Years ago I had the potentially hair-brained idea to produce an event in Los Angeles called, The Drums Inside Your Chest (iykyk), a poetry and variety show that brought together some of the best contemporary poets in America for a powerful and provocative night of spoken word, music, and eclectic variety acts. The show turned into an annual series and ran for five years in L.A., and featured beloved writers like (who co-produced many of them with me,) , Buddy Wakefield, Wanda Coleman, Patricia Smith, Beau Sia, and Jack Hirschman. It also featured the renowned poet , who died—allegedly, as their partner Megan Falley so beautifully put it in an essay—one year ago this month of cancer at the age of 49.
The filmmaker Stephen Latty was a friend at the time (still is) and he knew right away we had something very special on our hands with this series, so he decided to film it. Drums was different than other poetry shows and became a kind of small cultural event on the West Coast aimed at broadening poetry audiences, making the art form feel far more accessible, wild, and thrilling rather than stodgy and Academic—what most people thought a traditional poetry reading was. Stephen and I turned some of the footage we shot over several years into a film but so many hours of extraordinary interviews, backstage moments, and breathtaking performances remained unseen.
A year ago this past week, the world fell to its knees with grief and shock at the news that Andrea Gibson had died, just weeks before their 50th birthday, after a hard-fought battle with cancer. The outpouring of love from long time fans and new ones who had just discovered Andrea’s substantial and stunning body of work engulfed the cultural landscape. Many publications and institutions reached out to me to write pieces honoring Andrea’s legacy. In my grief-filled haze, I did, for the New York Times and The Poetry Foundation. Outwardly, the world mourned this powerhouse of a figure who opened our hearts and minds to questions on humanity and mortality; inwardly, the poetry community closest to Andrea—our community—was leveled by losing one of our own. (Read this gorgeous, devastating piece by the writer , also a friend of Andrea’s.)
Mortality was suddenly not just some figurative evocation to wax poetic about. It was something here, amongst us—a loss that was all our losses, all at once.
Recently Stephen and I decided to go back and look at the old footage from The Drums inside Your Chest that never made it into the film, after the success of Come See me in the Good Light, the Academy Award nominated documentary about Andrea and Megan Falley’s life and love. Stephen and I felt compelled to keep Andrea’s legacy alive in any way we could—and that of all poets who are gone now, too. To remind us that poets are the heart strings on the world; the ones who keep the beauty, the melody, and the emotion moving through everything around us, sometimes reverberating and resounding in the most unexpected ways.
We watched hours of footage, including an interview with Jack Hirschman, another with Wanda Coleman, and many with Andrea, contemplating how we might string them all together for some new kind of documentary or film. More than once, I had to pause the video to cry. Stephen, on the other end of a Zoom call, understood exactly how I felt. All three of these poets—two of whom, Jack and Wanda, had fully shaped me as a young writer—were gone now. What were Stephen and I supposed to take from these ghosts on screen? From their words of wisdom, their views on the world, on being a writer? What would they make of the world we live in today, where fascism has a choke-hold on America, where AI threatens the written word at every turn?
^^Just kids: cracking jokes with during sound checks for The Drums Inside Your Chest. (No audio in this one.)
^^Derrick talking to Jack Hirschman who says: “Wounds. Wounds are what make my poems go.”
^^Wisdom from one of the greatest writers and performers, the one and only Wanda Coleman.
It’s going to be a long and surely emotional journey working on this new documentary project with Stephen—pulling together the stories of the past from the mouths of poets whose bodies are gone but whose bodies of work are perhaps more with us now then they ever were before. As Andrea once wrote in Poem from the Afterlife: “That portal of light was not a portal to elsewhere, but a portal to here. I am more here than I ever was before. I am more with you than I ever could have imagined.”
Your Creative Call to Action this week: Turn your own fury into radical tenderness in the form of a single sentence.
Andrea wrote: “Death is the opposite of leaving.” Think of all that this sentence conjures, makes you feel, makes you see differently now.
In honor of the legacy of Andrea Gibson and the one year anniversary of their death, Write the most tender sentence you can craft about something hard write about. Death. Injustice. heartbreak. Cruelty. Andrea’s whole body of work is the proof that softness and rage aren’t opposites—that in order to really reach people, we need to draw a line between both.
This is a very short creative call to action—just a sentence— but it can be as long or short as you want it to be, and you can and should take as long as you need to to craft it. Enjoy thinking about the intention of every word, all that a single sentence can hold.
Post yours in the comments below or on social media or in Notes and as always tag me.
Extra Credit: Forward this post to someone whose creative call to action you want to see manifested in the world, ask them to JOIN US!
Substack Lives coming up including Joan of Arcadia show creator Barbara Hall and more!
July 28th @ 2pm ET: Documentary filmmaking and the art of making a tv show succeed with executive producer of House M.D. and the director of Artist in Residence, Katie Jacobs.
September 3rd @ 2pm ET: A conversation with nonfiction writer and poet Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz on finding humor in the gruesome, writing across genres, and her new book The Ballad of the Fugitive William Parker: A True Tale of Love, Murder, Treason, and Ordinary Folks Who Saved America.
September 14th @ 2pm: Joan of Arcadia, Madame Secretary, and Judging Amy fans: Brace yourselves, we have the one and only show creator-extraordinaire Barbara Hall in the house for a conversation you won’t want to miss.
October 14th @ 2pm: A conversation with one of our most gifted fiction and short story writers and educators on the craft of dark humor in storytelling, managing chronic illness as a writer, and her new murder mystery, The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford, Nafissa Thompson-Spires. (Live link coming soon!)
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