Rivendell
Uncensored Voice: A Talk with Peter J. Harris
Peter J. Harris, a resident of Los Angeles since 1991, is originally from Washington, D.C., but has also lived in the San Francisco area. Recently Associate Dean of Black Student Affairs of the Claremont Colleges, Harris produces and hosts his own radio show, Inspiration House: VoiceMusic for Whole Living in Los Angeles on KPFK FM, 90.7. He publishes his own literary magazine, Drumming Between Us: Black Love & Erotic Poetry and is also an active participant in the Anansi Writers Workshop at the World Stage, a non-profit literary and music center in the Leimert Park area of L.A. Harris' work has been published widely in magazines and anthologies. Harris has a book of poems, Hand Me My Griot Clothes: The Autobiography of Junior Baby, published by Black Classic Press and winner of the 1993 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Multicultural Literature.
Peter and I sat down to talk on the morning of May 2, 2000. We had agreed to meet at the Grove House, an Arts and Crafts style house situated on the Northeast corner of Pitzer College. By 9, it already promised to be a bright, hot day, and Harris arrived wearing light dress pants, sandals, a short sleeved dress-shirt and a vest. His curly hair and beard were peppered with gray. He had brought with him a small sheaf of his poems.
We sat in the back of the house, in its amply lit back classroom, and as we conversed, small planes flew overhead on their way out from a local airport. Near the end of our talk, a friendly cleaning lady leaned her head in to greet us.
SM: You have mentioned to me this idea of "uncensored voice." I thought that was a great term. I wondered if you could talk about that a little.
PH: I think I mean by "uncensored voice" giving myself permission to think, first off, anything. Everything from, literally, just outrageous, evil stuff, stuff I know I'd never do. It's dangerous, frankly, you know, 'cuz you realize that as a man, as a woman, as a human who cares about a lot of stuff that, you know, you're just as base as anybody else at any given beat of existence. So what that means for me at a standpoint of trying to write good poetry is that I don't want to be shackled by any kind of conventions, protocols--certainly no kind of camps. I don't want to be in anybody's camp or be anybody's apprentice. I'm not interested in what some teacher has to say, for example. Although I can learn from anybody, I have learned from anybody, and I do want to learn and continue to study. But I'm really interested in cultivating the emotional and artistic freedom to find the most adventurous voice that I can find. One that, also, is really, seriously trying to communicate. But I ain't just trying to communicate intellectually. I'm not trying to make somebody get the meaning when they hear it the first time. I am just as satisfied if you get it in your gut, and you really don't have any idea of what the history of the poem is attached to, for example. So what I really mean is that I'm trying to be free to think and say and then write anything. And I want to have faith, as a result, that my home-training and my standards, my literary standards, you know, my ethical framework, will keep me in check in a positive sense so what I come out with has real tension to it. And it's scary, but it's really natural at the same time.
SM: When I first heard it, I thought of "First thought, best thought," that Ginsberg idea, and I wondered about revision. Say you get the first draft down. Do you then think about this idea coming back to your work and revision?
PH: Absolutely!
SM: Is there a way to have uncensored voice in revision?
PH: Oh, I think so, sure. I've never written a good poem, I don't think, that hadn't been hacked over and reread or in which I have not really challenged myself. Often the first start is just the down beat! But I'll tell you, yeah, yeah, as I'm editing I'm still, I'm still free. In fact, I'm editing for adventure then. Because most of what comes out in the first couple of minutes for me, most of the impulse, it peters out really fast. It's a turn of phrase very often. It's a startling moment when I can see different things connecting. But the scary part begins with actually trying to draw that into a full-bodied diction...
SM: You mentioned "diction." You told that class of students that you tried to write in "high speech." You were also clear about saying, at the same time, that you wanted your own diction--as a, maybe as an African-American male, as a father, whatever it be for you that makes you you, that's a diction. So can you talk about what you mean by high speech? And also this idea of there being a tension with that and diction?
PH: Right. Well, first the term comes from a guy named Kamau Daa'ood. Kamau co-founded the World Stage in L.A. where I am a volunteer member. And it's a wonderful phrase for me because what I understand him to mean is that high speech is ceremonial, ritualistic. But for me it also means startling, elemental. You know it really is a language which is comfortable with contradictions. And I don't think any of this is new. I think most poets really are shooting for some sort of...moment, or moments strung together, where they have really locked something in that maybe heretofore has been unlockable, you know. But when he says High Speech, what I think is this: One, I'm talking about really accepting the challenge of writing a poem that does not settle at all for the easy turn of phrase; it doesn't settle at all for the simplistic metaphor. I am really death, for example, on "nectar" for sweet, as a metaphor for something sweet. I am really death on chocolate, unless it's really...you know, in the black community a lot of love and erotic poems rely on those terms, that "nectar" stuff and "chocolate" stuff, and I'm really hard on my younger colleagues--and then, as a result, on myself. I'll go back and look at some of my older pieces that I know have those kind of words.
So, one, High Speech is really trying to just understand the incantational power of words and putting them together. Now, at the same time--for me at least--what I have been struggling with is: How can I also incorporate the way I would speak if I were on the Metro in Washington, D.C. Or, if I was at Ballou High School, where I went as a teenager in D.C., I want to find that kind of folkloric resonance in my own voice, and I have grown up around that. It's got proverb in it, warning in it. It's got praise in it. And what I am listening for, even back to this whole thing of the uncensored voice, is how to have that sound ringing, ringing in among the words in the poem so that one second I might be saying something that I consider to be very elemental and spooky almost, and in the next line will be: "Can I take it to the bridge?" You know, all of a sudden it's James Brown and Bobby Byrd swapping "yeahs!" in the middle of the poem. And then it makes me think, just as a poet who is continuing to study about somebody like Larry Neal, who was very much undersung as a critic of, certainly Black poetry, but of American culture, as well. He died in 1981 of a heart attack at 41. And he has this wonderful, long epic poem called "Can I Tell You This Story, or Will You Send Me Through All Kinds of Changes." In the middle of this long poem about his growing up in Philadelphia and the danger of the era, and the loveliness of the era, and the love that was going on behind closed doors, and the dancing, and the slow drag, he says, "Can I tell this story?" You know, that's what I am shooting for: Accepting and insisting that, you know, what would be considered vernacular is really a real serious belief in self, that there is poetry in my father's proverbs; there's poetry in the drunks who I saw sitting with my dad in his car.
Now, that's a little romantic, so let me make sure I undercut that immediately. There ain't nothing particularly poetic about a drunk slurring his or her speech, but, you know, there is poetry in the kinds of straining, whether it's playing the dozens, or talking shit. Or even in my father's case: When I used to confront him about drinking liquor, Smirnoff vodka, you know, he'd call it his medicine. Well, I was just a kid, I didn't know what the hell that meant, but, as I look back, I mean, he was trying to shield me from the fact that he was...
SM: But it is medicine.
PH: Or something. I'm not sure if I am able to capture his pain, or his frustrations as a cat growing up in the '60s with five kids, you know, working as a custodian. And I don't want to recall this in some typical scenario, sociological scenario. It was a black community. He was struggling. You know, I believe that he drank probably for a lot of reasons, none of which were particularly healthy, for me at least, but, the idea of him saying to me as a kid, "You know, this is Daddy's medicine." At least there is some poetic impulse in there, so that's what I am trying to grapple with.
SM: It almost sounds like this is a place where the high speech and the diction become the same thing in a way.
PH: But that's the work of us, who consider ourselves creative writers or poets. That's the hard work. Because anybody can speak, anybody can sit down and write something. I encourage everybody to speak and write. I don't try to censor anybody. But I like to say "A lot of people can write poetry, but not everybody is a poet." And to me, and that's not just ego or me puffing up my feathers, or anything. In the end, it's the work that you put in to prime yourself to receive and edit, you know, this thing called a poem into the startling document of your emotions. That's what being a poet demands of you. And when you hit that, other people get it, even if they don't know exactly all the technical reasons why; but they feel something. I call it the "clench" thing. Their anus clenches or their heart speeds up. I mean it's a physical thing. All good cultural artifact does something like that; it's like alchemy. It changes something. And that's what I am going for at all times. I may not hit it all the time, but I am always...that's what makes my bones creak, my ligaments stretch.
Continued . . .
« Back to Excerpts