Artist Q&As
Roger Bonair-Agard: Memory and the origins of art
WPF: This is your third White Pine appearance, but this year you have a slightly different role, serving as “festival guide” and taking part in many events. How are you approaching that?
RBA: I’m excited about it because it’s the most ambitious role suggested for me at the festival yet. I think ultimately what both my poems and commentary are supposed to do is provide some of the narrative and philosophical sensibility that an interdisciplinary festival of this sort needs. While in past years I could approach each of my festival gigs as individual tasks, I feel the gigs I have at the festival this time are part of the larger voice of the festival, and as a result I need to pay more attention to the overall arc of everything.
Whenever someone asks me to conceptualize my role as an artist and larger things like that, I like to start from whatever my current artistic obsessions are. Right now, my artistic obsessions are memory, the role of memory in the creation of art — in my case, in the creation of immigrant art, in particular — and the role of patience in the creation of individual pieces of work, both in terms of the writing of a poem and the crafting of a performance.
If I start from there, what I’m finding is that the places from which performances are born and the places from which compositions are made and developed all come out of a certain kind of desperation to either remember or recapture something that someone understands or feels. If I approach it in that way — say when I’m taking one of Kami [Polzin]’s paintings or somebody’s music and attempting to write to that — it makes the job a lot easier, because I’m translating images instead of attempting to create a whole new image. When I write my own pieces, I’m trying to figure out the image in my own head, as it were. When I write a piece that comes out of somebody else’s work, they have already come up with that image, and my job becomes that of a narrator or translator, even though my piece is itself its own artistic work.
WPF: Will the poems you perform in response to other works be primarily yours, or will you be choosing others’ work to read?
RBA: I’ll mostly doing work of my own. In at least one instance I will be reading a piece of work that is someone else’s, however, because I think it is particularly pertinent to Angela Jia Kim. There’s a piece by Patrick Rosal I plan to read called “The Tradition of Pianos”. It’s actually a love poem to a woman whose last name is Piano, but in terms of what we’re dealing with and in terms of the player’s relationship to the instrument, I think it’s an apropos piece to put out there for the mood of what might be happening.
WPF: Artistically speaking, what have you been up to since your last festival appearance?
RBA: I’ve been working on the manuscript for my second book, which is called Gully and will be published by Cypher Books in 2010. The manuscript is just about finished now; I’m doing last minute edits and whatnot.
Gully refers to a fielding position in the game of cricket, and the book is a collection of poems drawn from my experience growing up as a fan of cricket at a time when the all-black West Indies cricket team dominated this white, colonial gentleman’s sport. The second half of the book is about how the immigrant translates when he goes someplace new, so that of part the book is about what “gully” means to me now that it’s 20 years later and I am also a black American. It has poems that are more overtly political in terms of who I am as a black man in America — there are tributes to Barack Obama, Lil’ Wayne, and Frieda Kahlo — and poems on a number of other subjects, as well. That book has been the main thrust of my work this past year.
Coming up, I’m moving to Chicago for a year starting in September to take up a writing residency with Vox Feris. They have awarded me a one-year residency to live in a house with three other poets and basically do what the hell I want.
WPF: It sounds like a much more literate version of “The Real World”.
RBA: (Laughs.) Yeah, something like that.
WPF: In one event you’ll be giving a lecture with painter Kami Polzin. What are you two planning on talking about?
RBA: I want to take off a little bit from what Kami is doing to talk a little bit about memory, like I was talking about earlier. Specifically, I would like to talk about how an artist uses memory to analyze experience. At that event I’m going to read some of my own work that I think not only draws from my memory, but relies on the idea of what memory means. I plan to use some works of mine and some works of others to talk about how the artist keeps himself both sane and relevant. I think that’s where I’ll be coming from, but haven’t quite finished deciding how that talk is going to go.
WPF: What do you hope audience members take away from your events this year?
RBA: For those people who are returning audience members, my ego hopes that they see growth in my work from what I’ve presented in years past. The only way I can answer that honestly is to say I want people to think I’m more fly than I was last year. Of course, I also hope people enjoy the work and are entertained and feel as though they’ve been made to think by it.
WPF: What are you most looking forward to about coming back this year?
RBA: I feel as though every time I come to White Pine I learn something about how art works, so I’m really excited for the work that I am doing with Kami Polzin and I’m also really excited about, in particular, the work that Angela Jia Kim is doing and how my interaction with her might add to my own sense of how art works in the world.