“Spiritual Technology”: Blackshop talks poetic expression and sisterly affection with Yolanda Wisher
In my very last workshop in my last year at Temple, I met Yolanda Wisher. The late great Bill Van Wert had been bringing in former Temple students as guest to talk about how their work had grown and changed post graduate school, basically what can one do with a degree in creative writing. Sitting in that classroom and later walking across campus with her and Bill, I was struck by her confidence, and creativity. After six years of higher education, poetry had started to feel, well, academic. Yolanda’s work, however, seamlessly interweaves ideas of the classroom with the world outside: a richness of music and history historically found absent on most syllabi. The next semester, I invited her to speak on a panel on New Black Poetics, and even though when she walked in I absent-mindedly mistook her for a student, we’ve been friends ever since.
Oh, and what can one do with a degree in creative writing? Well, in addition to writing, teaching, performing, and singing, Yolanda founded the Germantown Poetry Festival in 2006. She co-authored Peace is a Haiku Song (Philadelphia Mural Arts) in 2013 and published her first book Monk Eats an Afro (Hanging Loose Press) in 2014. In 2016, Yolanda became the third Poet Laureate of Philadelphia. She’s currently the Curator of Spoken Word and producer of the Love Jawns: A Mixtape at Philadelphia Contemporary: podcast that is one-part music, one-part poetry, and all part much-need listening.
- Quincy Scott Jones
Blackshop: When I think of Yolanda Wisher I think of community, I think of Philly. You’re the founder of the Germantown Poetry Festival. You’re the former Poet Laureate of Philadelphia. The intro and outro of Love Jawns always reminds me of WDAS, DJ Tony Brown “and that chocolate sound that melts in your ear…” In other words, it reminds me of Philadelphia, specifically (though not exclusively) Black Philadelphia. At the same time, Love Jawns has featured writers like Tracie Morris from Brooklyn, Sanam Sheriff originally from India, Toluwanimi Obiwole from Nigeria, and Meta Sarmiento from Guam (the latter two based in Denver) while broadcasting to an audience on five continents. How important is it to spread Philadelphia love and sisterly affection globally and what’s your secret to making the world feel one neighborhood away?
Yolanda Wisher: I think it’s important to spread Philly love globally, but more importantly I think it’s important to spread love here first. To acknowledge and honor the makers of the culture of this place and how they’ve influenced and shaped our national culture. We don’t always get the love and credit we deserve. Philly love and sisterly affection starts close to home, on the block, on the stoop, it never forgets where it comes from, no matter where it roams. I’m not interested in Philly becoming any place other than what it is. It doesn’t have to become some cosmopolitan attraction to prove itself. I want the world to accept us as we are — one of those things is a weird outpost of cool in the deep south of Pennsylvania. And I’m not sure I know the secret of making the world feel a neighborhood away — I just know that the Philly I know is a tough and tender place I carry with me everywhere I go. It’s that sense of being a stranger who can find their way, who can piece together kinfolk out of a strange place. Sometimes I find pieces and echoes of Philly halfway across the world, in the voices and attitudes of poets from worlds away. Philly is a place, but it’s also a state of mind.
Blackshop: In the Sharma-Jones house, Love Jawns has been a source of peace in this pandemic, and yet Love Jawns is anything but easy listening. In June 2020, Love Jawns released a “Summer Jawn” a mix celebrating Juneteenth, the nationwide protest, and long struggle for equality in this country. In September of 2020, “Fall Mini-Mix” partnered with #VoteThatJawn “an initiative that aims to bring 18-year-olds and other first-time voters to the polls.” Much like your own work, the poems in Love Jawns speak to incarceration, gentrification, intersectionality, and the unnecessary loss of BIPOC life. What is your process for putting together a Love Jawns mixtape? How do you balance creating a vibe that both challenges perception while also soothing the soul?
Yolanda Wisher: The LJAM process is a collaborative one, like making a mixtape with a bunch of friends. It starts with an invitation to three poets to record three poems. From this garden of delights, the production team (me, Associate Producer Jaléssa Mungin and Audio Engineer Vince Anthony) pick three poems that seem to be in conversation with each other. We divine a theme from the poems and pass it and the poems onto a DJ/producer who stitches them together with musical interludes. We invite the DJ to be in a vibrational conversation with the poems, too, as they make their quilt of sound. In some ways, LJAM tries to recreate the space of a poetry reading where your antennae of consciousness are being raised and tuned with each new poet’s voice. The addition of music creates a soothing groove for the ear and the spirit to rest in while your chakras and cockles are getting aligned.
Blackshop: In “Dear John Letter to America” the poem keeps returning to variations of the phrase “I am the slaveship and you are a skyscraper.” The poem ends with
We’d meet every day at the intersection, the bridge, the phone booth, the hot dog stand, and you’ll tell me your baby dreams, the ones dense and wet as first forest. Show me your dirty drawls and your secret birthmark. Maybe then, America, I might give myself to you.
The poem speaks to the feeling of being BIPOC American, to being a BIPOC artist carrying the burden of putting such a feeling into words, to be by birth and craft what George Open called a “legislator of the unacknowledged world.” At the same time, one could argue mainstream, i.e. non-BIPOC citizens, are beginning to acknowledge the inequities we’ve seen for years: I write these questions three weeks after white nationalist stormed the Capitol in D.C. on live T.V. and one day after President Biden signed four executive actions to address racial inequity. Is this America showing it’s “dirty drawls” and “secret birthmark”? If so, what is the BIPOC artist’s role in this new America?
Yolanda Wisher: Yes, America showed its ass that day. Got caught slippin. My great aunts and uncles used to say: “All I gotta do is stay Black and die.” A deceptively simple phrase, but I think that’s my job as folks keep dying to be more white. What does it mean to stay Black? I think it means to remember the history that got us here and to bear witness to the resistance as it grows among us. We have to stretch and search for new ways to say what needs and can’t be said. To tell the stories that haven’t been told. We have to let our souls speak freely. We have to trouble the public and private edges of our practice to find a place of purpose. And we have to learn from the models and the failures of the artists who came before us.
Blackshop: I’m thinking of one of your mentors, Sonia Sanchez, who would tell a story that went something like this: when students would ask her how she survived growing up as a Black woman in urban America, Prof Sanchez would say “I’ll come back in five years and you can tell me.” In a 2016 interview with Billy Penn you said:
Yolanda Wisher: Poetry saved me. I grew up in an abusive household. There were drugs in our house. I didn’t feel safe all the time. I was a black girl in a predominately white school and environment, and I felt isolated, and it was my voice. And there were teachers who knew that, teachers who knew that that’s how I was going to get somewhere. And I’ve seen kids using poetry to get out of some situation similar to mine. I’ve seen that.
Can 2021 Yolanda speak to 2016 Yolanda? Has poetry continued to save you in these last five years? What can teachers offer to the young poets now so that we can foster the next Amanda Gorman, the next Sonia Sanchez, the next Yolanda Wisher?
Yolanda Wisher: What I know even more now than I did in 2016 is that poetry is still my oldest friend. She’s never left me. And she’s held all the raggedy and regal parts of me. I want us to start teaching poetry as more than a quiz, explication, exam, or a degree. Poetry is an art practice, a spiritual technology, a lifestyle, a lifelong companion, a way of walking through the world. It’s absolutely necessary to our evolution as human beings, and it doesn’t have to be an intellectual exercise to be of value.
5) In 25 words or less, how we gonna come up?
Yolanda Wisher: We gonna come up bit by bit, friend by friend, generation by generation, poem by poem.
About Blackshop
Anti-racism conversations still often occur in a black-white binary. From articles with a direct address, “White people, here’s how…” to decrying the harm of Karen and Kevin, this moment of increased awareness over racism is well…whitewashed. As a couple, we are always considering what Afro-Asian allyship means to us, the socio-political realities we negotiate both within and without their coupledom. “Blackshop” came to us while we were discussing our dreams of opening a store that centers the arts and culture — records, movies, performances — of people of color. This column is in the spirit of that imagined community. It is a space where we engage with a creative community of color, from poets and prose writers to comedians and graphic comic writers, rich discussions to collectively consider what allyship “for us, by us” really looks like.
About Us
Nina Sharma is a writer and performer from Edison, New Jersey. Her work has been featured in journals such as New Yorker, Electric Literature, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Anomaly, Longreads, and The Margins. Her most recent essay, “Shithole Country Clubs,” has been named an Editors’ Pick at Longreads. As of date, “Shithole Country Clubs” is the most read essay of the year on its site of publication, The Margins.
Nina is a proud recipient of the Diversity Scholarship at the Magnet Improvisation Theater where she has performed in “Hearts and Stars,” “Mixtape: The Diversity Improv Show,” “You Are Not Alone: An Uplifting Show about Depression” and “True Colors.” She is a co-founder and member of the all-South Asian American female improv group, Not Your Biwi. For more on the ties between her comedy and essay writing, check out “Getting in Touch with the Absurdity of Our Lives,” her Kenyon Review interview with Rosebud Ben-Oni.
Nina is formerly the Programs Director at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. She has an MFA from Columbia’s School of the Arts writing program. A 2017 and 2018 Asian Women Giving Circle grantee, she leads her AWGC-funded workshop, “No-Name Mind: Stories of Mental Health from Asian America” at AAWW and across New York City. She currently teaches at Barnard College and Catapult.
Quincy Scott Jones is the author of the The T-Bone Series (Whirlwind Press, 2009) and the upcoming How to Kill Yourself Instead of Your Children (C&R Press, 2021). His work has appeared in the African American Review, The North American Review, Love Jawns: A Mixtape, and The Feminist Wire as well as anthologies Resisting Arrest: Poems to Stretch the Sky, COVID Chronicles: A Comics Anthology, and Black Lives Have Always Mattered: A Collection of Essays, Poems, and Personal Narratives. His graphic narrative, Black Nerd, is in the works.
