MISEDUCATION MAY
my latest chapbook MISEDUCATION is coming out this month and so here are all events, books, essays, poems & music that is MISEDUCATION
Hullo friends!
It is Masturbation May y’all! (this is true, lol ) It’s also National AAPI Heritage Month! Also! It is Arthritis Awareness Month, Better Sleep Month, Mental Health Awareness Month, National Walking Month, and Women’s Health Care Month. I’m adding another: MISEDUCATION MAY!
OKAY SO BEFORE ANYTHING I NEED TO MARKET THE TWO LAUNCH EVENTS FOR MISEDUCATION, THUS ALL CAPITAL LETTERS HERE AND BOLDED SO THAT IF YOU SEE NOTHING ELSE YOU SEE THIS
MAY 13, SATURDAY AFTERNOON (1PM MST) IS THE VIRTUAL LAUNCH EVENT HOSTED BY NDR FEATURING DOROTHY CHAN! WE’RE BOTH GONNA READ POEMS AND TALK ABOUT MISEDUCATION! IT’S GONNA BE A BLAST PLEASE COME! HERE IS THE REGISTRATION LINK. HERE IS THE FLIER.
JUNE 17, SATURDAY EVENING (7PM MST) IS THE IN-PERSON LAUNCH EVENT HOSTED BY COUNTERPATH IN DENVER, CO FEATURING NATHAN ALEXANDER MOORE, FRANKLIN CRUZ, ARTSYQ, AND DJ ALISHA B. IT’S ALSO BASICALLY MY BIRTHDAY PARTY FOR MY 31ST BIRTHDAY. I’M MAKING A FLIER SOON BUT PLEASE SAVE THE DATE AND COME CELEBRATE WITH ME!
OKAY! WE’RE TAKING IT OFF CAPSLOCK NOW~~
INTRO
MISEDUCATION is coming out this month! (and if you pre-ordered, your copy should be arriving by the end of the month! Which is to say I’m pretty sure ME is a Taurus baby, but you’ll get to interact & play together finally in Gemini season). I’m super excited to share this work with you all– MISEDUCATION is the dissertation, the honorary degree, the archive, the record, the receipts of that particular [dis/mis]alignment of fields. In many ways I’ve felt a deep shame about my time in academia and my perceived lack– but this collection of poems reminds me to trace the roots of violence, but in that tracing, spacing, erasing, drawing– that something else is possible. Not can be possible, not will be possible (and though maybe and though hopefully)– is possible now.
And so to celebrate I was like yeah I’m gonna do a daily social media campaign where I share poems and essays and music related to MISEDUCATION. And then my guts rumbled and my anxiety instantly skyrocketed and then I remembered that I am not personally capable or really even desiring of launching a daily social media campaign. It’s too much! Like, I had the intention of sending this on May 1st. It is now May 12th. The energy lately has really felt like that recently too– lots of cancellations, lots of things coming to the surface. Shoutout to y’all who do that kind of work, but the way my brain is set up, it’s gonna be a no from me.
And then I was like, oh yeah I have a newsletter, what if I just put all of that stuff right here. So here we are!
So basically I wanna share poems of mine already published from the chapbook, poems from other projects/manuscripts that are in conversation with MISEDUCATION, poems that inspired me, essays that inspired me, and music that inspired me.
ME CONTEXT
Before I get into it, I think it is worth mentioning some facts about how MISEDUCATION came about. I am a grad skool dropout. After graduating undergrad at UChicago, I thought that academia was my [only] future and enrolled in a PhD program for Political Science at UCLA to study Political Theory and Race, Ethnicity, and Politics (REP [sometimes also called Racial and Ethnic Politics]). Given how involved I was in various activist and organizing communities in Chicago, I knew that the institution would never love me, but UCLA was my top choice because there were a lot of Black professors and there was the REP subfield (which most PS departments didn’t even include). However, I learned quickly that REP was a victorious battle in a very long and unfinished war. There were many red flags even before I enrolled, such as a massive data fraud scandal from one of the PS department’s so-called “rising stars” right after I was accepted for admission. And y’all, not only are there TOO MANY horror stories from my time there, but I have no desire to rehash most of those incidents– it is why I wrote MISEDUCATION, and also why I opted to keep MISEDUCATION small and compact (in fact, I only wanted it to be a micro-chapbook, but alas). I think the final bit of background I want to share is that the original title before changing it to MISEDUCATION was MY VILLAIN ACADEMIA, but it felt like, as a result of being an anime allusion, there would be false expectations and also an air that reduced the gravity and seriousness of this project and these poems. Oh and the other thing I wanted to mention is that many of these poems are older than poems that were in my previous chapbook BODYELECTRONIC. They were waiting for me to figure out a proper vessel, an appropriate narrative. The poem “Sullen” was my first published poem ever, and I remember very vividly when I wrote it and why I wrote it and who I wrote it about (fuck that professor, by the way, what a vile man. There are many professors in the book, but this particular guy is mentioned again in “Post-Academia Dispatch”. If you talk to me in person I’ll name names, lmao [lbs!]). You can still find it on the Spit Poet Zine issuu archives I think, and shout out to Spit Poet Zine and Caito Foster, thank you!
Okay those are the ~fun~ facts I wanted to share for now. So here are various sources that inspired ME as well as pieces that I feel are in similar conversations (like I literally read a poem this morning, published this morning, that I’m including).
BOOKS
(and if you’re interested, while buying books and supporting authors is amazing if you can, I highly recommend you borrow or request from the library. Libraries are so important, so let’s find ways to collaborate with them as often as possible!)
The Mis-education of the Negro By Carter G. Woodson
The original MISEDUCATION. Plus Woodson also went to UChicago and so it feels cool to be connected in that way as Black alum
Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire
https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/pedagogy-of-the-oppressed/
&
Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope by bell hooks
https://www.routledge.com/Teaching-Community-A-Pedagogy-of-Hope/hooks/p/book/9780415968188
One thing in my time in grad skool that astounded me was realizing that professors were not really taught how to teach, but rather, rely on a trial & error method of “pedagogy”. It was especially in my encounter with these books that I realized that we needed more attention paid to how we share knowledge and who performs/received this knowledge
the undercommons: fugitive planning & black study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney
https://www.akpress.org/the-undercommons.html
This book only exists because of the undercommons. And while this book was the catalyst, it was the people of the Undercommons in LA that allowed me to survive, to speak justice to power, to imagine differently. All my love to the folks I communed with there (including Fred Moten himself who came by to a session – such surreal times were my times in Los Angeles, CA)
Complaint! By Sara Ahmed
https://www.dukeupress.edu/complaint
I often cite Sara Ahmed as well as Christina Sharpe for being the writers who sparked my shift from theory into poetry. These are writers who deeply admire words in all of their definitions and valances. And so this work of Complaint! was so important because it helped me to understand that my individual experiences were very much tied to a much larger apparatus of power.
Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities by Craig Steven Wilder
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/ebony-and-ivy-9781608193837/
I was introduced to this book through a song (how often do you hear about books via song?!) – A song of the same title by Esperanza Spalding on her album Emily’s D+Evolution. (btw I really like the juxtaposition of miseducation and d+evolution)
I remember sharing this song with my advisor at the time, who simultaneously seemed fascinated and totally uninterested, kinda like a parent when their kid says hey look at this.
Anyway, this book is about the roots of slavery as literally foundational to the formation and function of the university, in particular, the so-called “Ivy League”
In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower : How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities by Davarian L. Baldwin
What’s funny is that I found out about this book because I google searched my name one day and this book popped up. Apparently I am quoted in this book– well, a quote of a quote. I was interviewed for an in-depth journalistic feature about the activism work I was involved with at the time via the Campaign for Equitable Policing where a small handful of UofC students shared information about the UofC police force (the largest private police force outside of the Vatican State) and ultimately pushed for its abolition
So I haven’t read the book but I would assume the argument discusses how universities essentially colonize neighborhoods historically populated by Black people and/or people of color / low-income residents. Specifically how universities employ private police forces toward the command, benefit, and profit of the university community and at everyone else’s expense. Much like the military in colonization processes, the police actively expand their jurisdiction, and then the university buys up property within that jurisdiction. The real fact of the matter is that while this is a specific situation, most universities have a police force that operates in the same basic fashion (after all, my poem “Bebop” is about being needlessly harassed by University of California police).
In The Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe & Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe
https://www.dukeupress.edu/in-the-wake
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374604486/ordinarynotes
In The Wake is probably the most important book I’ve ever read thus far, the book I return to the most, and the book that totally informs how I read everything from now on. If there is one book I point to when asked how I became a poet, it is In The Wake. This is a book that allowed me to see the worlds contained in a single word, and how to view those worlds as a universe (and let’s really think about that word here: uni-verse) rather than distinct and separate.
I specifically note In The Wake (as well as Ordinary Notes, which I have not bought and read yet but have listened to the Between the Covers interview with David Naimon, a must listen! which clearly means that ON is a must read!) because of Sharpe’s discussion of the work of annotation and redaction. She talks specifically of Black annotation and Black redaction (she gives the example of the poetry of Quenton Baker and Paul Hlava Ceballos as an example of this– and you can read an interview with the two of them on their work here [also shoutout to their respective new books, Ballast and banana [ ] ]). She notes (ah look, there’s that word again, note!) these forms of annotation and redaction as different forms of seeing “toward seeing and reading otherwise; toward reading and seeing something in excess of what is caught in the frame; toward seeing something beyond a visuality”, wherein visuality is “not simply looking. It is a regime of seeing and being” (I’m quoting from both In The Wake [from Chapter 4: The Weather] and Ordinary Notes [Note 79])
ESSAYS
“Black Study, Black Struggle” by Robin D. G. Kelley | Boston Review, March 1, 2016
https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/robin-kelley-black-struggle-campus-protest/
“The university is not an engine of social transformation. Activism is.” That’s the subheader for the article, but really, that’s the meat of the essay and the meat of ME. I wanted to cite this article because it hold so much of the discussion I wanted to also participate in, but also because even though I never really interacted with RDGK directly, he was/is always in the background. (Literally, I would be getting breakfast on campus before heading to my office or to class and there he was).
I also appreciate that he actually mentioned the work of the freedom school undercommons model I was involved with in LA, that he mentions the primary organizers by name. I remember seeing a short documentary too where I was interviewed, but I couldn’t find it for this.
“The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and Poetical: Erasure” by Solmaz Sharif | Evening Will Come: A Monthly Journal Of Poetics (Issue 28, April 2013—Erasure Issue)
https://thevolta.org/ewc28-ssharif-p1.html
I highly recommend…wait not, I insist that this essay be read before one engages with erasure poetry. This is an essay that, as is made clear in the title, discusses the implicit politics of poetry, the the explicit politics of erasure work. She notes “Erasure may well be the closest poetry in English has gotten to role of the state,” and also notes the etymology of the word “obliterate” in this function. To me, this essay insists that we take special care and attention to our words and lyricisms in our efforts toward liberation. It also suggests to me that in our own erasure work, we recognize it as a violent state tactic, and also as palimpsest, which is to say it is not the removal but rather the writing over or on top of. That our erasure work should actually function toward archive, toward citation, toward unveiling rather than veiling.
ME is a collection very much about erasure. I erase forms, I erase primary documents, I redact names– ERASURES! so it was important for me to read other poets who use erasure (M Nourbese Philip, Nicole Sealey, Anthony Cody, Tracy K. Smith, and many others) in a way that addressed & counters state erasures
POEMS
These are poems written by others that I think are in the same conversations MISEDUCATION is also trying to take part in. Definite give all of these poets and their poetry a read!
“Curriculum Vitae” by KB Brookins (from the forthcoming Freedom House )
“anti poetica” by Danez Smith
“The Spook Who Poemed by Her Altar and Not at the Feet of Academia” by Edythe Rodriguez
“The Spook Who Sat By The Once Bombed City: Psychological Explorations Of Ancestral Memory Through The Lens Of Racial Battle Trauma” by Julian Randall
“This Land is Where We Buried Everything That Came Before You: African American History and Concepts of Ownership in Early Elementary Education” by Julian Randall
“Fellowship Application” by Joseph Rios
“ALL THEY WANT IS MY MONEY MY PUSSY MY BLOOD” by Morgan Parker
“Genius Child” by Langston Hughes
“Theme for English B” by Langston Hughes
Okay I just gotta say this is one of my favorite poems ever and I have it memorized still to this day.
POEMS FROM OR ABOUT MISEDUCATION
There are a few poems from the collection that are already published as singles, so that’s cool. There are also poems in other collections that could have easily been included in ME so I’m sharing those too. I like to imagine all of my poems are also in the same vast universe even if the projects they end up in are completely different worlds. Plus this is just a good opportunity to share some poems I’ve had out for a while but are probably just chilling in their little slots in the digital archive, mostly unvisited and undisturbed (UNTIL NOW MUAHAHA!)
Okay so first, poems not included in ME but certainly in conversation
This poem is an ekphrastic piece about a selfie I took immediately after submitting my grad skool withdrawal papers
“Inbox”
Here is a link to me reading the poem on the podcast The Chapbook out of Bull City Press
Let’s just say that I’m aware and annoyed by the fact that this poem is actually not included in the BODYELECTRONIC audiobook on streaming platforms…
This poem is basically a poem about the process of writing ME, the transition from being a scholar and living the life of books to writing a book about that life
This poem was another poem inspired by “Cruel” by St. Vincent, which is a song that repeats and refrains throughout ME
This poem is about the UCLA police department and being stopped literally in front of my apartment for “bebopping across the street [of my apartment, a complex of graduate student housing]”
This poem was writing about/during the first lockdown, but it reminds me of the severe “writer’s block” I experienced during my time at school– it makes me consider the institutional forces that impeded the creation process
And poems from MISEDUCATION that have been published
“Sullen” in an issue of Spit Poet Zine
This is a poem about professors opting to, instead of using words or communication, use their eyes to communicate a power dynamic
“On Crypts and Currency” in an issue of Stellium
This is a poem that was written during/about the COVID lockdown but was edited to specifically critique the wealth of universities
“Academia Abecedarium” ; “Competitive Edges” ; “Casually Cruel” ; and “Grateful” all published together in an issue of New Delta Review
MUSIC
Music is always my first passion– music is the genesis of so much of this work, so much of my poetry. Know that with me and my art, there is always a song, too. So the final thing to include here is my MISEDUCATION music playlist, songs that inspired or are in the same conversations as ME. And like, it’s a really good playlist, this is one I often return to, seriously. As with most of my playlists, I tend to tweak them overtime, so I made this playlist years ago but have since added more recent songs.
Here is the spotify link:
END
Okay y’all, thank you friends! Thanks for reading/listening/ exchanging energy with me, as always. Also as always, feel free to reach out if any or all of these notes resonated with you in some fashion.
Merry MISEDUCATION May! May May May! (<that’s a complete sentence, lol)