Being Restored to What We Know

Last Thursday I had the privilege of being a part of a critical panel and conversation exploring natural intelligence, imagination and its capture, earth-based language, what's making our cultures imbalanced, so-called ai and its ideological underpinnings, and how to resist and refuse ai especially when we are being aggressively seduced to adopt it. Etc.

Thank you to my co-panelists Pooja Prema (who framed and moderated the panel), Tiokasin Ghosthorse and Ukumbwa Sauti, and for our expansive conversation, which flowed across multiple intersections and frequencies. And, we only scratched the surface. Thanks also to Ecoversities for creating the vibrant Re-imagining Education Conference. The replay is below.

In solidarity with dreams of freedom and with those fighting for those dreams and for freedom... may we keep our remembering of connectedness alive.

The ground of poetic knowledge, an astonishing mobilization of all human and cosmic powers. —Aimé Césaire, “Poetry and Knowledge”

I am usually reticent about making my intertexts—which I sense create a shifting relational field within which the poems arrive at the brink of communication or drift away—too obvious. But it is sometimes helpful to provide points of entry so that readers/listeners are welcomed in to conspire. I was reminded of this while preparing for a poetry reading/talk a few weeks ago for Dr. Susan Rowland’s graduate class at the Pacifica Graduate Institute.

One of the intertexts in the poem “It is I who sing with a voice” (from my poetry collection Wild Fin) is Aimé Césaire’s theory that in writing a poem, the poet consents to accessing an immense intelligence residing in the Earth and the dimensions of the world.

A line from Césaire’s translated poem “At the Locks of the Void” gives my poem its title:

“It is I who sings with a voice still caught up in the babbling of elements. It is sweet to be a piece of wood a cork a drop of water in the torrential waters of the end and of the new beginning. It is sweet to doze off in the shattered heart of things.”

I view Césaire’s “giddy” ontological “dilation” as not only an aesthetic or literary gesture, but also/rather as a political and spiritual one. (Dr. Alex Gil corroborates this on this 2017 panel, though the white men swiftly shoot him down.) These modes of Négritude/Afro-surrealist consciousness emancipate us from euro-colonialism’s attenuation of the human towards its dehumanizing + denaturing agendas, and break down colonial barriers between human/cosmos, life/death, past/future, body/land.

Here is an excerpt from my poem:

For those attending the 2026 AWP Bookfair, Wild Fin will be available at Booth 317 where Weavers Press will be, and it is otherwise available via Asterism Books.

Oh and if you are a poetry reviewer and want to review the collection and uncover some of its possible joinings and un-joinings, please message me.