- We We We over... We are... We're... We overcome... We are... We are in whole wide, whole wide.

We are deep in... We are deep, overcome There was all this debate about page versus stage and I was always thinking to myself, well, why can't... Why does it have to be one or the other?

What happens if we turn the page into a stage?

Someday, someday, some day... We, we are over... We are, we are... Is this what the wanted unwanted don't want.

We are over...

Some day... Oh, deep we are overcome... Aye!

we are over...

Someday, someday...

Ain't, what?

Someday, ain't... Any designed piece of text that you read, whether it looks conventional or not, is self-consciously sort of scoring something.

It's telling you how to read it.

All over...

Someday, someday, someday... Walloped up into dream upended and marched into houndstooth of knit elbows or garden of a million clenched buds, the doubled vox redouble into synced redoubt and sinks into that old silencing rite.

Shh, some... We are... Shh, what?

Shh.

I am, shh... (indistinct) I wanted to have the same sort of effect that I feel when I'm listening to a rap song that samples a vocal line underneath the rap that's being said, or like people talking me over each other at a barbershop.

Black lives matter.

So I wanted simultaneity.

And so that led me to doing this work that I've been calling performative typography.

Bow wow, shh, shh.

I can't.

Shh, shh.

Hashtag Black Lives Stutter.

Shh, shh, shh.

What we want is to not be your what's unwanted, your whats or your un... We want what's what to be unyours.

We want you to won't what your want to want.

Shh, shh, shh.

I can't.

Shh, shh.

Bow wow says the dog.

Shh, shh.

Day and night policeman work.

Shh, shh.

Fireman points the water.

Shh, shh.

Bow wow, says the...

Bow wow, says the...

Bow wow... Why won't you shh?

(calm music) It was the summer of 2021, I think, that I received my diagnosis, you know, I got my papers for ADHD.

At that point, I began to think about how so often in my work I was trying to break a sort of linearity.

I was trying to work in a way that I would describe as almost kind of fractal, where if you tell somebody, you can read this poem any way you want to, but you're still basically saying, start at the left top corner and end of the bottom right corner, you're actually still having a normative reading, right?

You've just sort of jazzed it up.

And I wanted to create something that felt really like what I was believing and wanting readers to be able to experience in my work.

That the stuff on the page looked and sounded closer to like how I think about it.

Like layers, there's just layers.

I mean, I was very interested in the way that text looks, the different sort of artifacts, different sort of rough edges there.

And that's when I began using collage techniques.

So writing these collage poems that allowed me to just literally take pieces of text, of images, things that I remembered, things from comic books, movie posters, and then overlap them in a way that reminds me of like a bathroom wall with graffiti on it, or a graffitied train or dense advertising spaces.

That kind of simultaneity also feels more like how I take in the world.

So making these poems this way is a way of saying this is still a poem.

It doesn't and may not look like or be structured like someone else's poem, but if certain kinds of poems are reflecting a mind at work, that's my mind at work, these poems are my mind at work.

(calm music) - [Announcer] This program was produced in collaboration with the Center for the Art of Medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School.

And funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

(calm music)