Music Excerpt: “NY” from the cd Soul Sand, composed and performed by Kosta T, used courtesy of Free Music Archive

Jo Reed: From the National Endowment for the Arts, this is Art Works, I’m Josephine Reed…It’s April –and we’re celebrating National Poetry Month—so today, we’re revisiting interviews with two poets. Later on in the show, we’ll hear from the former poet laureate of the United States, Tracy K. Smith, but first…. here’s an excerpt of my 2018 interview with the award-winning poet and NEA Literature Fellow Melissa Range.  Her collection Scriptorium was selected for the 2015 National Poetry Series by non-other than Tracy K. Smith.   Like Smith, Melissa examines the past in order to shed light on the present.  Scriptorium marries the two by focusing on language—who speaks with authority? Whose language is dismissed? What do we preserve and how? The collection’s title refers to a room in medieval monasteries where the monks copied and illustrated manuscripts, and many of the poems describe in sonnet form the processes involved in creating illuminations: mixing the ink, preparing the parchment and so on. But in Scriptorium, Melissa Range also examines her Appalachian roots— the word play, the language and slang she grew up hearing—often disparaged by outsiders and slowly falling out of use. Medieval illuminations and Appalachian slang sound like an unlikely pairing, but Melissa uses the image of the Scriptorium to bring them together.

Melissa Range: I started thinking more metaphorically about a scriptorium as a place where language is taken down as if with some kind of permanence. So if I think about, you know, illuminated manuscripts and how very often they were written in Latin, but that’s not the language of the people. It’s the language of the church, but there’s always some enterprising monk who will translate it into a language for the people. And that to me shows the power of the vernacular and that the vernacular is as good as the standardized language. That was really interesting to me because also while I was writing about medieval art, I was writing a lot of poems about southern slang. My grandmothers had recently passed away and I was really interested in kind of their languages and preserving it. So once I thought about this scriptorium as kind of this metaphorical place where the vernacular language could also kind of come up and assert itself against standardized language, then I thought that was kind of a metaphor that pulled all of my poems together.

Jo Reed: I’m interested in how you connect medieval illuminated manuscripts and the language you heard growing up in East Tennessee

Melissa Reed: Well, I do think it is kind of about the level of language, the power in language that other people might make fun of or discard. And so when I think about where I’m from I think about the way that I talk, the way my people talk, and how I have been made fun of that for a long time, whether it’s my accent or the kind of southern slang that I use, Appalachian slang, and I really wanted to explore the kind of fascination for me in some of   these great slang phrases. And also to kind of assert their power and that they’re not something to be mocked, but there’s a real longevity and there’s something really juicy in the language.

Jo Reed: It’s authentic.

Melissa Range: Yeah.

JO Reed: I'm from New York, another place that you really do get made fun of a lot for different reasons.

Melissa Range: <laughs>

Jo Reed: I mean it’s very, very different, but I think it’s similar in the sense that there are so many stereotypes.

Melissa Range: Right, right.

Jo Reed: And you know, the whole New York accent, which of course means you’re completely uneducated, which I have a feeling you probably share that part of the stereotype, too.

Melissa Range: Oh, yes definitely, definitely.

Jo Reed: And speaking about that, I would like you, if you don’t mind, to read one of your poems that deals with the southern vernacular and that’s Hit.

Melissa Range: Oh, yeah, I would love to. So Hit, this poem came about actually while I was in graduate school. I was studying Old English, and that’s another thing that’s happening in this book is there’s a lot of kind of working with Old English literature, Old English texts and poems. But I had heard both of my grandmothers say “hit” for “it” my whole life. So instead of saying, “It’s raining,” they would say, “Hit’s a-raining.” And I always thought that was perfectly normal except people would make fun of it. But then when I took Old English I realized it was Old English and the “H” was just still kind of there in my grandmother’s generation. I don't think it’s really there anymore. I think that is kind of dying out. My mother’s generation doesn’t use it, and my generation, we don’t really use it, either, but we know it when we hear it. So that’s kind of how this poem came about.

"Hit. Hit was give to me, the old people’s way of talking, and hit’s a hit sometimes. Sometimes hit is plum forgot and I drop the ‘H’ that starts hillbilly, hellfire, hateful, hope. Sometimes hit hits the back of my teeth and fight’s hit’s way out, for hit’s been around and hit’s tough. Hit’s Old English. Hit’s middle. Hit’s country. Hit will hit on you all day long if you let hit. When I hit the books they tried to hit hit out of me, but hit’s been hit below the belt and above, and hit still ain’t hit the sack. Sometimes you can hit hit like a nail on the head and sometimes hit hits back.”

Jo Reed: I love this poem.

Melissa Range: <laughs> Thank you.

Jo Reed: I love the rhythm of it, and I love the sensibility of it. I think it’s wonderful.

Melissa Range: Well, thank you so much. I had a lot of fun writing it, and the first time I ever read it I thought, "Can I actually read this?" It’s such a tongue twister.

Jo Reed: It is a tongue twister.

Melissa Range: And then you get used to it.

Jo Reed: There’s a lot of dialog between the past and the present that happens throughout this book.

Melissa Range: Yeah.

Jo Reed: Talk to me about what you were doing with that.

Melissa Range:  You know, I don't know if I even had that much of a plan, really. I just love history and I love to write about history. There’s historical stuff in my first book, and I’m writing kind of a historical manuscript now for my third collection that I’m working on, and so I think I’m always interested in how can I see parallels between my life and lives that have gone before me, or how can I see parallel situations in the country or in the world with what has gone before? And I feel like it’s important to look at that and to kind of see what can we learn from the people who have gone before us. And then as far as the southern poems, I do think it really is at the level of language. Like I was thinking so much about old languages, and, you know, like I said, there’s some poems about Old English poetry in here, so thinking about that language. Old English becomes this dead language that no one speaks but we can read. So we can read “Beowulf” in Old English but nobody goes around speaking in Old English anymore. And I was thinking about my language, my southern language, and the fact that a lot of these phrases that my grandmother said are kind of dying out. And I wanted to think about them as living language and in some ways, I wanted to preserve, you know, kind of doing that poet’s work of preserving language.

Jo Reed: More than preserving because you don’t want it to be set in amber—

Melissa Range: Right.

Jo Reed: but to keep it vital?

Melissa Range: Yeah, I agree, to keep it vital, for sure. And for me to remember that—you know, my grandmother would say something is as "flat as flitter." Well, if I write a poem about that then I’m always going to always remember that, and I’m going to remember that I can still use that phrase. I can still keep that phrase alive no matter where I end up living. Like I live in Wisconsin now. I don’t live in east Tennessee anymore, but whether I ever go back home to live or not, I can always kind of take that language with me. So, yeah, it is preserving but it’s also more than that, like you say. It’s keeping it vibrant.

Jo Reed: There’s a poem that you-- and please forgive me. I’m going to mangle the name of the poem. Is it Ofermod?

Melissa Range It’s “Ofermod.” That’s close.

Jo Reed: “Ofermod,” like the “F” is almost a “V?”

Melissa Range: It is a “V,” yeah. It’s Old English. It’s an Old English word, and I mean it looks like “Ofermod” but it’s “Ofermod.” That’s how—well, we think that’s how they said it. We don’t really know.

Jo Reed: Okay. Do you mind first reading and then talking about that poem?

Melissa Reed: Sure, yeah. So Ofermod, I think the poem will kind of explain what this word is, but I’ll give a little bit of background. There are a couple of characters in the poem. One is my sister—you’ll learn about her—and, then, there’s a warrior named Byrhtnoth—this is an Old English name and he was a character in this poem called “The Battle of Maldon,” and this was a real historical battle. And he thought that they could beat the Vikings, he and his Old English troops, and I think that might be all I need to say.

"“Now, tell me one difference,” my sister says, "between Old English and New English.” Well, Old English has a word for our kind of people: ofermod, literally “overmind,” or “overheart,” or “overspirit,” often translated “overproud.” When the warrior Byrhtnoth, overfool, invited the Vikings across the ford at Maldon to fight his smaller troop at closer range, his overpride proved deadlier than the gold-hilted and file-hard swords the poet gleefully describes — and aren’t we like that, high-strung and ofermod as our daddy and granddaddies and everybody else in our stiff-necked mountain town, always with something stupid to prove, doing 80 all the way to the head of the holler, weaving through the double lines; splinting a door-slammed finger with popsicle sticks and electrical tape; not filling out the forms for food stamps though we know we qualify. Sister, I’ve seen you cuss rivals, teachers, doctors, bill collectors, lawyers, cousins, strangers at the red light or the Walmart; you start it, you finish it, you everything-in-between-it, whether it’s with your fists, or a two-by-four, or a car door, and it doesn’t matter that your foe’s stronger, taller, better armed. I don’t tell a soul when I’m down to flour and tuna and a half-bag of beans, so you’ve not seen me do without just to do without, just for spite at them who told us, “It’s a sin to be beholden.” If you’re Byrhtnoth lying gutted on the ground, speechifying at the troops he’s doomed, then I’m the idiot campaigner fighting beside his hacked-up lord instead of turning tail, insisting, “Mind must be the harder, heart the keener, spirit the greater, as our strength lessens.” Now, don’t that sound familiar? We’ve bought it all our lives as it’s been sold by drunkards, bruisers, goaders, soldiers, braggers with a single code: you might be undermined, girl, but don’t you never be undermod.

Jo Reed:  Tell us your thoughts as you created this poem.

Melissa Range: Yeah. Well, this poem took a long time to write.  I was translating “The Battle of Maldon” with a friend of mine and I hit upon this word and I said, “ofermod?” And she said, “Yeah, it’s really rare. It’s only used a couple of times in the entire Old English poetic corpus.” And this idea that mode as a word means mind, heart, and spirit all wrapped up in one. So if you can imagine your mind and heart and spirit are all the same and then that somehow translates to over proud. Once I learned that word I thought a lot about me and my sister and where we grew up and kind of the ethos of us. When I showed her this poem she said, “Oh, that’s the poem about my anger management problem,” <laughs> and I said, "Yeah, it kind of is, but it’s also my poem about me being so prideful that it doesn’t matter if I have half a bag of beans I’m not gonna ask anybody for help." You know, I’m not gonna say everybody in Appalachia is taught the same thing because that’s not true. But at least in my family we were taught, you know, don’t ask for help. Don’t be beholden to anybody. You figure it out and you make your own way. You know, I have a lovely job now being a professor at a small college and I’m really grateful for this job. For many years I struggled financially and with jobs, and so I would be really kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel, but I just wouldn’t ask anybody for help. And that overpride, when I learned that word it was a real revelation to me, that I applied it to my sister but I also applied it to myself. That word taught me a lot about me and my family and it taught me a lot about where I’m from, and I mean it was amazing to me that that just happened just because I had to translate this Old English poem, that I found this word that felt so Appalachian to me, just so hearty and grim.

Jo Reed: That’s a great story. The wonder of language—that’s what I was thinking about as you were talking. It’s extraordinary--

Melissa Range: It really is.

Jo Reed: How it can take you through generations and centuries and be all but obsolete and still so pertinent.

Melissa Range: Yeah, yeah, I agree.

Jo Reed: It sounds as though you grew up in a family and in a place that deeply appreciated language. 

Melissa Range: Yeah! One wonderful thing that I got from my upbringing is just this real kind of delight in language. I don't know how true that is for Appalachian people or southern people in general. I think that at least where I’m from and in my family there is a real delight in rhyming and alliteration and word play, just people always kind of making up funny little sayings that would usually rhyme or alliterate, and I didn’t really think about that much until I was an adult and writing poetry and thinking, “Oh, well, it’s really kind of fun the way that my grandmothers and my parents and my sister, how they just use language as this real kind of playful thing." And I think that might have something to do with the fact that I love to rhyme and use wordplay, just kind of listening to that growing up.

Jo Reed: Now, when did you become interested in poetry and actually writing the words down and doing written poetry as opposed to staying in an oral tradition?

Melissa Range: I love the sounds of things, but I really kind of have to write it down to understand what I’m thinking. I’m kind of a process-y person like that. You know, I always wanted to be a writer but I didn’t know I wanted to be a poet until I was in college. I think it’s because my schools where I went, we didn’t really do a lot of poetry. We mostly read novels, and so I read novels and I thought, "Well, maybe I’ll be a fiction writer." And so it wasn’t until college and I took this fiction workshop and I kept getting comments back on my stories that were, “Well, your language is really beautiful but your characters are flat and your plot makes no sense.” And I thought, "Well, I don’t really care about the characters or the plot. I just care about the language." But I hadn’t really thought that that equaled poetry. And then my junior year of college I took a workshop with a lovely poet named Marilyn Kallet, and after about a week I was like, Oh, I don’t have to have characters and plot." I mean you can have characters and plot in a poem but I don’t have to. It really can be all about what I want to do with language. And so then from that moment I was like, "Okay, I’m going to do poetry." And so I just started reading and writing and haven’t really stopped since then.

Jo Reed: I’m going to ask you to read another poem—I’d like you to read “Regionalism.”

Melissa Range: Oh, sure. 

Jo Reed: Ties poverty to a certain extent together with region in that one fell swoop. <laughs>

Melissa Range: Yeah. This poem has a lot of little referential things going on, when you hear the line, “I don’t hate it but they all do,” is a repeating line in the poem. And I’m just kind of riffing off William Faulkner at the end of the novel “Absalom, Absalom!” And I'd also seen—you, know I love Natasha Trethewey, and I had seen her kind of riff off of this, too, in a poem in “Native Guard,” and so I was thinking about it. You know, I joke when I read this at readings. I’m like, “Okay, so people made fun of my accent my entire life and finally I got angry and wrote a villanelle about it to get my revenge.” <laughs> So that’s kind of what this poem comes out of, too.

"Regionalism. People mock the south wherever I pass through. It’s so racist, so backward, so NASCAR. I don’t hate it but they all do. As if they themselves marched out in blue they’re still us, them-ing it about the Civil War, mocking the south wherever it is. They’ve never passed through. It’s a formless, humid place with bad food except for barbecue. The grits, slick boiled peanuts, sweet tea thick as tar. I don’t hate it but they all do, though they love Otis Redding, Johnny Cash, The B-52’s. The rest of it can go ahead and char. People mock my southern mouth wherever I pass through, my every might, could have, and fixing to, my flattened vowels that make fire into far. I don’t hate how I talk, where I’m from, but they all do their best to make me. It’s their last yahoo in a yahooing world of smears, slur, and mar. People mock the south, its past. They’re never through. I’m damned if I don’t hate it and damned if I do.”

Jo Reed: 2015 was a big year for you: “Scriptorium” was chosen by Tracy K. Smith for the National Poetry Series.

Melissa Range:  I couldn’t believe it. You know, poets, we always enter contests trying to win book prizes because that’s very often how a book will get published, and you never expect to win one. You’re just kind of throwing it in with a lot of other really talented people and just kind of keeping your fingers crossed that your manuscript will cross the desk of the right person. And I couldn’t believe that Tracy K. Smith picked my book. I mean obviously she’s such an incredible poet. And, it’s still just kind of flabbergasting to me. I really had to sit down when the people called me from the National Poetry Series, and I’m sure that happens to everyone who wins any kind of book prize. You’re like, “Are you sure you’re calling the right person?”

Jo Reed:  That’s funny. And you also got a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2015.

Melissa Range:  Yeah, 2015 was my year of miracles, my boyfriend says, yeah, because I did. And I used that money to fund some research trips and some time off from my job and to work on my third collection, and I’m still working on it. I’m a very slow writer so I’ll be working on it for a while.

Jo Reed:  And that leads to my final question:  what you’re working on now.

Melissa Range: Yeah, I would love to talk about what I’m working on now because I’m so into it. And I just kind of innocently thought, “Well, I wonder if there’s any abolitionist poetry?" And then was there ever. There was so much abolitionist poetry, and I discovered all these wonderful poets like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, who’s a great poet. And then as I kind of started reading more about them, I just started reading more about abolitionists in general and I was kind of stunned to see just how many people were involved in this movement, most of whose names we’ve forgotten, and I just decided I wanted to write poetry about these people. They did a lot of really good stuff in this country and they worked together even when they didn’t always get along, and they created this positive change and we should remember them. So I’ve been doing tons of archival research and trying to kind of make poems based on their text and their words. So I’m not trying to invent voices for them because they have voices, but I’m trying to kind of bring them back to our consciousness, I guess.

Jo Reed:  And I look forward to reading it. Melissa, thank you.

Melissa Range: My pleasure. Thank you.

Jo Reed:  That was poet and 2015 NEA Literature Fellow Melissa Range.  We were talking about her collection of poetry Scriptorium. You can keep with her at MelissaRange.com.  This is Art Works, I’m Josephine Reed. Next up, we have an excerpt of my 2021 conversation with the former poet laureate of the United States, the brilliant Tracy K. Smith.

Tracy K. Smith is a writer of rare distinction…her work is lyrical, accessible and crucial—combining honesty, engagement and imagination as she explores issues of family, loss, race, history, desire, and the wonderous. Here is a small part of resume: she served as poet laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. She is the author of five prize-winning poetry collections, including Wade in the Water, Life on Mars which won the Pulitzer Prize, and most recently, Such Color. Her 2016 memoir Ordinary Light was a finalist for the National Book Award. In 2018, she curated an anthology called American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time—bringing together contemporary writers to create a literary sampling of 21st century America. There’s much much more, but I’m sure we’d all rather hear Tracy K. Smith read and talk about poetry…which was exactly where I began my conversation with her.

Jo Reed:  Tracy, in your collection Wade in the Water, you have a long poem titled “I will tell you the truth about this; I will tell you all about it.” that’s derived exclusively from Civil War letters and deposition statements. Tell me how you came both to these documents and to the decision to use only those voices in the poem.

Tracy K. Smith: Well, I was invited along with maybe a dozen or more other poets many years ago now to write poems that were marking the 150^th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War and I mentioned the argument about was it or was it not about slavery. That’s always bothered me enough that I’ve often kind of distanced myself from conversations about the Civil War and the opportunity to write a poem in or toward that subject matter seemed important to take up. And so I thought what I would do was-- would be to research what black people alive at that time had to say about their own sense of what was at stake and I found two really wonderful sources that had a number of primary sources. The books were “Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction Through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files” by Elizabeth Regosin and “Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African American Kinship in the Civil War Era” by-- edited by Ira Berlin and Leslie R. Rowland, and so those books I thought were just going teach me and somehow enable me to metabolize all of this information, all of these different perspectives and write a poem in my own voice but of course what happened was I sat down and I was just copying down quotes, citing letters and building for myself a sense of what seemed like a kind of gospel version of this history, all these many different voices telling their versions of a single story and in some ways it is the single story of this country. And with all of those notes and these amazing resources it seemed senseless to try and do some sort of jujitsu on that and make it a poem in my own voice so what I chose to do instead was to just kind of curate a listening session to think about what people chose to say, how and to whom and with what hope in mind. That seemed like an important thing to ask other readers to pay attention to.

Jo Reed: In your work, history is often a shadow that shapes the present. It’s not as though the figure shapes the shadow; it’s the shadow shapes the figure. I wonder if you’d mind reading your poem “Declaration” and then telling us a bit about it.

Tracy K. Smith: Okay, yeah. “Declaration”:

 He has

 

              sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people

 

He has plundered our—

 

                                           ravaged our—

 

                                                                         destroyed the lives of our—

 

taking away our­—

 

                                  abolishing our most valuable—

 

and altering fundamentally the Forms of our—

 

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for

Redress in the most humble terms:

 

                                                                Our repeated

Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.

 

We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration

and settlement here.

 

                                    —taken Captive

                                              

                                                                    on the high Seas

 

                                                                                                     to bear—

 

 So that poem is obviously drawn from the text of the Declaration of Independence which I was reading as a way of trying to listen to history a little bit differently than I habitually had or maybe had even been taught to and trying to see if there was another story or another message within a document like the Declaration of Independence that could be useful to my understanding or even our collective experience of the twenty-first century. And what I found when I looked at it closely was that this narrative of the nature of black existence in this country leapt off the page, and I wrote that poem now maybe three or more years ago but reading it in 2021 after the summer that we’ve endured with so much violence against blacks and so much violence heaped on top of violence because of the fact of outcry and protest that poem is very haunting to me.

Jo Reed: yes. It does so speak to this moment and the nation at this moment is also struggling with its historical narratives, which is something that had to happen because if you’re sanitizing the past it’s like putting a Band-Aid on a festering wound. I’d like you to speak to how poetry can be key to opening up historical narratives since poetry, your poetry, insists on holding up and acknowledging not just various views but often contradictory views. It speaks with a multiplicity of voices.

Tracy K. Smith: Well, we’re drawn to poetry I believe because the most emphatic moments and experiences in our lives are often characterized by some sort of ambivalence. I know that motherhood is characterized by a simultaneous joy and a feeling of loss or fear or constraint, I think love is characterized by warring feelings and implications, and so poems help us take that apart; poems help us find language that illuminates those dualities or multiplicities that live within things that we think are supposed to be consistent, coherent and unified. What I think poetry does is it begins to make us brave enough to do that even when we’re looking up away from the pages of books. As somebody who writes poems as a way of making sense or finding clarity, I also understand that much of what we see is what we choose to see and unless we put pressure upon ourselves we could stop there and we could lose sight of so many other and perhaps truer details and realities or details and presences, and history seems like one of those things that you can get into a particular mind-set about and that mind-set can prevent you from being open to other versions of fact. What I like about poetry is that it asks us to listen in many different directions and to put pressure on our own impulses, our own assertions. The formal rigor of poetry urges us to think more rigorously about language and that I think urges us to think more inventively, rigorously and honestly about meaning. Poetry can be possibility-creating if we allow it to be.

Jo Reed: Your title poem, “Wade in the Water,” is such a beauty and that is a poem that picks a journey beginning in one place but really ending for me in a place that made perfect sense but was unexpected when I began the poem.

Tracy K. Smith:  Shall I read the poem?

Jo Reed: Yes, please. I’d love to have you read it and then talk about it.

Tracy K. Smith: “Wade in the Water”

for the Geechee Gullah Ring Shouters

One of the women greeted me.

I love you, she said. She didn't

Know me, but I believed her,

And a terrible new ache

Rolled over in my chest,

Like in a room where the drapes

Have been swept back. I love you,

I love you, as she continued

Down the hall past other strangers,

Each feeling pierced suddenly

By pillars of heavy light.

I love you, throughout

The performance, in every

Handclap, every stomp.

I love you in the rusted iron

Chains someone was made

To drag until love let them be

Unclasped and left empty

In the center of the ring.

I love you in the water

Where they pretended to wade,

Singing that old blood-deep song

That dragged us to those banks

And cast us in. I love you,

The angles of it scraping at

Each throat, shouldering past

The swirling dust motes

In those beams of light

That whatever we now knew

We could let ourselves feel, knew

To climb. O Woods—O Dogs—                       

O Tree—O Gun—O Girl, run—

O Miraculous Many Gone—

O Lord—O Lord—O Lord—

Is this love the trouble you promised?

Well, that poem marries an experience that I had that it’s kind of transparent in the poem. I went to a ring shout, I walked into the space, I was greeted by one of the performers who said, “I love you” and gave me a hug, and I was also in the midst of doing all kinds of research in the American South about antebellum history, and I was deeply troubled by what I knew I would find but, finding physical archives of enslaved existence and seeing plantations celebrated as though they were these destinations when in fact they were labor camps, that gesture of love transformed all of those feelings. It didn’t erase the fact of the past but it gave me another tool with which to live with it and I just needed to write the poem to go back into that space, that experience and slow it down, render something of it that might also invite a reader to see the beautiful life-enlarging choice that love is. And it’s not about everything is sweet and easy; it’s about we are here in the muck and the only way that we can get through to the other side, which is I think the very same mentality or understanding that had helped people survive slavery, is love.

Jo Reed: How do poems tend to begin for you, with an idea, with an image, with a sound?

Tracy K. Smith: Often it’s with a question or a preoccupation, something that makes me feel at least partly worried, and sometimes it’s love, the delight. Like I said, love is this wonderful thing but it’s so astounding because it somehow has power that isn’t yours and it’s-- it can be a reason to stop and think wow, what’s going on here? So for me it’s just the impulse to stop and say, “What’s going on here?” or “I don’t like where this is going” that leads me to the page. I rely on images because I need to be able to see myself in a place and in the presence of something in order to build a poem, and once I can see something images begin to take root and then I can feel myself almost engaging with them, being in physical proximity with them, and other capacities become easier for me to muster, sound, momentum. Form is often a tool that helps me keep going forward in a poem by setting parameters, and somehow all of those things if I’m working correctly create a momentum of their own whereby I’m no longer preoccupied with what I’m doing and I’m just moving forward into understanding or revelation.

Jo Reed: You were poet laureate from 2017 through 2019 and you focused a lot of that work on rural America. What inspired that?

Tracy K. Smith: Well, I got that phone call from Dr. Hayden at a time when it felt like America had cracked in half and I felt like speaking about our political situation in the vocabulary of politics was in some ways exacerbating that sense of division and I would often find myself thinking oh, if only we could talk to each other through poetry we would actually maybe listen better; we would understand that there are nuances that the language of political debate sort of eschews. And well, the opportunity to do something, to do a national-scale project, made me really want to return to that idea that maybe poetry could do this bridge building; maybe poetry could make us behave as our better selves when we are together with others. And since most of the work I’ve done as a writer has been in cities, in book festivals or college towns I thought maybe rural America would be a new context for thinking about all of the things that poems urge us to think about, which is everything, and what I found on that-- while I was on the road during those two years was that my theory was correct. <laughs> Poetry made strangers who probably had wildly different values and experiences confidants. I’d read a poem or I’d ask somebody else to read a poem by another poet and say, “What do you notice? What does this poem make you remember, feel, think, wonder?” and then we would just go places together. We would go to real places and vulnerable places and places where that feeling that I am like you in more ways than I’m inclined to assume that feeling kind of became present and I’m really grateful that I got to do it when I did. During this past summer, when everybody was on quarantine I often thought oh, gosh, this would be a great time to get back out there with poetry and see what we could help each other to ask and say and see.

Jo Reed: I’m going to ask you to read one more poem if you don’t mind. It’s a short one called “An Old Story.”

Tracy K. Smith: Oh, sure.

Jo Reed: I think that’s a nice place to end.

Tracy K. Smith: Yeah. It’s the last poem in “Wade in the Water” and the title for the next book is taken from this poem. I wrote it as an attempt to write a new myth for us in this country, something that allows us to look forward with courage and maybe a new sense of what the goals are.

“An Old Story”

 

We were made to understand it would be

Terrible. Every small want, every niggling urge,

Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind. 

Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful 

Dream. The worst in us having taken over 

And broken the rest utterly down. 

                                                                 A long age 

Passed. When at last we knew how little 

Would survive us—how little we had mended 

Or built that was not now lost—something 

Large and old awoke. And then our singing 

Brought on a different manner of weather. 

Then animals long believed gone crept down 

From trees. We took new stock of one another. 

We wept to be reminded of such color. 

Jo Reed: That is a wonderful place to leave it. Tracy, thank you so much for giving me your time.

Tracy K. Smith: It’s been a real joy. Thank you.

Jo Reed:  That was the former poet laureate of the United States, Tracy K. Smith, her latest collection of poems is called ”Such Color.” Her other books include, Wade in the Water, Life on Mars, and her memoir Ordinary Light. You’ve been listening to Art Works, produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. Follow us on Apple podcasts or Google Play and leave us a rating, it helps people to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed, stay safe and thanks for listening.

We’re drawn to poetry I believe because the most emphatic moments and experiences in our lives are often characterized by some sort of ambivalence. Poems help us take that apart; poems help us find language that illuminates those dualities or multiplicities that live within things that we think are supposed to be consistent, coherent and unified. What I think poetry does is it begins to make us brave enough to do that even when we’re looking up away from the pages of books. What I like about poetry is that it asks us to listen in many different directions and to put pressure on our own impulses, our own assertions, even our own wishes or recollections or the things that we cook up out of just thin air. The formal rigor of poetry urges us to think more rigorously about language and that I think urges us to think more inventively, rigorously and honestly about meaning.

###

Music Credits: “Peculiar Grace” and “Bend Don’t Break” from the opera, Fire Shut Up in My Bones,  Kasi Lemmons- librettist, Terence Blanchard composer. Performed by Will Liverman and Angel Blue from the Metropolitan Opera production co-directed by James Robinson and Camille A. Brown.

“Oh- By The Way” from the album Oh-By the Way, composed by Terence Blanchard, performed by

Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers.

Main theme from BlacKkKlansman, composed by Terence Blanchard, featuring The E Collective.

“Breathless” from the cd Breathless, composed and performed by Terence Blanchard and the E Collective.

 

Jo Reed: From the National Endowment for the Arts, this is Art Works, I’m Josephine Reed

You’re listening to Will Liverman—singing the role of Charles in the opera Fire Shut Up in My Bones.   It’s based on the memoir by NY Times writer Charles M. Blow; the lyricist is Kasi Lemmons and the composer is the six-time Grammy Award winner jazz trumpeter and music artist Terence Blanchard. The opera, which just aired on the PBS series Great Performances, premiered at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis in 2019 and opened the season at the Metropolitan Opera in 2021 becoming the first opera by a Black composer performed at the Met.  

The National Endowment for the Arts supported the commission, development, and premiere of Fire as well as its opening at the Met.

Fire Shut Up in My Bones tells the story of Charles, a young African-American man who grew up in a hard-working but poor family in Louisiana. When he comes of age, he confronts the sexual abuse he suffered as a child at the hands of his cousin and grapples with the decision to take revenge or not.

It is a moving story of struggling to belong, to overcome trauma and to make a new life. While the score has its roots in Italian opera, it very much embraces elements of gospel and blues choruses, and, of course, jazz.  Jazz is very much at the root of Terence Blanchard’s musical life. He began his career in the Lionel Hampton Orchestra before moving to Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. He then formed a quintet with 2022 NEA Jazz Master Donald Harrison, went on to a solo career, and now leads the E Collective.   He’s been deeply involved with jazz education and currently occupies the Endowed Chair in Jazz Studies at the UCLA. 

Terence Blanchard has also composed more than forty film scores. He and Spike Lee are long-time collaborators working together on some 17 films , and received academy award nominations for two of them BlacKkKlansman  and  Da 5 Bloods. Fire Shut Up in My Bones isn’t Blanchard’s first opera—that would be champion which also had its premiere at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis in 2013.  So how does opera fit into Terence Blanchard’s rich musical life? It seems so unlikely until you know Terence’s father was passionate about opera and sang it non-professionally. It was the music that filled his childhood so writing opera was a bit like coming home.

Terence Blanchard: That's the weird thing about it, Josephine. It's bizarre because it made me realize how much of an effect my father's passion for opera has left an indelible mark on my musical personality because once I started down this road of writing opera, a lot of those memories started to come back, a lot of those emotions of hearing that music started to come back. I was just in a rehearsal a couple of days ago with the guys at The Lyric, and I was telling a few people-- I said, “Man, for some reason, whenever I hear these baritones, it brings me back to the days of when my father would be in rehearsal every Wednesday night with these guys singing just because they loved operatic music so much.”

Jo Reed: How did you come to write opera?

Terence Blanchard: <laughs> Yeah, that's a question I'm still trying to get around myself. Jim Robinson, Timothy O’Leary, and the staff at Opera Theatre Saint Louis wanted to increase their audience by doing a jazz opera. They reached out to a guy named Gene Dobbs Bradford, who at the time was running Jazz St. Louis. Gene and I had been friends for a number of years, and he remembered a conversation that I had with him where I told him about my father loving opera. So he brought my name up to Opera Theatre Saint Louis, and Jim Robinson came to meet me in New York where I was doing a gig and sat down with me and asked me to write an opera, and I thought he was delusional and off his rocker and said, “This crazy man has just come to ask me to write an opera. I need to get out of this really quick.” But I quickly realized that he was serious, and I've always been up for a challenge. I mean, obviously, I could have easily said, “That's not my thing.” But I love challenges, I love learning, growing, so I thought I would take a stab at it, and my thinking was that if it didn't work, I had a career that was going fine, and I would be okay.

Jo Reed: What appealed to you about Charles Blow’s book “Fire Shut Up in My Bones”?

Terence Blanchard: Well, I think-- there are a number of things about the book that really appealed to me. First of all, just the overall power of the story given who he is and the level of successes he’s achieved. A lot of times when we see people who have reached a certain level of achievement, we don't see the grind. We just see the polished entity at the end, and reading the book, there was so many things I related to. I related to him being from the south, obviously, being from Louisiana, being a little different in his neighborhood. I went through that too. I wasn't molested by a family member or anyone, so that part of it was really powerful and hurtful for me to read. But to think about him coming through all of that and being the brilliant writer that he is a testament to his resilience, and I thought by doing his story, we could really help a lot of people and draw some attention to some of these issues.

Jo Reed: Collaboration is key to all your work as a musician and composer, from your band The E-Collective to composing for film to composing an opera, and I really would like to talk about these different collaborations and what each require from you, and let's begin with “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.” How did you work with Kasi Lemmons, the librettist, whom you worked with previously? How did you even begin?

Terence Blanchard: It’s so interesting when you ask me about Kasi because I remember when we did our first film together, it was “Eve’s Bayou”, and in having a conversation with her, I remember her telling me how she really loved opera. So in a weird way, I became her Gene Dobbs Bradford because I remembered that conversation about her wanting to write a libretto, and I've always loved her writing because we've done a number of films together. So I called her and asked if she was interested, and of course she was. Opera Theatre Saint Louis flew Charles, Kasi, and myself to St. Louis. Charles at that moment was extremely generous not only with his time but with just information. He was giving us a lot of great insight into his life and what was going on and stuff that wasn't in the book, and Kasi is just like a person who absorbs everything, and she doesn't miss anything. So in one of their conversations, Charles said, “I always was a boy of peculiar grace,” and-- which is not in the book, and she remembered that, and she wrote this aria based on that “I once was a boy of peculiar grace,” and that has become one of the main aria in the opera. You hear it about three or four times. So once she started to write the libretto, then I just took it from there and just started whittling away at reading the libretto out loud and trying to get a rhythmic sense for what was happening in the libretto and then just moved from there.

Jo Reed: What about writing for voices, which has to be different than writing for instruments?

Terence Blanchard: It's extremely different writing for voices than writing for instruments because there's so many variables you can't really put your finger on unless you're writing for specific voices. So if I'm writing for cello, I'm writing for cello. If I'm writing for brass, I'm writing for brass. There's a certain range of notes that you know all of those instruments will be able to produce. Writing for voice is different because even if I write for a baritone, each baritone is very different. Some baritones have-- can produce more sound in upper register. Some can produce more sound in the lower register, and that becomes the thing where the workshop process is paramount to solving some of those issues.

Jo Reed: And do you give room to the singers similar to the way you do with your band, for example? Is there room to improvise? Is there room in the music that you make?

Terence Blanchard: Of course. One of the things that's been interesting about this process is that even from my first opera, “Champion,” having conversations with the late Arthur Woodley, Karen Slack, and some other great opera singers, one of the things we-- that they really made me aware of is how many African American singers grew up in the church or probably sang R&B or jazz. So my thinking was to allow them to bring all of that part of their musical background to these pieces because these are current pieces. Puccini wrote at a time where there wasn't blues or R&B, so I get it. But now I would really love for them to just encompass everything that they can bring to bear on telling these stories. So there's room for them to improvise in certain spots, and they can always take liberties with melodic content. After all, I am a jazz musician, and that's what we do all the time. So in giving them that freedom, it was kind of comical to watch at first because they weren't used to it. <laughs> So it was almost like they would take baby steps just to try things, but then as they became a little more comfortable with it, then it became really beautiful to see everything that they would add.

Jo Reed: You know, it’s interesting before “Fire” opened, I had an interview with the soprano Angel Blue who, as you know, sings Destiny in the opera. And while she’s certainly trained in opera, she also has a background in gospel.

Terence Blanchard: Oh, okay.

Terence Blanchard: She was amazing.  As a matter fact, when you talk about what people bring to the music, I never forget, <laughs> she’s so sweet.  She walked over to me.  She says, “Terence, I heard what you said about bringing your background to it.  Do you mind if I--” I said, “Please.  By all means,” and in rehearsal when she sang “Peculiar Grace” for the first time and she started to give the inflections from her church background. There wasn’t a dry eye in the room

Jo Reed:  Often with jazz, with opera, that they’re traditions, and there's honoring the tradition, but that doesn't mean it's calcified. You can honor the tradition and grow it.

Terence Blanchard: Yeah. And that's the thing that I hope that we are doing with this because I've always viewed opera to be the original form of theater that was created for the masses, and in doing so, we can't ignore the culture from the masses, especially if we're doing these current stories. So I think it's paramount for us to bring all that we can to bear just like Puccini did, just like Verdi did, all of them, just like how they had the capacity to look at their communities and create these very brilliant, moving musical stories by encompassing their culture and the folklore and bringing all of the folklore into play when creating these stories.

Jo Reed: Exactly. Yeah. Terence, there's so many moving parts to opera. Camille Brown choreographed the work and co-directed with James Robinson. So you have dancers, you have chorus, you have singers, you have a full orchestra. Was that daunting?

Terence Blanchard: Only when you get to rehearsal, <laughter> you know, because when you having the meetings, you’re like, “Oh, that'll be great. Oh, that'll be awesome.” And then you get to rehearsal, and it's over-- it's almost 100 people there. You go, “Oh, okay. This is kind of huge,” so-- but the thing about it is that, man, I've been so, so blessed working with true professionals and brilliant minds. So in the same way that I give the singers room, I have to give Camille and Jim and all of those people room to do their thing, and it's been beautiful because we're all on the same page. Artistically, we're of like minds, which I think is a true blessing and a miracle because that doesn't necessarily have to be the case. But in saying that, it's allowed us to create something that we think is a little unique, a little different but still very powerful and still very much a part of the genre.

Jo Reed: Well, when “Fire” opened the season at the Met, it was after a long closure due to COVID, and then, as we know, it was the first opera by a Black composer to be staged at the Met, which I think surprised many people and...

Terence Blanchard: Me being the first.

Jo Reed: Yeah.

Terence Blanchard: Yeah.

Jo Reed: And for you, that had to have been, obviously, gratifying on one hand but also, I don't know, bittersweet, shocking.

Terence Blanchard: Yeah. It was filled with mixed emotions because when the journalist asked me the question at first, I thought he had it wrong. I'm like, “No, can't be.” He goes, “I believe so.” He said, “I'll double check, but I believe so.” And once he said it, I started having all of these weird thoughts about that can't be, not in a city like New York where all of the things that we experienced in the art world for generations have emanated from that town, and to the think that the Met would be a place where that hasn't happened yet was just something I couldn't imagine. So I-- and here's the wild part about it. The summer right before the premiere of my piece at the Met, I was in St. Louis, and they were doing a piece by William Grant Still, and I remember listening to it going, “Man, that's kind of cool. Really unique. It’s beautiful. That’s something--” and I kept thinking for when this piece was written, that had to be cutting edge, and then to think that he had been rejected by the Met three times just-- it blew my mind, and it hurt my feelings. So my quote has always been is that I may be the first, but I wasn't the first qualified, and understanding that-- we brought all of that information to everybody that was a part of the production. So everybody knew what was at stake, what we were trying to do by making a statement with this piece, and it just fueled the fire for everybody to work even harder.

Jo Reed: I know you've said, “I don't want to be the token. I want to be the turnkey.”

Terence Blanchard: Yes.

Jo Reed: Do you feel that key is turning?

Terence Blanchard: Oh, yes, yes. Peter Gelb has already gone out and commissioned people to write pieces that they're going to produce at the Met. They're going to do “Malcolm X,” obviously, and they're going to do those two pieces along with Anthony Davis's “Malcolm X.” So for me, right there, that's a sea change in what can happen at the Met, and I just hope that it continues from there.

Jo Reed: When fire premiered at the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, that's a pretty intimate hall, and the Met is so much bigger.

Terence Blanchard: Oh, my God. Mm-hmm.

Jo Reed: What kind of adjustments did you have to make to adapt “Fire” for this bigger place?

Terence Blanchard: Well, the first adjustment I had to make was to control my own breathing once I stepped into the hall <laughter> because I was sitting there, saying to myself, “This place is massive.” It's actually four times the size of the place in St. Louis. St. Louis holds 900 seats, and I think the Met is close to 4,000. So the adjustments that we had to make initially was just to beef up the production itself by adding more dancers, having a larger chorus and beefing up some of the orchestrations, but most of that was just maybe having double winds and then having a little more strings. I didn't really have to write anything for that. Some of the things that I did have to write were in St. Louis. We had a lot of spoken word portions, and we didn't think that that would go over too well in the Met because some of those voices can be clearly heard and can be better heard singing than speaking. So I had to go in and write a lot for those parts, and then the rest of it was just production. Allen Moyer, who does the set design-- it was so funny. We have this box that we use on the stage and it’s used in a lot of different ways, and in St. Louis, it was a modest-sized box, you know? <laughs> And when I walked onto the set of the Met and I saw how huge that box was, I just cracked up laughing because I said, “Wow.” I said, “I wonder long it took you to make me that.” <laughs> But the thing that was really beautiful about it-- Allen is brilliant in terms of his vision for creating these effects. It made the stage intimate, even though that stage is massive. I remember standing on that stage just for a photoshoot, and I almost got vertigo. I just-- it was so huge. I'm like, “This is crazy to think that people can sit-- stand here and sing without microphones and be heard in the back of this hall is just incredible.”

Jo Reed: I know. It's amazing, right, without microphones no less. Whew.

Terence Blanchard: Yes, it is amazing.

Jo Reed: I want to take a step back, if you don't mind, and just talk about you and music. You started, if I'm right, on the piano, correct, and then you moved to trumpet.

Terence Blanchard: Yeah, but all of that happened when I was a kid. I started on piano-- I was about five years old-- because I used to go to my grandmother's house and bang on the piano, trying to sing “Batman,” the theme from “Batman,” and they got tired of me just doing that. They said, “If the boy’s going to do that, can he learn how to play something we can listen to?” And my first piano teacher lived in the house right behind mine, so I could never miss a lesson. I started playing the trumpet when I was in fourth grade, elementary school, so all of this happened when I was relatively young. Well, really young, and I kept up with my piano lessons all the way through high school. Even in college, my first year in college, I studied with Kenny Barron, great jazz pianist.

Jo Reed: And what was it about the trumpet, Terence, that just drew you?

Terence Blanchard: There was a guy named Alvin Alcorn who had come to my elementary school. Mary Dora Coghill, that was the school I went to, and he gave a demonstration, like a little presentation about New Orleans-style jazz, and I just remember hearing the trumpet, thinking, “Man, the piano can't do that. The piano can't bend notes like that. The piano can't-- doesn't have vibrato like that.” The way he played the trumpet was more closely related to a vocal performance than anything for me, and I remember going home, telling my dad that I wanted to play the trumpet. The funny thing about that, my dad had just rented a piano for us to have at our house so I could practice. So that was interesting. <laughter>

Jo Reed: An interesting conversation, eh?

Terence Blanchard: It wasn't much of a conversation. It was <laughs> an interesting lecture that I got. Yeah. So...

Jo Reed: You worked with Art Blakey early in your career, and I'm curious about the influence of Art Blakey on you, on your approach to music because you quote him a lot.

Terence Blanchard: I quote him all the time because there's so many things that he gave us that ring true in my life. He always used to tell us, “Never speak above your audience. Never speak beneath then. Just speak straight to them.” That's one thing he always used to say. He always used to say, “Never try to be too hip,” he said, “because two hips make a butt,” even though-- <laughter> you know what I mean? So there were a lot of little things like that, and when he would talk to us about playing certain tunes-- if you're going to play a ballad, he would say, “Play the ballad. You’ll get a chance to do something else on another tune. Don't try to play everything on every tune. Let each piece of music be what it's supposed to be.” And those things are things that I live my life and I create my music by. So I've been blessed, man, with being around great musicians who have helped me a great deal and helped kind of set my musical ideology.

Jo Reed: I'm curious how you compose and perform and make music with your band, The E-Collective.

Terence Blanchard I do for them what Art Blakey did for me. It's just to give them room to grow, and I always encourage all of the guys in the band to create and write because it also helps me grow. I don't want to be the lone voice of the group. I want everybody to feel like it's a workshop in process. We're a work in process.

Jo Reed: How is the collaboration with the E Collective similar to and different from the way you worked with the collaborators in “Fire Shut Up in My Bones?”

Terence Blanchard: Well, the similarities are is that everybody has room to bring their personal musical taste to whatever it is that I do, right.  The differences are with my band, you know, the guys have more of a say because they are creating music for a project.  All of those guys have input into it, while I am also writing and arranging stuff myself.  Obviously, that’s impossible to do for an opera.  You need to show up with the entire story intact so you could get the work of fine-tuning it and workshopping it and making it better from that point.  So having said that, even though those are two very different approaches, the end result is the same in terms of performance, where everybody has a chance to give their own input about how they feel about what it is they’re performing.

Jo Reed: Terence, how did you begin to score movies?

Terence Blanchard: Man, totally by accident.  You know, we were doing the prerecorded music for “Mo’ Better Blues,” Spike Lee’s movie, and we had taken a break, and at the same time that we were doing that I was getting ready to record my first solo project for Columbia Records.  So I remember sitting at the piano and playing a tune that I had written for the album and Spike walked by and heard it and he said, “Man, what is that?” and I said, “Well, something called “Sing Soweto.”  He said, “You wrote that?” and I go, “Yeah,” and then he goes, “Man, can we use that in the film?”  I went, “Sure,” and we recorded it just as a solo trumpet piece that day and then after he shot the scene he asked me to write a string arrangement for it and the rest is, as they say, history.

Jo Reed: So you and Spike Lee have been working together for, what, 30 years, 17, 18 films?

Terence Blanchard: It’s been crazy because we didn’t realize it was that long, <laughs> you know.

Jo Reed: And music is so important in his films.

Terence Blanchard: Yes.

Jo Reed: And he uses it deeply and wisely.

Terence Blanchard: I’ve been very aware of that from the beginning with Spike.  You know, that’s why when I’m writing music for his films I try to make sure that I take care of what it is that I bring to the table, because I know for him it’s going to be something that’s going to have presence in his films.  It’s not going to be something that just sits in the background.

Jo Reed: Yeah.  How does the process of working on films with Spike Lee, how has that evolved?  How do you start composing?  Does he send you a script, give you an idea?  How does that work?

Terence Blanchard: You know it’s always interesting about that, because I’ve worked with other people and they said, “Man, I really like what you and Spike come up with.  I want to work with you the same way that you work with Spike,” and when I tell them how it’s done they really don’t believe it, you know.  Because really what happens is:  Spike, he will send me a script and he wants me to start really thinking about the story even before he shoots.  You know, I get the script the same time the preproduction people get the script, and once he starts to shoot, sometimes he’ll send me video or sometimes he’ll send me still pictures from a production, and then I can just start to get to work, and once I start working the main thing for me to do at first is just to come up with thematic ideas.  It’s not even to score any scenes.  Just to come up with thematic ideas only played on the piano.  He doesn’t want to hear any synth mockup with samplers or anything like that.  He just wants to hear it on the piano, and I’ll send him sometimes up to 12 musical ideas, and what he does is he’ll listen to them and then he starts to assign them to characters.  He’ll say, “Oh, I think this is So-and-So’s theme.”  “Oh, this sounds like her theme,” and then we have a spotting session and we go through the film in the spotting session and spot where the film needs music, where the music should start, where it should come out, things like that. And then after we have that we may have a conversation about tone for the film.  Like with “BlacKkKlansman” he said, “Man, I think we should have like a R&B band inside the orchestra,” and I said, “Perfect,” because I had the E-Collective at the time, and I said, “Well, that’s perfect.”  Other times he says, “Well, what about if we feature this instrument.”  I’m like, “Okay, fine,” and then once we have those general conversations and that spotting session, Spike doesn’t hear any music until we get to the studio, and I think he does that on purpose because he wants to hear it and feel it the same way and audience is going to feel it for the first time.  But me knowing that, I go the extra-- and that’s the thing I try to tell young filmmakers.  Having that type of trust makes your composer go the extra mile, you know, because you don’t want to give up.  You don’t want to betray that trust, you know? So it makes you work harder.  But at the same time, you know, it allows you to be free, you know, and I think there’s maybe one or two times that I had to rewrite a scene for Spike.  I remember on “Miracle at St. Anna” I had to rewrite the opening because it was a war picture and it was first time I had done one of those and I was so excited about that action in the front that I had written all of this type of action music in the front, and that’s not what Spike wanted.  He wanted more melodic, oddly enough to say, operettic approach to scoring that scene. But other than that we’ve been really in sync in terms of what his films need and what it is that I need to provide.

Jo Reed: Did film scoring give you some of the tools you needed to be able to write an opera?

Terence Blanchard: Oh, <laughs> man, it’s funny that you ask me that question.  I was just having this conversation with Jim Robinson yesterday.  No, two days ago.  Because I was telling him, I said, “Man, if it wasn’t for film I wouldn’t be able to do this,” because I know if it weren’t for film I’d probably go back to that thing Art Blakey was telling us about about not trying to be too hip.  I would’ve been too hip.

<laughter>

Terence Blanchard: You know what I mean?  Because I would think about how to push the envelope forward musically and technically, whereas film has allowed me to understand is that your musical personality’s going to shine even if you’re just writing a single note just to enhance a scene, you know.  There’s no need to really think that you have to prove anything.  What you need to do is to tell a story the best way you see fit, and I think when you do that your musical personality gets a chance to shine in a natural way, not in a more contrived fashion.  So film has helped me with that immensely, and I know I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t have a film career first.

Jo Reed: And how are the two different?

Terence Blanchard: Well, the two are different in that film, there’s so many other elements to it that don’t need me, and that part of it allows me to take a break and to figure out how the music should play once it comes in because we haven’t heard music in a while, whereas in opera there’s music going on all the time, and you have to be judicious in how you use certain things because I’m not trying to wear out an audience’s ears.  I understand that they’re going to between sitting down listening to music for two and a half hours.  So there are moments where the music can be complex and really challenging.  Then there’re other moments where the music needs to relax and fall back and give the audience a break.

Jo Reed: You know, you said that film requires you to put aside your ego.

Terence Blanchard: Yes.

Jo Reed: And I wonder what opera requires?

Terence Blanchard: Same thing.  You have to put aside your ego because  it goes back to what I was just saying.  It’s not about proving how complex you can be rhythmically, how dense you can be harmonically or with your orchestrations or how difficult of a melody line you can write.  It’s not about all of that.  It’s really just about telling a story, and once you put your ego aside and understand that that’s your job, then everything starts to fall in line, you know.  For example, when I read the librettos, you know, I can easily create some musical line that has some complicated rhythm to help tell a story, but that’s not what I want to do.  For me, I try to find a story in the libretto in that I will read the libretto over and over again.  I will read the libretto over and over again and I will try to get my rhythms from that, <”dah-dahs” the rhythm>.  So you start to get that sense of what the story is from the rhythm of the libretto as I’m reading it and then it just kind of builds from there.

Jo Reed: I’m curious what composing for opera gives you that your other musical work doesn’t.

Terence Blanchard: Whoo.  Well, first of all, it allows me to write for voice, and I’m a failed singe myself, so, you know, when my dad was singing in church, he has a beautiful baritone voice that they thought he passed on to me. <laughs> No.

<laughter>

Terence Blanchard: I think they heard me in church one Sunday and they said, “That’s so-so.  But doesn’t he play the horn?”

<laughter>

Terence Blanchard: So, you know, that’s the first thing.  It allows me to write for voice and allows me to kind of sing through those voices on stage, but here’s the main thing about opera; I’ve been thinking about this.  I’ve been thinking about this a lot.  You know, opera seems to be-- and maybe I’m wrong, I don’t know-- but opera seems to be the one vehicle artistically where you just about have all of the art forms coming together tell a story.  Visual in terms of painting or digital paintings, set design, lighting, acting, dancing, singing, music orchestrations, and that to me is something you can’t get anywhere else.  The whole idea of putting all of these elements together to tell a compelling story in a live theater, film doesn’t even do that, because film, it’s a highly produced piece of art that is still beautiful.  Don’t get me wrong.  It’s powerful and compelling in its own way, but the theater is live and it’s different every night.  You actually are in the room with the artist, you know, whereas in film you’re looking at them up on a screen.  But in opera, they are right there in front of your face.  You can feel the power of their voices.  You can feel the power of the orchestra when a orchestra blooms and plays a triple forte. All of those things come together to create an experience that I haven’t had in any other art form.

Jo Reed: And what experience do you get when you’re performing with E-Collective that you don’t get anywhere else?

Terence Blanchard: It’s the immediacy of allowing myself to speak my own truth, whatever that is for that day, and sharing that with great musicians on stage.  Being pushed by them.  Being inspired by them in a blink of an eye.  That part of it is something I haven’t found anywhere as a performer.  Opera is different because I’m not performing.  I’m more of a spectator <laughs> in, you know, the operatic world, but when it comes to live performance, playing with my band, playing with great musicians, man, there is nothing that compares to that.  I can’t explain it because it’s the type of thing where you think the show is going to be a certain thing one night and somebody’ll play something and it inspires everybody else to do something else and next thing you know the show morphs into something that was unexpected but still yet beautiful and powerful.  That part of it excites me every night about playing with great musicians.

Jo Reed:  You’ve written and performed music that speaks directly to gun violence, racial justice, and Black Lives Matter and I’m thinking specifically of your cds Breathless and Live.  

Terence Blanchard: Yeah.  Well, you know, when we first put the E-Collective together, my intention for it was to inspire some young kids who were producing music but not necessarily playing, you know, and what I mean by that, producing by using drum machines and samplers and stuff like that.  I wanted to encourage young kids to play instruments, so initially the E-Collective was put together because of that, but while we were in Europe on our first tour, we hadn’t made the record yet, the first record yet, but we were touring in Europe and Mike Brown was shot. Tamir Rice was killed.  There were so many things that were going on and I just couldn’t fathom myself doing a feel-good record, you know, so we started to try to find a vehicle that would allow us to have conversations about gun violence in our country, and that’s where the idea of Breathless came along, because my daughter, Sidney, she gave me the title for the album, because it was literally supposed to be about all of those shootings, but when we started talk about “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe,” she said, “Just call it Breathless,” and once we did the first CD, when it came time to do the second one, we couldn’t leave the topic alone because we felt like we just needed to continue the conversation about this, and it’s been like an extremely powerful experience because I’ll never forget, we were in Cleveland and we were playing the music and this gentleman walked up to me afterwards and he says, he loved my album When the Levees Broke, which is the music from... “When the Levees Broke.”  And he said he was expecting to hear that but when he heard me play he said, “The music just sounded so angry.”  He said, “But then you told us what the music was about,” and he said, “It made me rethink my position on gun control,” and that was a very powerful moment for me because that’s literally why we were making those records, and moving forward, you think you made progress and then all of a sudden George Floyd is killed, and when that happened, you know, that was a sea change, because I have a lot of friends who aren’t African-American who were calling me up and apologizing, and I didn’t know why they were calling me at first.  They kept asking me if I was okay, and I didn’t get what they were talking about until we would get into the conversation, and it made me realize that it was the first time that America really saw what African-Americans had been talking about for generations, and that had a powerful effect.  It’s the reason why I think I was at The Met, you know.  It had a powerful effect on this country, and we’re trying to seize the moment to make sure that we keep this door wide open for all people.  Not just African-Americans but for people of all walks of life, all genders, all sexual orientations, because life’s too short to be tripping on something like that.  So while I’m heartbroken that George Floyd’s family and Mike Brown and all of those families have lost loved ones, you know, we can’t let those deaths occur without taking advantage of being able to affect change in our communities and hopefully open up some hearts and minds.

Jo Reed: And of course, art is one way to do that.  I mean, art demands empathy and has the ability to show us to ourselves.

Terence Blanchard: It does.  It does, and that’s one of the things that I love about “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.”  While it’s not a story that deals with police violence, this story does deal with intolerance and, you know, I think that’s something we really need to pay attention to, and I think art and these projects can shine a mirror on those things and hopefully affect some change in people’s minds.

Jo Reed: And finally, Terence, we don’t have time to talk about your teaching and mentorship, which you have done and have been devoted to for many, many years, but I wonder if you had to think about just a couple of things you really try to impart to your students, what are they?

Terence Blanchard: It goes back to Art Blakey. <laughs> You know, I hate to say it, man, and, you know--

Jo Reed: <laughs>

Terence Blanchard: --what’s so funny about you asking me that question, there’s so many times when I’m teaching I go, “I know y’all get tired of me saying this, but I’m telling you, Art Blakey used to tell us.”

Jo Reed: <laughs>

Terence Blanchard: But it literally goes back to that.  It’s about being honest at the end of the day.  That’s really what it is, because you have to confront your own bias, you know, in being an artist, and in doing so hopefully you can help heal other souls.  That’s the thing, you know.  So that’s the thing I try to tell my students all the time.  “Don’t lie to yourself.  Don’t lie to yourself.”  You know, if there’s something you need to work on, you know you need to work on it, you know you’re deficient in this area, work on it.  It’s not going to magically all of a sudden heal itself.  You need to put an effort into it, and I said, you know, when you deal with Christianity, you know, people out there, there’s a phrase that comes up and says, “Seek and ye shall find,” and I said, “Well, the first word in that phrase is the most important.  Seek.”  It doesn’t say “ye shall find.”  It says, “Seek and ye shall find.”  So you got to put some effort into whatever it is that you do, and as long as you put effort, don’t lie to yourself and work hard, you’d be surprised what can happen in your life.  The career is one thing, but just in terms of your development as a person and as a human, you’d be surprised what can happen for you if you just put forth the effort to do the work.

Jo Reed: And I think that’s a good place to end it.  Terence, thank you so much for giving me your time, for writing this amazing opera.

Terence Blanchard: Thanks for saying that.

Jo Reed: That was jazz musician and composer Terence Blanchard. You can keep up with him at terenceblanchard.com.  Fire Shut Up in My Bones recently aired on the PBS series Great Performances check your local PBS station for details or go to PBS.org and search for Great Performances. You’ve been listening to Art Works, produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. Follow us on Apple podcasts or Google Play and leave us a rating—it helps people to find us. I’m Josephine Reed, stay safe and thanks for listening.

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