making and wrestling with with language directly. Um, yeah, there's something very immediate and lived and felt about poetry as a way of being with language.

Sanna: 13:24

That's part of why that introduction feels important.

Jody: 13:29

Yeah, yeah, there's like an ethics that for me, feels bound up, which I think is hard to put language to, but I think that's part of what poetry is for me too. Yeah, it's an ethical commitment and it's actually the way that I think. 

Jody: 13:44

I read a lot of theory, or like could maybe regurgitate a lot of theory, but on the level of the body, like where it actually becomes something that I can live or something that I can put in practice, in spaces, with other people in organizing and movement spaces, or  in a day-to-day kind of space I have to feel it first. And poetry maybe is the space that  mediates that for me, that turns it from something that I can think into something that I have felt. 

Sanna: 14:32

I think it's very good at being between those spaces, because I was describing once the other day that I have come to understand poetry as like a category of feeling.
It's like somewhere between feeling, thinking. Understanding it, I think, makes that it is very capable of like playing in, just in the space of being, or like connecting us to a more embodied, a more mindful, a more present. It's presence. 

Jody: 14:57

wait, I have one more thought. I'm thinking about what you said of how, like, being a poet positions you in relation to all these other people. I think that's part of it too. Like that ecosystem, or collective, is so much a part of the practice of poetry for me, like no single poem is ever going to contain everything. I think it was an interview that Zaina Alsous did with the Adroit Journal at some point, where she talked about how each poem is an attempt, and even each book is an attempt, and it just kind of becomes part of this constellation of other people who are similarly making efforts towards the same thing.

Jody: 15:38

That I think is so beautiful about poetry, because the form kind of dictates that, like you know each poem can only hold so much, and I know you have opinions about this also.

Sanna:
I do? wait, just remind me, my goldfish era. 

Jody:
oh well, I think one time you were talking about like oh, I think a poem kind of comes out and to a certain extent it just is what it is and you can only edit it so far. But fiction is different.

Sanna: 15:59

yeah, the whole convo about shooting an arrow versus kneading the bread. This was like yeah, this came out of you. I think it comes down to poetry doing something with language that, like you said, presses up against the world. It feels to us maybe to those of us who are poets, it feels like the closest place to get, or touching, attempting to press your whole heart, body, mind.

Jody: 16:37

Our friend, Bahar Orang, friend of the podcast - Her brilliant book, where things touch: a meditation on beauty makes me think of that. Sanna's having a moment. 

Sanna:
I whispered, my bible. 

Jody:
I mean same, yeah, but yeah, one part where she writes about beauty, if you're lucky, means there's more of you, like more surface to press against the earth. So, yeah, something going on with poetry and beauty and language and feeling, that feels very distinct.

Sanna: 17:17

yeah have you ever seen that meme? that's like the one bedroom apartment, all utilities. It's like a an ad in a newspaper for an apartment. No, and it was going viral, I think on Twitter a couple of years ago, because in red circled, instead of writing no pets, he wrote no poets. No poets, no smoking available July 1st. I thought that that's also important in the archive of poetry.

Jody: 17:49

Yeah, that's good poet lore.

Sanna: 17:52

I think yeah, and it's important to be a little bit self-deprecating as a poet.

Jody: 17:57

Acknowledge, just like how truly embarrassing it is to be a poet.

Sanna: 18:04

How truly embarrassing it is, is it's so true. maybe we could go to the back, go to the beginning again, and I just wanted to add more to the conversation of why we were doing this or how we began, and think more about that together, because, in all honesty, also, I love your answer, but I think mine is very different in the sense that I think that I've been thinking about doing this for like a really long while and kind of a little bit disconnected from community more, I don't know, in in this realm of cyberspace.

Sanna: 18:49

The Vs podcast meant so, so much to me when I was growing up as a poet, like I feel like it really taught me what it means to be a poet, and I feel like since Brittany Rogers and Ajanae Dawkins made the move of solidarity to basically pause or leave Vs in November 2023, I feel like for a while there's just been like a gap in kind of that space.

Sanna: 19:16

And then I think I've just been in a place where I've been thinking a lot about myself as like not just a writer but like, now having gotten a certain amount of grip on my writing and feeling quite confident and secure in where my writing is and that train feels like it's going, like that railway feels like it's running, I'm turning my attention more towards community building aspects and how I want to start things that will inevitably probably end, but in the transitional cycles of efforts made towards magazines, podcasts, all the different things we make together, right, that we collaborate on, like you said, and this was something that I knew that I wanted to do.

Jody: 20:09

What you said just now about how you're, I don't know, established, or just like running with poetry or as a poet, and that the next question that you turn to is how do I build community, or what does this look like in relationship with other people? is

Jody: 20:23

I think why I admire and also respect your practice so much. because, yeah, I think that's really beautiful and not actually something we're trained to do as artists, like in a capitalist system that wants you to sort of just pursue an idea of, yeah, stay in line, pursue individual success or recognition, like without actually considering the people around you, behind you, beside you.

Sanna: 20:51

Um, so yeah, I love that thanks. I just want the baby poets to have a podcast so they can figure out themselves as poets too.

Jody: 20:59

The word that came to mind is poet doula, because I'm in training to be a death doula and doing end-of-life care and grief care work and we're always talking about like companioning. The idea of presence being such a big part of poetry, presence being such a big part of grief and death work. Um, but yeah, this idea of being a companion and just moving beside someone as they are having their own experience and journey of this. I just had this image of you bopping beside the baby poet as they're figuring out who they are in the world. 

What a perfect companion you would be. You are.

Sanna: 21:49

So maybe I want to transition us to thinking about beginnings in a different way now, and I want to start by sharing the etymology of the word begin. According to the online etymology dictionary, the noun beginning is from the late 12th century, a time when something begins. the initial stage or first part. The verbal noun of begin, meaning the act of starting something, is from the early 13th century and the old english word was actually fruma uh, which is where foremost comes from, which explains the former latter cultural catastrophe in english.

Sanna: 22:25

Because nobody, do you know? When someone says the former or the latter, I still don't know what is being said, because former means beginning, even though now former kind of means the latter, but the the verb came from old english to attempt, to undertake, and from West Germanic, which was found in compounds, obscure compounds, but loosely perhaps means to open or to open up. And I liked finding out all of that because there's a sense of evolution between the sense of opening to beginning.

Jody: 23:01

Do you want to say more about that? Like, what is moving from opening to beginning?

Sanna: 23:08

I think I like the idea of beginning being an opening. or like materially, in the word begin there is some kind of opening, almost like a hole to crawl through.

Jody: 23:21

It feels less linear, like it's not setting you in one specific direction, or that it's like chronologically from beginning to end, but just opening could be in any direction, any dimension. 

Sanna: 23:50

maybe we can move along to the first few curated lines of poems, and I know that you brought one, Jody. Do you want to share it?

Jody: 23:51

when you said first lines of poetry, the first line that came to mind was the first line from Solmaz Sharif's debut collection, Look. "it matters what you call a thing." and I think I remembered one interview that I watched that she did, where she talked about just how much intention she put into that line, thinking of it not just as the first line of this poem but, the first line of this poem, of this first book, this first book of many books that form a career or like a life's work, or whatever you want to call it.

Jody: 24:29

And I remember just like well, first of all being like, you're on another level as a human being that I will never reach.

Jody: 24:36

The thoughtfulness, yeah, wow and also the confidence, in a way, like this is the first book of many, and this is not the only thing I will have to say, and how do I want to open, like you're saying, the etymology of beginning and opening? Yeah, how do I open this like engagement with the world, and what is it that I would want to say to do that? It's kind of mind-blowing to me. and that the thing that she said was, "it matters what you call a thing." Such a declarative statement about her poetics also, um, about a poetics that engages with, that engages with power and that engages with politics and form.

Sanna: 25:24

And with mattering.

Jody: 25:25

Yeah, that kind of rejects the, you know, when people say, oh, poetry doesn't make anything happen. It kind of rejects that, in a way that there is something that poetry can act on and it is part of our responsibility, maybe, as poets, to reckon honestly with what that is at all times. Maybe it's changing in different moments and in different contexts, but, yeah, that it does matter. And so calling into the room all of these ethical commitments as poets. Power move, like another level.

Sanna: 25:59

Yeah, truly truly another level and reminding me also of what I love. You quoted this once and I think of it often um, uh, maybe another poem, maybe the same poem, I don't know, but that "like is the cruelest word" and that you can use it to compare two things that are deeply dissimilar. You can use it to defang something that is powerful, you can use it to, you know, bolster something that is not powerful or that is very weak. And, yeah, just that kind of through line in her work, right, which is a through line that I admire so deeply, of like, uh, almost taking it, taking the pieces apart. She's quite mechanical, I find, you know, there's almost like an engineering quality, kind of like tenderness, and also like a deep, deep commitment that is required in how you touch those pieces, and I feel like Sharif does that with words, like she treats them with the same kind of like preciousness of part.

Sanna: 27:12

The poetry beginning that I brought forward from my heart was actually Fatima Asghar's poem Kal, and the first line of it goes "Allah, you gave us language where yesterday and tomorrow are the same word: Kal." I just return to this poem, like so so often, and as I was thinking about, like what beginning I wanted to bring forward here. You know, yesterday and tomorrow, beginnings and endings tied up together again and again, as we'll continue to see. and kal as a kind of word reverberating between them, a word that's truly enamored with their mirroring and this sense of like a beginning, mirroring and ending, a beginning as the opening kind of a gap, right. Like a crevice.

Sanna: 28:03

Again, we're bringing our ghosts and our beloveds into the room, our beloved ghosts let's call them, and Fati is definitely one of them for me. this poem is like a friend that I've leaned on for sure, time and time again. 

Jody:
was this poem a beginning for you of anything? 

Sanna:
I think so. You know how we've been talking about how, like poetry is a sense of feeling. Or when you write, do you feel overcome by a feeling, or do you feel inspired, or do you just have something? What is the experience of beginning a poem for you?

Jody: 28:49

Sort of like a non-specific feeling. I think it's not something where I can put a label on it and say what I'm feeling right now is grief. Not that grief is a feeling too, but like an experience of many feelings. But yeah, that it's not like one feeling that I could name, but just like maybe like an oversaturation of feeling, in a way that coalesces in like one line or one image, and then I get hooked into it and I just kind of have to, yeah, open actually. Like open up that image or open up this word or this idea for construction, like sometimes that's what it comes to. It's not always that deep, but like what if I were to write a poem that uses mostly words that have these three shared sounds or something? So like an instruction for building, or to unpack. 

Sanna: 29:49

Yeah, I asked because I think there is a feeling I've come to recognize as poetry, like there's a feeling that I call poetry, or poetry that calls itself a feeling. I don't know, something like that. and I can remember very clearly that every time I read this poem I can find it. it's almost like a compass, like I can remember the feeling that I call poetry, particularly by the end of the poem and I think just so many of its themes like grief, mothering, time, or a kind of release of time, the time-space continuum, to find something else, to open our way into something else, that I think they do so beautifully with this particular work. So, yeah, I usually begin a poem by becoming aware or the feeling coming over me of poetry and I'm like, oh, it's a poem coming.

Sanna: 31:00

It's like catching something, it usually is, and sometimes it has early, early stages, like the feeling of the poem comes over me very slowly, but sometimes it's very intense and very coalesced and almost like tight in the feeling and usually when I read a poem I really love, it's a much faster and clearer process and, yeah, a compass. I think this poem is definitely a compass for that feeling.

Jody: 31:31

I love that.

Jody: 31:32

Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up and it's making me think back to the line that I brought in. I feel like I cut off the rest of that line, "it matters what you call a thing. exquisite, a lover called me. exquisite." and I think as a compass too for feeling and also like what a poem can hold, some of the themes, maybe in the same way that you're talking about how some of the themes in Fatimah Asghar's work also resonate with themes that you are often spending time with in your own work, I think same for me with that poem, of just like, the beloved, touch, intimacy, empire, power, language. that all of those can coexist in this kind of compressed space and time of a poem, that there is a very immediate catching of that feeling that happens. and it's like from the moment that first line begins I feel it. 

Sanna: 32:47

as I did my research I felt led inevitably to the question too of like, what is the beginning of poetry? since we're talking about beginnings, I did a bunch of different research but I think I was really taken with the idea that poetry, in many ways predates literacy and has a deep connection to oral history, like it's a device of memory. It was often an object of memory before it was an object of aesthetic. There was something I read about how there was only really a distinction made between poetry and poetics, poetics being the study of aesthetic in poetry around like I don't know, Sophocles or something. But who knows how we track history right, I'm sure there was somebody who was thinking about the beauty of their language long, long before that. But I really was taken by the idea of poetry in its oral sense being this like very ancient tool as well as art.

Sanna: 33:46

When we talk about the beginning of poetry, maybe what we really mean is the beginning of lyric poetry, which I believe both of us ostensibly write in and which is the most generalized category of poetry in the world now. The most popular and lyric poetry originates in the late 19th century, modern lyric poetry being a formal type of poetry which expresses personal emotions or feelings, quote-unquote. It owes its temperament in many ways to the greek philosopher aristotle, who developed the categories of lyrical, dramatic and epic poetry. It's colored in this way by many western modernist myths, traditions, fractures and fumblings. You know, poets love to quote the etymology of poetry itself, I think, which comes from, uh, the greek poesis, meaning to make, to produce, to compose, and tracing it further back to the proto-hellenic um po poyus, from proto-indo-european. I cannot say this, I'll put it in like the description. which really leads us to pile, stow and gather together.

Sanna: 34:57

So I found that really cool, just as like a pin to put in the ground of when we think about the beginning of poetry, pile, stow and gather. but this reminds me too that we are speaking to one another in english, often writing in english or thinking in english, but I don't ever want to forget to bring other languages in. Maybe that's also why I'm so fixated on Kal. I'm always longing for the poetry of Urdu, which I try to access, and I've been trying to more and more. But I just want to make sure we bring in other languages, and I think a cool way we could do that, to loosen English's power on us even just a touch is through etymology again. So I had the idea that we could bring in a word of poetry, a word meaning poetry, that is close to both of us in another language that we know and to follow their paths in time as well.

Sanna: 35:55

So my word is shairi in Urdu, which is the same as it is in Kashmiri in Urdu, but not in Hindi. Usually I can't tell the difference between Hindi and Urdu, but this was one time. I guess in their most formal forms they do tend to diverge, because the word in Hindi is kavita, which is very different. It has a very different, deep and dense history. But Shairi in Urdu is born from the classical Farsi sayr, meaning a poet or like someone who does poetry or sayri, meaning the art of poetry, which then comes from the Arabic shaira shair to know, to realize, to feel, to be aware Too many words for me to really say that.

Sanna: 36:41

There's, uh, an encompassing feeling, knowing, which involves the hard demand which we were kind of talking about earlier too. Um, and finally, interestingly, it all comes from the arabic trio, uh root. So there's many words in arabic that come from clusters of words that come from three letters, and in this case it's schien, ein and ra, which all often relate to words that have to do with knowledge, awareness, or hair. At several points in my research of this specific word, it seemed that words about poetry were just like one step away from words about hair bristles, furriness or pelt, cracks or strains, like hairline fractures in a vase or strands of hair. 

Jody: 37:45

I like this inventory of images that are kind of compiling now around piling, stowing, gathering, and then hair and hairline fracture. to me I'm like oh, that's an expression that I know in English, but that imagery also kind of persists in a different etymology.

Sanna: 37:54

I liked the simultaneous like in the Urdu slash Arabic, slash Persian word, the thickness, you know, to put it quite simply, to reduce it down to its parts, but just to have one thing that, when compiled, makes this one larger thing that looks as if it's a monolith but is really many.

Jody: 38:17

So I too, have a word, although my etymology is much more loosey-goosey. I did not do any research, so this is all hearsay.

Sanna: 38:35

I love hearsay and rumors.

Jody: 38:37

This is all gossip. this is all poetry gossip. So the word for poetry in Cantonese that I know is "see", and so I think I don't often like encounter it like separate from verb. So like what are the actions that you would take in relation to poetry or in relation to "see"? And one is "leem", so like kind of memorizing poetry or reciting poetry, and to me it's interesting that the verb and the noun go so closely together. But the character for poetry, what I know of it is that it has a couple of different parts and often, like characters will have different parts, like some that are phonetic and that tell you how to say that character, and some that are semantic and that kind of gives some clue as to, like, what the meaning of the word is.

Jody: 39:34

And so part of the, the semantic unit of this character, I guess, is the character in itself for speech, but with a little marking added to it that indicates sort of like the mouth, or the tongue and the mouth, and that kind of suggest this grasping or holding of speech, or like movement of speech through the mouth. and then there's a phonetic part of the character too. so that's what I know of that character. Poetry as language or speech kind of held in the mouth, which I appreciate for the embodied nature of that. Um, but I have a story to tell you about this character, which is that

Jody: 40:23

so when I was born and my parents were trying to give me my Cantonese name and they're mulling over possibilities, and I think hadn't decided on anything yet, and then my mom died a week after I was born and this, for whatever reason, sparked my dad to have a moment of thinking that he should name me "leem" or something like that. So the character for reciting or memorizing because it's also not just memorizing poetry, but that verb in another context could also be about grieving, holding, memorializing, all of these sorts of connotations.

Jody: 41:03

So to him he was kind of trying to capture it in my name, this quality of like grieving or mourning my mom, and thankfully someone talked him out of it because I think it was my mom's sister actually and she was like that's kind of like a lot for like a baby. they were just born, like you're kind of defining their destiny for the rest of their life and to be named under, I don't know, like the star of grief or whatever.

Sanna: 41:33

Um, but to be named under the star of grief. Yeah, sorry, I just wanted to repeat that. that we're just staring at each other.

Jody: 41:43

Exactly. Imagine giving that to a baby.

Jody: 41:48

And then just staring at the baby.

Jody: 41:52

But I like this story because, yeah, it just makes me feel like I had an affinity with poetry and with grief and it makes sense for me too, that so much of my poetry is kind of steeped in grief or exploring grief, and it actually made it into my first poem of my first book as well. 

Sanna: 42:15

so I was gonna ask does it feel like an origin, does it feel like a beginning that you return to? Yeah, it's very beautiful yeah, but thank god for your aunt. Thank god, that would have been so much. 

Sanna: 42:27

In Urdu, there's this saying that sometimes when babies get sick when they're really small, like, when people give babies names with a heavy consonant, so like let me give an example howa, like howa, would be considered a heavy name. and if the baby was given the name howa and then got sick, they would change the baby's name because they would be like, their name is too heavy on them. so it's like the sickness is their body, rejecting the heaviness of the heaviness of the name. particularly the ha or ein,  those consonants are considered heavy. 

Jody: 43:13

heavy in what sense?

Sanna: 43:14

yeah, it's hard to describe. like burdensome, or it's almost like a very open noun. it's like often nouns that make the shape of an o with your mouth.

Jody: 43:25

Openings, again. 

Sanna: 43:30

openings. yeah, I just remembered that though. So I feel like that would be a case of non-body. if you name a baby another special person's name, you could be like, that name was too heavy for them. The memory was too heavy.

Jody: 43:48

The memory was too heavy, the memory was too heavy. yeah I feel like a lot of etymology is like this, like when you really spend time with where it came from and how it traveled, like a lot of that history is so much like myth. 

Sanna: 44:04

Yeah my next point for us to talk about was about was just to marvel for a second at how often beginnings and endings appear together. What's up with that?

Jody: 44:21

Are you upset by it?

Sanna: 44:26

I'm just like, oh, that's pretty interesting. I don't know. I'm very into synchronicity because of julia cameron. I'm doing the artist's way. This will probably come up.

Sanna: 44:36

It comes up every single time I talk to Jody or if I look at anybody. I'm fucking talking about julia cameron again.

Sanna: 44:45

So embarrassing, but I really do feel like I've been believing more and more in the universe's patterns and I think one of the things I learned as I was researching was oh, beginnings and endings, they really just sit side by side wherever they go.

Jody: 45:03

Yeah, as someone who is obsessed with death and loves talking about death and is trying to make my life about death. Yeah, I'm with you. Beginnings and endings going together. but yeah, like death is the ultimate opening. No way, there's no way to know, and you just have to get there and find out.

Sanna: 45:30

Yeah, selfishly, tell me more about the idea of death being an opening, or your own affinity. You've mentioned, so far, death, grief, dying, companioning. and now it feels perfectly aligned with this idea of beginning, ending, touching.

Jody: 45:56

I guess one thing is that when I think about death, that it can be such a moment of coalescing, of people coming together, or when I think about this idea of what is a good death to me, or what is a death that I would want if I could, if I could choose, and obviously, um, most people have no, yeah, don't get to decide what are the circumstances under which they die.

Jody: 46:23

But to be surrounded by loved ones, or like in a position where I have had the space to reflect on what was important to me in life and like what I did and what my relationships were and what people meant to me and what I meant to them and all of that, that it's such a gathering. and maybe thinking back to like pile stow and gather as the beginning of poetry, um, yeah, that that feels like a lot of what, how I would want to live my end, or my death. but then also, yeah, this question of like what happens after you die, that there is no way to really answer, that we could have beliefs about it, but it is the true space of unknowing.

Sanna: 47:20

Yeah, the truest space of unknowing, in some sense, which also makes me think, oh, maybe that's why poetry loves it, or that's why poetry gathers near it like a moth, because of poetry's love of unknowing. poetry loves the void.

Sanna: 47:43

I think so true, so true, it does love the void, and this also reminded me of- I don't think we've ever discussed this, even as friends, but because my book is titled my grief, the sun, so kind of in a lovely mirrored sense, my affinity to grief comes from, I think, its ability to shed light on life, like when something passes away, something else almost opens to become brighter, or to outline, or to thread a memory there or to thread a poem there has often felt easier in many ways, just because it's like, it's so charged right? I think there are zones in life or in the world or in our experiences of the world that are just charged with things poetry likes. Or again, with that moth metaphor, that poetry hovers around.

Jody: 48:51

Poetry really does, I think, hover around death or around grief. also I like this idea of being able to thread a poem. Is it like through the space of unknowing, or maybe around?

Sanna: 49:09

Maybe to make an outline of it. In whatever way we can, in the dimensions we have access to, I like this image now of poetry as moth yeah, that makes sense to me.

Jody: 49:21

Yeah, I think for me too, with poetry and death, it also has a lot to do with madness and my own experience around that and with suicidality and stuff, like just spending so much of life kind of touching death, or the possibility of death. like really saying hello, how are you, like every single day. Yeah, and I often have thought about poetry as a way of like translating madness or like holding that in a way, in a way that it's like untranslatable into kind of quote-unquote, coherent or linear or whatever language. Yeah, that those things are touching also for me all the time. 

Sanna: 50:08

wow, I have two thoughts. One, I love that this is becoming like our ars poetica.

We're like so what do Jody and Sanna think poetry is? I think that's perfect. No, truly, I think that's perfect, and I'm also thinking that I want to share.

Sanna: 50:22

One time in university I did like a final paper as a series of poems, erasure poems that are actually the second section of the book.

Sanna: 50:31

That's eventually what they became, but they started out a little bit different. and in the comments that my professor gave me, professor mittermeyer wrote, she made something apparent that I've thought about a lot since, which is that I sometimes talk about poetry as something I'm not doing, like it's very sufi of me. also because she specialized in anthropology, often followed people who were Sufi in Egypt in acting in like non-agentival ways, like acting out of their body or out-of-body experiences that happened in those kind of religious spaces, and she felt, I think, an affinity between how I talked about poetry and those kinds of Sufi beliefs, like that God is something that acts through you, or like this idea that, you know, I didn't write the poem, I almost carved it out, it revealed itself to me.

Sanna: 51:28

I think I had written in my reflective paper or something like that and she was like, that's real Sufi of you. and I hold on to that deeply because I think it is real. I was just reminded of it when you were talking, because I think I've often felt like writing or poetry is something that I summon but that is not mine, like a real sense that there is a poetry out there and I catch it, but it's not material I've made.

Jody: 51:57

You're making this catching motion, but also earlier you were talking about feeling as something you catch too, like when you're reading a poem, or like that starting impulse for poetry sometimes is like catching a feeling. Maybe what it's bringing to mind for me is just not shying away from the spiritual elements of poetry too, and yeah, and that of also grief and death and like all these experiences that are in some way too big for the flesh vessel, my little meat suit here, to hold that.

Jody: 52:36

Me and my little meat suit. And that's maybe why I love julia cameron these days, because I just love that she's brought me back after a long period of, like, spiritual drought. She's brought me back to this idea that creativity is deeply spiritual, like there is something that wants to happen, like there is something that desires to be created or likes that you engage with it or that you create in it. And I found I'm enamored by that possibility. I've always been enamored by it, but I'm now enamored by her because I'm enamored by the reminder and the kind of expansiveness she gives, that she gets a little too gaudy often both G-O-D-Y, but also gaudy like G-A-U-D-Y. Tacky girl, but I love tackiness and I love Julia.

Jody: 53:32

I like how quickly it went from spirituality to tackiness.

Sanna: 53:43

I wanted to end this episode by talking about another beginning because, as we record, thousands of students across Turtle Island are gathering, boycotting and protesting against various academic institutions invested in Israel and in arms manufacturers who are contributing to the genocide ongoing in Palestine. These students are demanding that their institutions divest and setting an example for all of us on what it means to imagine a new world, to begin a new world. I bring this up because, also synchronously, in a stroke of serendipity, when we visited the encampment, we saw a sign that someone had hung up at the University of Toronto's encampment, named the People's Circle for Palestine, and it was a quote by Aimé Césaire which said, "the only thing in the world worth beginning, the end of the world, of course." And that was from the notebook of a return to the native land.

Jody: 54:43

I brought a quote to share in relation to that, because hearing that, the only thing worth beginning is the end of the world, it brought to mind this saying around abolition, that I think you hear a lot, or I hear a lot, that abolition is the end of the world.

Jody: 55:00

And yeah, so this quote from Harney and Moten, the Undercommons. They write, "what is, so to speak, the object of abolition? Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society." And so all this that we've been talking about, of beginnings and endings touching, the end of the world, meaning the founding of a new society, that makes me think too of these encampments as one tactic in a much wider struggle against settler colonialism and against imperialism worldwide, and a fight not only for divestment and for the dismantling of these institutions and these systems that are profiting and investing in the arms trade, but the end of a world in which settler colonialism could even be a structure that exists. So it is one tactic and part of a fight that is much bigger than that. And Aimé Césaire in discourse on colonialism wrote a spicy line about how liberals are the foot soldiers of colonialism. So true.

Jody: 56:19

So true bestie.

Jody: 56:22

But it made me think too about how these encampments expose that logic around liberalism and really force it to confront the logics of capitalism and of imperialism, and how we're not supposed to just exist in space and live together and take care of each other. And to bring in one last quote, I was remembering in "the end of White Supremacy," Saidiya Hartman said, "is abolition just a synonym for love?" And so, yeah, as you think about all of this, beginnings and endings of worlds, and how is that a synonym for love?

Jody: 57:05

And also, I want to reclaim love from liberalism. I feel like there's all this light and love discourse, that kind of made love seem like this kind of frivolous or placating, defanged love. and I think the liberals shouldn't get to have love. no, we should take it back, it's ours.

Sanna: 57:34

it reminds me too of one time, I think in the Vs episode where they interviewed Fati they said like, I like what they think about love, which feels very aligned with this, and it's like "I want everything I do to begin and end with love." But they don't mean like a love that is like la-di-da warm feeling inside my heart. It's like a love as an ethical commitment, like a practice, like a commitment to one another, a kind of care, a kind of depth of care even. I feel like you embody that a lot. I was discussing this with my cousin, because I was just discussing the possibility of a different world, and I was like well, if the world ends, maybe, I don't know, none none of us should lock our doors. And she was like what?

Sanna: 58:18

and I was like it could be.

Sanna: 58:20

But anyway, you got brought up because I was like, there are people around me who practice a level of care and who are building a level of trust with each other where we could live that way. yeah, but there has been another way and there can and will be actually. there can and will be.

Jody: 58:37

Yeah, there will be. so is poetry just how we practice loving the world? 

Sanna:
wow. is poetry just how we practice loving the world.

Sanna: 58:57

To end our episode, Jody, I'd like to invite you to share your favorite poem on beginnings. And maybe tell us why you brought this specific poem. 

Jody: 59:07

So the poem I brought is called "Tomorrow is a Place," by my favorite poet, Sanna Wani.

Sanna: 
oh my god. 

Jody:
I've just been waiting to inflict this on you actually. I'm so happy about this. I'm so sorry.

Sanna: 59:26

I literally just fell.

Jody: 59:27

Sanna is levitating off the chair right now. In like pain or in happiness. I can't, I can't tell.

Sanna: 59:33

Perhaps both. it's very kind of you. that was like, the true ghost of today, being confronted by your own poem.

Jody: 59:44

um, should I read it? Tomorrow is a place. for maya. We meet at a coffee shop. So much time has passed. And who is time? Who is waiting by the windowsill? We make plans to go to a museum, but we go to a bookshop instead. We're leaning in, learning how to talk to each other again.

Jody: 1:00:09

I say, I'm obsessed with my grief, and she says, I'm always in mourning. She laughs and it's an extension of her body. She laughs and it moves the whole room. I say my home is an extension of my body and she says most days are better with a long walk. The world moves without us, so we tend to a garden, a graveyard, a pot on the windowsill. Death is a comfort because it says, transform, but don't hurry. There is a tenderness to growing older and we are listening for it. Steadier ways to move through the world and we are learning them. A way to touch your own body, a touch that says dig deeper. There in the ground, there is our memory. I am near enough my roots. Time is my friend. Tomorrow is a place we are together.

Sanna: 1:01:05

That made me very emotional to hear you read it. Did you share about why? Sorry, I blacked out there.

Jody: 1:01:19

Because I love my friend.

Sanna: 1:01:23

Jody is also wearing a shirt at the moment that says I love my friends. It's true.

Jody: 1:01:29

I'm very consistent. But also I think, you know, at the end of our conversation I feel like it couldn't have been more perfect, all the things that we talked about and that this poem holds like, yeah, death and grief, of course, and it made me remember our first conversation that we ever had where we also talked about so much grief and estrangement and death of like parts of the self or past relationships. But this poem, for me, the feeling that I catch when I read it is so much opening and beginning and so, yeah, it feels very fitting that it reminds me of that beginning of our friendship and that there is also so much of that feeling in the relationship in this poem and how it moves. It moves so carefully and lovingly.

Sanna: 1:02:31

It's so nice that you brought it and that you're bringing it into conversation this way too, because I'm thinking about how Maya was an old friend who I hadn't seen for five years when I wrote it, and it's like an odd little instance of a beginning and ending right, because we were beginning like this new chapter of our friendship, but we were also ending or reflecting on the ending of an old chapter. So it exists, I think, in that space that is no space, that time that is no time, it's just your friend that you're happy to see again. 

Jody: 1:03:11

there's so much permission and love in the "tomorrow is the place we are together", like it's not saying how close are we together, in what way are we together? But just regardless of what it actually looks like, that the togetherness exists in, like the love and care. And that is something that we can count on.

Sanna: 1:03:47

Hey, thanks for listening to this pilot episode on beginnings. If you liked this episode, I encourage you to share it with poet and non-poet friends alike and to please leave a review, comment or rating on Apple Podcasts, spotify or wherever you're listening. Don't forget to click that follow button too, so you don't miss our next episode with the amazing Palestinian-American poet, Summer Farah. Poet Talk is produced and created by me, Sanna Wani. The show music includes songs from the album Elise's Awesome Dance Adventure by Komiku, including Elise's theme as the intro and a calm moment to remember before taking the dangerous road as the outro. The transitional music is an anarchist's utopia and that weird feeling when you understand that you are alone and the only hope. You can learn more about Komiku at loyaltyfreakmusic.com. Special thanks to Jody Chan for their contributions to this and future episodes. For more information and to support Poet Talk, you can visit our website, poettalk.buzzsprout.com or follow us on our Instagram at TalkPoet. Okay, that's all for now. Thanks again for listening. Bye. Thank you.