Spotlight on the Alzheimer's Poetry Project

Man reciting poetry with eldery men.

Poet Gary Glazner (center) working with participants of the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project, which uses poetry recitation to trigger brain activity and help people suffering from memory loss. Photo by Michael Hagedorn

Revisit our NEA magazine story on the Alzheimer's Poetry Project, which uses poetry to help seniors with memory loss.

Phil Schaap

Music Credits: “Orinthology” composed and performed by Charlie Parker from the album Charlie Parker Bird of Paradise.

“Yardbird Suite” composed and performed by Charlie Parker from the album Charlie Parker on Dial: The Complete Sessions.

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

Phil Schaap: All jazz education is performance oriented. Well, who’s going to train the listeners? I’ve spent a lifetime trying. I’m trying to create an audience for the musicians. That’s my job. Their job is to be musicians and sometimes I help them in that endeavor, too, but no audience knows sound. I don’t care how well you play.

Jo Reed: That was educator, radio host, producer and 2021 NEA Jazz Master, Phil Schaap, and this is Art Works, the weekly podcast from the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed. Phil Schaap is an original, a legendary radio host since 1970 at WKCR, an award-winning producer and audio engineer with a facility for remastering jazz classics, a renowned teacher of jazz, a virtuoso of jazz history in general and Charlie Parker in particular and one of the great story tellers. Phil Schaap has won six Grammy Awards for his liner notes, audio engineering and production. Schaap has taught jazz at Columbia University, Princeton and Rutgers and he’s currently teaching in the graduate school at Julliard. In addition, he became curator at Jazz at Lincoln Center where he created Swing University, an educational program that teaches classes that cultivate listening and an appreciation for jazz. From the mid-1970s until 1992, he booked musicians for jazz at the West End, a Manhattan club with nightly shows seven days a week. Phil Schaap has also conducted and collected hundreds of hours of taped interviews with jazz legends many of whom were close friends and mentors. There’s little wonder that Phil Schaap is the 2021 recipient of the A.B. Spellman NEA Jazz Master’s Fellowship for Jazz Advocacy. Phil Schaap’s entire life has been immersed in jazz. He was literally raised on jazz in the company of extraordinary jazz musicians who were close family friends. Jazz was bred into his bones as a child thanks to his parents and their connection to the music.

Phil Schaap: My father was tone deaf yet he had a love for jazz. He also was a history student, a specialty in French history. He went abroad as a teenager to study. So when he was in France, he became involved with the early French speaking scholars of the art form and translated for them. My father translated the legendary 1919 review of Sidney Bouchard [ph?] at the conductor answer may wrote that predicted that jazz would be the musical highway of the twentieth century which it was. So he had jazz chops. Now my mother and my mother’s side of the family are western classical musicians well trained. They’re the teachers. My grandparents were even music teachers in the late nineteenth century and my mother, this is so long ago they didn’t even call them beatniks yet. She was a bohemian and as something of a renegade to her family she embraced jazz music. They met. My father was smart. He was doing a lot of work for the French jazzies and he realized being smarter than me that there was no future in jazz employment. So he and the famous photographer, Bill Gottlieb, William P. Gottlieb, left jazz together and went into educational materials which was their career. That’s the parent side of the story. They were both fascinated with jazz. On my mother’s side there’s musical talent. On my father’s side there’s a scholarly nature.

Jo Reed: I’m curious about your mother particularly since she was a musician and your family you say was tone deaf, did they help you to learn to listen to the music and hear the music?

Phil Schaap: My mother’s guidance was more astute than my father’s preferences. She would listen to records with me and point out where the real breadstick, as jazz people used to say, the best stuff was and that was very helpful and as helpful and much more harsh than my mother was our neighbor. We lived in a jazz community in Hollis, Hollis, New York. It’s in Queens County, part of New York City and that’s how we knew Lester Young and Buck Clayton and Milt Hinton and Wendell Marshall’s family, the bassist with Ellington, and the blues and even gospel field, I was very close with Sonny Terry, the legendary harmonica player, but about 150 yards from our house was Lennie Tristano and it took me, you’re going to forgive me if Lennie Tristano and I are much better friends now that he’s been deceased for 42 years because he yelled at me all the time and it was after his death that Sal Mosca pointed out to me, that’s one of Tristano’s principals, he said “Sure, Lennie yelled at you every day. He was just trying to save you some time,” and it was Tristano, I used to hook up his stereo. He was sightless and in exchange I’d tape his Charlie Parker rarities and that was really the start of the rarities aspect of my Charlie Parker collection. When I was child, Ross Russell of Dial Records was closing up the firm and he stayed for a few days in our home and he left behind for me a complete set of the Charlie Parker Dials. I play them on the radio. They’re great things in terms of their own sonics, but of course for the astounding art of Charlie Parker. <music plays>

Jo Reed: I’m struck when I read about you not just how much music and jazz was a part of your early life, but how much the musicians were as well and I understand you lived in a jazz community, but would you just go and knock on the door of Milt Hinton and say hi, I’m Phil Schaap. I live down the street and I want to talk to you about whatever.

Phil Schaap: Well, I certainly was outgoing in a way that would find me knocking on strangers’ doors, jazz musicians doors and asking in. I did it to my family, my extended family and the extended family included jazz musicians. So each one is a different story. Tristano gave a concert at the Hollis Theater, a movie theater that added live music and my mother and father and I went there and there were three of in the audience and there were six musicians on stage. It’s when I met Lee Konits. I met Milt Hinton through his wife, Mona, who I met in a civil rights protest in 1959. I was undoubtedly the youngest on the picket line and she was a community activist. She was so nice to jazz musicians and people in general and then she brought me to the Hinton home and Milt had an incredible collection. I mean even world class by any standard and I would listen to music with him in the basement. Can I tell one more about Roy Eldridge?

Jo Reed: Yes, please.

Phil Schaap: I knew that Roy Eldridge had moved into Hollis. He would call it in later years Jolly Hollis and I already was in love with Roy Eldridge’s music and so I was desperate to meet him and unlike many of the jazz people who lived in the neighborhood he was on the road so much that you couldn’t really find him in the neighborhood. He wasn’t there. So I knocked on the Eldridge’s door and Roy’s wife, Vi, answered and she explained that Roy wasn’t home, but I could come in and she brought out some milk and cookies for me and I watched television with her. Eventually Roy was home and he became one of the most important people in my life.

Jo Reed: I have to know how you brought home Rahsaan Roland Kirk.

Phil Schaap: I met Rahsaan Roland Kirk in my high school years who became really one of the great gurus. He was different than my mother in listening to the music and we had tremendous parties. These would be my parent’s parties for the musicians in Hollis, Queens and in my adolescence, typical teenager I had a veracious appetite and Rahsaan who was not a teenager he ate a lot, too, and we had an eating contest which I tied him in. It was only a tie. So then I was tight with Rahsaan and when the West End started, he would come in on Sunday afternoons not to perform although he would stay for the evening’s performance, but I had a nice audio system hooked up in the sound system of the West End to play music in between sets and then we would have these listening parties. They were in a small community quite famous and there were a couple of them where you the crowd in the West End jazz room was wall to wall standing room on a Sunday afternoon with no music and far sparser crowd that night for the band. So Rahsaan would stay and I loved him and I’m lucky that he thought something of me.

Jo Reed: I know that Jo Jones who was Count Basie’s drummer was a mentor, dear friend and a babysitter for you. How did this even come to be?

Phil Schaap: Jo Jones’ impact and teaching to me is much more important in my adolescence that my childhood, but of course that I knew him as a very young fellow is the more charming aspect of the story. The story goes like this. My family attended the Randall’s Island Jazz Festival and somehow my mother and I got backstage. I’m kindergarten, first grade age. She’s holding my hand and there was a guy talking to my mother and he said “Well, you’ve gotten backstage, but if you really like to get into the inner sanctum and meet the great Joe Williams, I can accommodate you.” Hm hm. So my mother said “Well, that’s all very well and good, but of course Jimmy Rushing was the more appropriate singer for the Count Basie Orchestra,” and standing a few feet away was Jo Jones and he said “Adam, I heard that. That’s amazing. Thank you. You seem to know about our music,” and then my mother said to Jo, “That’s true, but my little boy here knows more about it than I do,” and he looked down at this five year old and said “Okay, mister,” I wouldn’t be called mister again for another 15 years. “Okay, mister. Who’s Prince Robinson?” and I said “The tenor saxophone in McKinney’s Cotton Pickers,” and it might be the only time I ever quieted Jo Jones. He was more than stunned and then he turned to my mother and said “You got a new babysitter,” and I would go over to his apartment after school. We’d watch Bugs Bunny on cartoons. At the end he would have a book pulled down from the shelf and he said “All right. Read 20 pages to me,” and I would read them. It took some time and then he said “Go home and tell your mother I’m not interfering with your education.” That’s what a lesson with Jo Jones was like.

Jo Reed: Did he help you learn how to listen to the music or listen to the music deeply?

Phil Schaap: Absolutely. We would listen to a record. I mean a record. I mean even one side of the 78 RPM disk, a single tune, and then we would listen to it again and he would make remarks about it and one of my secrets with Jo Jones since I never ask questions. He hated that, but he asked questions and he gave me a real education by challenging me to hear the substantive matters on these records and we would spend the whole day listening to as little as three minutes of music. It was very intensive repetitive listening. I guess you could say he’s influence on me.

Jo Reed: Phil, you have this extraordinary memory. You have a feeling for the music. You can listen to the music. Did anyone ever suggest that you play an instrument?

Phil Schaap: I did play an instrument. I was a trumpeter. I was a music major. I ended up brokering my college education by being an American history major with a minor in music. It was the only way to be a jazz student in my day. It’s funny because I teach on the [ph?] graduate level at Julliard and my students have degrees in jazz and, of course, I don’t because you couldn’t get one, but I did play. There’s the old saying those who can’t do teach and I played the trumpet. I had a nice facility in the upper register, but no other redeeming features. I played sharp which I guess is a little bit better than playing flat, but it’s still wrong and I gave my trumpet to Ed “Tiger” Lewis, the Brooklyn bebopper. The world’s a better place for it.

Jo Reed: Did you get joy from it?

Phil Schaap: Yes, I did enjoy playing trumpet, but people who heard me didn’t enjoy it. So I stopped.

Jo Reed: You were a good neighbor. You got to Columbia University in 1970.

Phil Schaap: Sixty-nine.

Jo Reed: Sixty-nine. Right after the strike the campus was in transition.

Phil Schaap: I was there for the strike. As a high school student, I was there for the famous Columbia strike in April of 1968. I sided with the strikers. My cousin, the late Bill Schaap, is the lawyer who won all the cases for them versus Columbia University. Bless his heart.

Jo Reed: The radio station, WKCR, then also was part of the transition that happened at the university and it was a very fruitful time to become part of that radio station, student run, no bells, no whistles, no vacuuming.

Phil Schaap: I was familiar with WKCR because the great Robert Siegel who had been news director had basically run the radio station during the student strike in ’68 and he was as professional then as he would be for a gazillion years at NPR. So I started on the station February 2, 1970. I think that’s the reason why people think I started in school in 1970. Clearly, it was the more important part of my activities on campus. There were a couple of jazz programs on the station and even had been before the students took over the station in ’68. That fall or actually it was late summer in September on the eve of Jimi Hendrix’ death, we had a rededication of the station to musical purposes, indeed, arts purposes that were not commercially viable that could be helped by us and jazz was pivotal to that vision and I was pivotal to jazz because even though I was young I spoke with knowledge and I became pivotal to a profound expansion of jazz programming which continues to this day, a half century later initiating the festivals and the birthday broadcasts and the memorial broadcasts and I still participate.

Jo Reed: Had you ever considered radio as a place where you might, I don’t know, light? Had that been in your realm of possibilities of what you might turn to?

Phil Schaap: My vision of professional career after school was rooted in my love for jazz and directed by my being a worker for the real jazz musicians. I became a fairly accomplished audio man, sound systems for live events at a very young age. I did sound work for Martha Reeves and the Vandellas and Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels. I started at the top and worked my way to the bottom, but by doing sound for Roy Eldridge I came to an understanding that I would continue to work for them during the school year as a worker, not a musician, and then in the summertime my goal was, in a sense it still remains my goal and is one of my unfulfilled missions, was to teach teachers during summers like at Teacher’s College courses that would show the social studies teachers and the music teachers jazz applications. I saw that as the perpetuation of the art form and I dutifully tried to get that going. I did a lot of demonstration courses for a man name Schneider at Teacher’s College and that was like for eight straight years. So as they say if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again, but then stop because there’s no sense being a damn fool about it. So that was my vision and what radio allowed as it turned out continuing the breakthroughs of WKCR programming in the early 1970s allowed some fulfillment of the mission because we are educational and we are entertaining and we have presented an art form to new generations now for, in my case, over a half century.

Jo Reed: “Traditions in Swing” was your first show. When you thought about that show what is it that you wanted to impart to the listeners?

Phil Schaap: One thing I wanted to impart is that the music hadn’t started with John Coltrane and that the music was substantive, it was a brilliant art and that there was still an audience for it. I mean, the original audience, but I already knew that if we didn’t create a new audience we were finished. In music, all music is present tense if it’s being played or listened to. It’s one of its charms and perhaps an explanation why music and sports are often so well enjoyed by similar people because in sports if you’re watching the game or if you’re actually performing in the game, you’re a player, you can’t be thinking about Yogi Berra was Don Larsen’s catcher in October of 1956. I mean, it would be ridiculous. You got to concentrate on what you’re doing and in music this presence tense aspect is huge and wonderful. Indeed, it’s as inviting as any aspect to it other than its emotional power that it’s present tense. If you’re listening you’re doing it now. If you’re performing you’re doing it now. It’s a present tense joy. And by the way, “Traditions in Swing,” I do play recent records. It’s the styles that are up to and including bebop. It’s not the dating of the music, but over time I’ve found that few of my students even knew the earlier records existed and so I’m trying to provide an avenue to it and also in best sound. There’s a whole sonic element. My students listen to these records from the past on their phones. They’re taking diminished sound off the Internet and making it worse and then trying to figure out who’s on bass and, of course, their phone speaker barely lets you know there’s a bass player on the record.

Jo Reed: You have long been a champion of Charlie Parker’s music and your love for it is real and it’s deep. Why Charlie Parker?

Phil Schaap: Why Bird. Why Charlie Parker? Well, first of all Charlie Parker is a genius and is a virtuoso of the greatest importance, but also I noticed and I mean all the way back that he was likable. I used to go up to these incredible dinners in Larchmont, New York with the very first jazz musicians and I’m talking about people born in the 1880s and I noticed that they liked Charlie Parker. They didn’t like John Coltrane, but they liked Charlie Parker and I noticed that Ornie [ph?] Coleman’s people, they liked Charlie Parker and I came to the realization Charlie Parker might be the middle and most likable sound in the entire art of jazz. <music plays> So I went with the flow and here I sit in the National Endowment of the Arts Jazz Master.

Jo Reed: “Bird Flight,” your daily radio show centered on Charlie Parker is something that is a labor of love for you as is “Traditions in Swing.” I’ve done radio. This takes a lot of work and you’re doing this as a labor of love. You’re not getting paid. How are you supporting yourself?

Phil Schaap: Well, at first I didn’t. I didn’t support myself economically. So my dear friend Sharif Abdus-Salaam, he was terrified. I didn’t have health insurance. When I used to go out after the live from the West End broadcast with another KCR alum, Cliff Price, we would look in our pockets and whoever had the most money would pay for dinner, but he didn’t like it because he soon realized all the money that I had was the money I picked out in my pocket. There was no bank account behind it and that unnerved him. I had a day job in my student years at Columbia running the ID card office for them. I still did that until August 15, 1980. It was then that I got my first stint at Rutgers and that lasted for a few years and then I taught a few courses at Columbia and so I cobbled together a career by a fragment set of jobs. Eventually, I was able to get a salary at the West End. It took about a decade. The West End may be the most successful part of my career because it had a beginning, a middle and a wonderful ending. You see, the musicians who raised me a lot of them were not even performing anymore and the gig is what the gig was. You’re playing weddings and bar mitzvahs and soundtracks for commercials and TV shows and when I created the West End I created a comfortable environment for them to make their music their way again as a gig and it worked. It was 19 years, seven days a week. In many ways it’s the way I gave back and it was just a beautiful thing. Jo Jones’ last gigs were at the West End. Paul Gonsalves’ last American performances were at the West End. So I don’t need to give you the laundry list of names, but they were my friends, they were my teachers, they were geniuses and I gave them a forum for showing their stuff.

Jo Reed: You sure did. The West End was a place I loved.

Phil Schaap: Oh, hallelujah. You were at the West End.

Jo Reed: Oh, yeah. Many times. Many, many times. So yes. I speak from the heart when I say it was wonderful and it was sad to see it go. You obviously are known for your extraordinary memory and jazz musicians would actually come to you for more information about their own career that they might have forgotten and there’s a great story about Sun Ra coming to you.

Phil Schaap: And Sun Ra kidnapped me over 40 years ago. He was scheduled to speak on his own behalf at Harvard and apparently the topic was his early career and he knew that I knew something about it because he heard me doing Sun Ra programming on KCR. He knew me. He, indeed, was a customer. He came to the West End. So Sun Ra comes to the West End and we move into a quiet area outside of the music room and I started telling him. Well, you joined the musician’s union on December 15, 1934 and told him about his gigging with Fletcher Henderson and the Rum Boogie and the Club DeLisa and the recordings for Aristocrat which is the early name for what becomes Chess Records. I knew that Sunny, we called him Sunny. I knew that Sunny liked ice cream and at those corners there was an ice cream store and he liked bananas and strawberries. So I went over there and I got two pints and we’re eating the ice cream and Sun Ra said “You know, it’s still a little noisy in here. Why don’t we eat the ice cream in the car?” There’s a wonderful gentleman since deceased, Richard Wilkerson, who was like the roadie for the Arkestra and he’s driving Sun Ra around and he says “Richard, why don’t you just turn on the motor and take us for a ride while Phil tells me about me.” So we’re driving and I’m not paying any attention to the road. I’m talking to Sun Ra and enjoying it and I realize we’ve been going for some time and I looked out the window and I saw Exit 3 Greenwich which means we’re in the state of Connecticut. Sun Ra was intent on driving me all the way to Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Boston area, but I came up with the only thing that turned it all around and he drove me back to the West End. I said “I can’t go with you to Boston. I have musicians to pay.” He had Richard turn the car around and we went back to the West End and I got there for the last number like 2:30 in the morning and I paid the musicians and Sunny went on his way to Boston.

Jo Reed: You’ve taught at Columbia, Princeton, Rutgers, currently at Julliard. How would you describe yourself as a teacher?

Phil Schaap: I teach listening. They say I’m a history teacher. I teach listening. I teach a different approach to listening for the Julliard graduate students and for any of my musician students over the years. I’ve started quite a few of the conservatories. I teach them a different type of listening than specific ear training or the training on their instrument or in their genre. What I teach is how to hear identity, how to notice the various schools of musical thought in jazz, how to recognize the ensemble. Is it a 12 piece band or is it 10 piece band? How many saxophones are there? Do you recognize the arranger’s style? And then there are many, many other flavors such as texture and then there are the rudimentary things. I’m always surprised considering I was a very limited musician and although I had a thorough music education up to and including college, it’s weird for me that sometimes I’m the guy who teaches concerto form to jazz students at prestigious conservatories or in college campuses. There’s a lot to teach, but all jazz education is performance oriented. Well, who’s going to train the listeners? I’ve spent a lifetime trying. I’m trying to create an audience for the musicians. That’s my job. Their job is to be musicians and sometimes I help them in that endeavor, too, but no audience knows sound. I don’t care how well you play, but if I summarize it I teach listening.

Jo Reed: Well, to continue that you began Swing University at Jazz at Lincoln Center and I want you to describe what it is that you have in mind with that because I think it piggybacks on what you just said.

Phil Schaap: Swing University at Jazz in Lincoln Center curriculum as well as a classroom situation that I created is about jazz music appreciation while a fair number of the students who have come to it are musicians and I’ve always been teaching musicians. I’ve always been with the players, but the real goal is to get you to hear and to know what to listen to in sequence. Dates are unimportant. Sequence is important. So you can follow the pathways of jazz stylistic development and also it’s economic art and also it’s sociology and political history. So teaching the sociology, the racial history. I mean, jazz if you study it from the end of the Civil War to Jackie Robinson with the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947. So in that pocket of 82 years jazz is the greatest avenue to study our sordid racist past and also the triumphs within that challenge to segregation because so many of these jazz figures are primaries in the struggle. I mean, Teddy Wilson integrates the American Bandstand 11 years before Jackie Robinson with the Dodgers, 18 years before Brown versus Board of Education, 28 years before the contemporary Civil Rights passages of 1964. These stories are astounding and because jazz had a modicum of popularity they exist in full detail.

Jo Reed: You’re a curator at Jazz at Lincoln Center and I’m curious about what that involves.

Phil Schaap: Being curator of Jazz in Lincoln Center most of the aspects of its educational outreach intersected with me. There were some that I was completely in charge of such as Swing University and many of the visitations would be sent out in Black History Month however inappropriate you might say and I would cover a school district with lectures on people like Roy Eldridge and Teddy Wilson and Billie Holiday, but working with Wynt Marsalis on the actual music and eventually when in Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola opened up and in general the programming department I would give musical assessments that would be appropriate to creating future music performances.

Jo Reed: How often would you go out pre-COVID and hear music?

Phil Schaap: In my adult lifetime most of the music I’ve heard and I’ve heard a lot of live music is involved with my working with the musicians and producing the music. So for 19 years I was at the West End either six or seven nights a week. So I heard a lot of live music and at Jazz at Lincoln Center I worked with Wynt Marsalis on producing the concerts and I’d go to the rehearsals which are great because you get to hear the music acoustically. So that’s a lot of music.

Jo Reed: I would love your thoughts about why live performance is so central for jazz, so crucial for jazz.

Phil Schaap: The performing arts in general, live is essential. Otherwise, it’s dead performing arts. There’s no reason not to have a classic form and to witness it in its earlier demonstrations now that we have film and film with sound and audio and even stereo, but it’s a dead art if it’s not actively done and while there might be a system by which the recordings could allow jazz to have an existence in the absence of live performance it’s an improviser’s art. With jazz you can ad lib. It’s the whole point. You take a new solo, take a Boston as they used to for freedom and expression.

Jo Reed: You have won six Grammy awards for a production and for liner notes. I understand the liner notes completely, but I’m curious how you became involved with producing and remastering albums.

Phil Schaap: So my writing the historical album notes which I think is still the name of the category as was said in the question writing that seems to make a lot of sense and producing certainly a remastered expanded reissue box set of somebody as important as Louis Armstrong, I mean, that’s kind of something that I guess would be in the domain of someone like me. The audio engineering is the part that isn’t clear, but is as essential as anything I’ve done in that I’ve made music sound better without performing and as I said I started at the top, I did sound for some of the biggest rock and roll acts of the middle ’60s and worked my way to the bottom very quickly, but along the way in learning about the audio I also and this was conceivably was accelerated by KCR, but certainly by the instruction I would receive from the legendary sound wizard, Jack Towers, and the far lesser known mastering engineer at Columbia Records, Harry Fine. They taught me a whole different audio science. I starting remastering and people noticed that the recordings they knew sounded better the way I presented them or that the way I played them on the air and then a few years into this, it was a skill I would say I was fairly adept at and I learned along the way you have to fix the old recordings to even attempt to hear them much less remaster them. So I became a specialist in remastering both old disks but old audio tape. I was quite inventive.

Jo Reed: Well, the epic, epic story of restoring Dean Benedetti’s home recordings of Charlie Parker those were 40 year old tapes you had to deal with.

Phil Schaap: So let me explain the whole thing. First of all, Bob Porter connected with Dean Benedetti’s older brother, Rick Benedetti, and discovered these legendary recordings. I mean, the most ridiculous thing was that they were wire recordings. It’s an early format that was dispensed with because it really wasn’t any good. I spent three years on this. It took me forever and the more difficult part was that Benedetti’s reel to reel tape, his is an earlier concept where the backing that threaded through the machine was paper. That stuff was in a tangled mess and fixing it broke it and I restored the string to the paper with Liquid Paper and that allowed it to go through the machine without tearing and then after I was done I cleaned off the Liquid Paper so that it wouldn’t eat through so that maybe if somebody wants to do it again on better equipment, who knows what analog breakthroughs lie in the future, but I also wanted to make it preserved and I want the Benedetti field recordings to last as long as they possibly can. So I preserved them as well as transferred them to the Mosaic box, the complete Dean Benedetti recordings of Charlie Parker which in one fell swoop added over a third of known improvised Charlie Parker to our ears.

Jo Reed: You have spent you whole life in service of jazz and I really would like you to tell us why it was worthy of so much and why it is worthy of so much of your attention and love and passion.

Phil Schaap: It’s music. It’s wonderful. It has the power of conveying emotion undefined in a creator’s feelings that speaks to the heart, mind and ears, perhaps in an entirely different emotional impact to the receiver of the art form. It tells the story of freedom. Jazz and freedom go hand in hand. You think about it and you dig it. So I’m into freedom and I like the fact that jazz is, too. There’s a lot of wonder there and a lifetime of listening has been its own reward.

Jo Reed: And my final question. You’re a 2021 NEA Jazz Master. I want to know what that means for you.

Phil Schaap: Being named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts and the recipient of the A.B. Spellman NEA Jazz Master’s Fellowship for Jazz Advocacy is like a culmination or even a crowning glory to a life well spent in jazz. It’s an acknowledgement. It’s an award. It’s citation that I actually did something. This award given to me proves that I might still have something of value to give.

Jo Reed: Indeed you do, Phil, and thank you and thank you for those years of managing the West End when I would come in which is a lovely coincidence.

Phil Schaap: It’s a delight. It’s a beautiful thing.

Jo Reed: It is. Thank you. That was educator, radio host, producer and 2021 NEA Jazz Master, Phil Schaap. Join the celebration of the 2021 JEA Jazz Masters. Watch the virtual tribute concert on Thursday, April 22nd at 8:00 P.M. Eastern, 5:00 P.M. Pacific. Singer Dee Dee Bridgewater and actor Delroy Lindo are the cohosts of this free event. Get more information at arts.gov. You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed. Stay safe and thanks for listening.

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Sunil Iyengar, who is a South Asian man. He is smiling and wearing a dark suit and tie.

Sunil Iyengar. 

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Photo by Tom Pich/tompich.com

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Sneak Peek: Phil Schaap Podcast

Jo Reed: I know that Joe Jones was Count Basie's drummer, was a mentor, a dear friend, and a babysitter for you. How did this even come to be?

Phil Schaap: Joe Jones impact and teaching to me is much more important in my adolescence than my childhood. But, of course, that I knew him as a very young fella is the more charming aspect of the story. And the story goes like this, my family attended the Randall's Island jazz festival, and somehow my mother and I got backstage. Remember, I'm kindergarten, first grade age. She's holding my hand and a guy was talking to my mother and he said, "Well, you've gotten backstage, but if you really like to get into the inner sanctum and meet the great Joe Williams, I can accommodate you."  So my mother said, "Well, that's all very well and good." But of course, Jimmy Rushing was the more appropriate singer for the Count Basie's Orchestra. And standing a few feet away was Joe Jones. And he said, "Madam, I heard that. That's amazing. Thank you. You seem to know about our music." And then my mother said to Joe, "It's true, but my little boy here knows more about it than I do." And he looked down at this five-year-old and said, "Okay, Mister." I wouldn't be called Mister again for another 15 years. "Okay, Mister. who's Prince Robinson?"  And I said, "The tenor saxophone in McKinney's Cotton Pickers." And it might be the only time I ever quieted Joe Jones, he was more than stunned.  And then he turned to my mother and said, "You got a new babysitter."

New Report Released on the Economic Impact of the Arts and Cultural Sector

abstract collection of different colored arrows pointing up
Image from Pixaby user Gerd Altman.
National Endowment for the Arts and Bureau of Economic Analysis release new report on the economic impact of the arts and cultural sector.

Fear Less, Build More: A Conversation with Emily Pilloton-Lam

Woman holding out her hands full of ink.

Emily Pilloton, founder and executive director of Project H Design and Girls Garage. Photo courtesy of @Project H Design/Girls Garage

In this audio interview, Project H Design Founder Emily Pilloton-Lam talks about empowering girls by teaching them how to be hands-on designers and builders.

Sally Wen Mao

Sally Wen Mao: So much history, the history of the Chinese in America, for example, I really had to go out and seek it. I had to do research independently because it was not something that was taught growing up in school…and sometimes, I feel this like very strong desire to take that information and turn it toward the lyric moments of poetry

Jo Reed: That’s poet and 2021 NEA literature fellow Sally Wen Mao. And this is Art Works, the weekly podcast from the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed. 

Critics are singing the praises of Sally Wen Mao’s second collection of poems, Oculus.  The word Oculus is Latin for “eye.”  It can also refer to the lens of a camera, and architecturally, it’s a circular window or a circular opening at the top of a dome. Sally Wen Mao uses these multiplicities of meanings, as she examines the violence of spectacle. Mao presents the many ways in which Chinese people, most particularly women, have become spectacles for American audiences in life, in death, on film and on line — objectified by a lens they don’t control.  Her poems excavate this history of spectacle beginning with Afong Moy—the first Chinese woman to come to America. In a series of persona poems, she takes Anna May Wong from early Hollywood to the present day. And Mao interrogates the culpability of present technology as well-- from an online suicide in 2014 to a murder that was a front page sensation and horror in 2012. Through them all, Sally Wen Mao makes clear the price these people paid and continue to pay as they hold the weight of our gaze, their visages a spectacle for others to consume...both visible and unknown. And the poet also intervenes—reanimating and resurrecting these women who have been flattened by history’s gaps and the narrowness of our stares.  Sally Wen Mao spoke with me about Oculus earlier this week—as it happens-- in the wake of the murders in Atlanta of six Asian-American women.

Sally Wen Mao: Yes. So, in Oculus I kind of attempt to create a through line between the history of Chinese women, in particular, in America and the present and the ways in which the narratives have been shaped about those women and I began with the first woman, the first Chinese woman to ever come to America, Afong Moy, which was in 1834 and then I continue with Anna May Wong, a Hollywood star, which she lived in the 20th Century, for the most part, and yeah, and then I trace it to the present, where, again, these conversations have really become fraught in the past week. So, that is something that I was really intentional about when I was writing and drafting “Oculus.”

 Jo Reed:  Let’s begin with a poem from Oculus.  And I think the poem “Occidentalism,” is a great way to frame this conversation.

Sally Wen Mao: Yes, great. Yes. I will read that poem,

 “Occidentalism.”

A man celebrates erstwhile conquests,

his book locked in a silo, still in print.

I scribble, make Sharpie lines, deface

its text like it defaces me. Outside, grain

fields whisper. Marble lions are silent

yet silver-tongued, with excellent teeth.

In this life I have worshipped so many lies.

Then I workshop them, make them better.

An East India Company, an opium trade,

a war, a treaty, a concession, an occupation,

a man parting the veil covering a woman’s

face, his nails prying her lips open. I love

the fragility of a porcelain bowl. How easy

it is, to shatter chinoiserie, like the Han

dynasty urn Ai Weiwei dropped in 1995.

If only recovering the silenced history

is as simple as smashing its container: book,

bowl, celadon spoon. Such objects cross

borders the way our bodies never could.

Instead, we’re left with history, its blonde

dust. That bowl is unbreakable. All its ghosts

still shudder through us like small breaths.

The tome of hegemony lives on, circulates

in our libraries, in our bloodstreams. One day,

a girl like me may come across it on a shelf,

pick it up, read about all the ways her body

is a thing. And I won’t be there to protect

her, to cross the text out and say: go ahead—

rewrite this.

Jo Reed: That is just such a beautiful poem. There’s so much that I love about this and the lines that really jump out at me-- “In this life, I’ve worshipped so many lies and then I workshop them and make them better,” and clearly, that’s what this poem is doing, trying to complicate a narrative that’s often so simplistic.

Sally Wen Mao: Yes. I mean, the origin of this poem came from when this happened to me, when I came across a book at the library that was-- it was a book kind of describing the sexual conquest of Asia by Europeans and it was a book that the tone of it was quite dehumanizing throughout, even though it kind of presented itself as a history book, it was very-- yeah, it really dehumanized and fetishized Asian women that it was describing throughout the book and  it defined the East was anywhere from North Africa to Southeast Asia. So, it just-- I find that these narratives are still being perpetuated throughout my life and they’re so harmful, the impact. So, I wrote this poem because I was really angry. I just remember myself. I was 22 and I just felt powerless because, again, the book that I found, it had just been published that year. It was reviewed in The New York Times. It was enjoying like this moment in the spotlight and I just felt “Wow, this type of book is still acceptable,” and yes, I can imagine that happening to any Asian woman and it’s not just that one book, but it’s so many books across the history of the world and not just books either, but like we mentioned films, narratives, all the media that we consume.

Jo Reed: Indeed and you do go back in history. Tell us about Afong Moy.

Sally Wen Mao: Yes. So, she was the first Chinese woman to ever come to the United States and she came because a couple of brothers or actually cousins, maybe, merchants wanted to sell this new line of products from Canton or Guangdong and they wanted to sell vases, scrolls, oriental objects, and they thought that the best marketing gimmick would be to bring a live Chinese woman to be displayed among these objects from China and so, they found this 19-year-old girl and sent her across the ocean and so, she landed in New York City and she was placed in this saloon, of sorts, and they put all these objects around her and they charged admission so that people can go and just kind of go and look at her and see her as kind of an object, right? This show, it became a sensation and she ended up going on a tour across the US and she ended up-- she met the President at the time, Andrew Jackson, and it was quite a journey and yet, every record that exists of her were newspapers, usually, and all of the accounts of her are written from the perspective of people who consumed her or paid to see her or just saw her as an oriental object, essentially.

Jo Reed: So, you imagined a voice for her and you gave her an imagined perception.

Sally Wen Mao: Yes. I mean, the thing about it is that her perception existed, but it was just ignored.

Jo Reed: Exactly.

Sally Wen Mao: And I had to imagine how strange it must have been for her. All of these people were calling her strange, but like coming from her perspective, like America was strange. America was like extremely bizarre in all of these ways that those newspaper accounts never ever considered.

Jo Reed: Well, there was a lot of emphasis on her bound feet, but what you did in that poem was instead of her being the object of these people’s gaze, you turned it around and had her gazing at the spectators and wondering at the deformity of women’s corsets.

Sally Wen Mao: Yes. Really, it is the first comparison is the bound feet are a way of controlling women’s bodies, but that also existed in the west in the form of corsets. So, in a way, the narratives were spinning this story that yes, China is extremely backwards, even Andrew Jackson called it like a barbaric practice. But like all of these things were happening in other forms in the United States.

Jo Reed: Exactly, and the context, of course, of somebody who’s a slave owner calling bound feet barbaric.

Sally Wen Mao: Exactly. Exactly, and somebody who displaced so much of the Native population at the time. 1834, like as Afong Moy was traveling through the United States, she was sometimes on the same path as the Native Americans who were being displaced at the time and so, all of those histories, I think, are intertwined.

Jo Reed: Well, you wrote 11 persona poems in the voice of Anna May Wong, who we know more about, I think it’s safe to say, than Afong Moy, but who despite her enormous talent was still flattened by stereotypes on the screen. You mentioned her when we first began speaking, but could you just tell us a little bit more about her?

Sally Wen Mao: Yeah. So, she was a very prominent Hollywood actress and she was born in Los Angeles and she was the daughter of a laundromat owner and she really rose through Hollywood like from a very young age. I think her first starring role, she was still a teenager and yes, she had to face a lot of racial stereotypes in the kinds of roles that she would be offered, like Fu-Manchu’s daughter and she did really critique this, like in her lifetime. She was very vocal about the realities for Asian actors and actresses.

Jo Reed: Can we hear “Anna May Wong on Silent Films?”

Sally Wen Mao: Yes.

“Anna May Wong on Silent Films”

It is natural to live in an era
            when no one uttered—
and silence was glamour

so I could cast one glance westward
            and you’d know what I was
going to kill. Murder in my gaze,

treachery in my movements:
            if I bared the grooves
in my spine, made my lust known,

the reel would remind me
            that someone with my face
could never be loved.

How did you expect my characters
            to react? In so many shoots,
I was brandishing a dagger.

The narrative was enchanting
            enough to make me believe
I, too, could live in a white

palace, smell the odorless gardens,
            relieve myself on their white
petals. To be a star in Sun City—

to be first lady on the celluloid
            screen—I had to marry
my own cinematic death.

I never wept audibly—I saw my
            sisters in the sawmills,
reminded myself of my good luck.

Even the muzzle over my mouth
            could not kill me, though I
never slept soundly through the silence.

Jo Reed: That’s “Anna May Wong on Silent Films.” Tell me what goes into taking on the voice, especially over the course of 11 poems, of someone who actually lived.

Sally Wen Mao: Yes. I did research. Obviously, I read a couple of her biographies. She did have a very vocal presence. She had-- for example, she wrote newspaper columns for the New York Herald Tribune and she did-- so, one contrast between Anna May Wong and Afong Moy is that Anna May Wong did have first-person accounts and records and I guess the reason I chose her as a persona is that in a way, Anna May Wong’s career and her job was to kind of take on the lives of other people and as a celebrity and as an actress, she ended up bearing the burden of representation and because her face was visible at the time, that ended up-- it ended up standing in for so many people and she was such a token, right? Still is, to this day. She’s very much a token and very much has to reckon with her role as a stand-in for, again, like all of these invisible lives, invisible faces.

Jo Reed:   I’ve always been in love with her voice because it’s so authoritative. And because of miscegenation laws, her roles were limited. Is that correct?

Sally Wen Mao: Yeah, the anti-miscegenation laws at the time meant that she couldn’t really be a leading lady, even-- and honestly, a lot of Asian roles went to white actors and those white actors, even if they were playing Asian people in yellow face, like there was still the anti-miscegenation laws applied in those cases.

Jo Reed: She also said “All Chinese in America are homesick,” which I found heartbreaking.

Sally Wen Mao: Yes, and something I think that is specific to her is that she was born and raised in Los Angeles. So, she didn’t actually go to China or she never even stepped foot in China until her early 30s. So, imagine, she had like this long and illustrious career as an actress trying to represent this people that really, she didn’t really know China that well. Like, she didn’t know China firsthand. She only knew China through this diasporic lens.

Jo Reed: In your poems, in your persona poems in the voice of Anna May Wong, you really give her stories. She has a romance with Bruce Lee. She’s making cameos in “Romeo Must Die” and “Kill Bill,” among others and it’s serious, but it’s also playful.

Sally Wen Mao: Oh, yes. I really wanted the persona poems to do something beyond just capturing her life. I feel like if people wanted to know about her life, they could read the multiple biographies that are out there about her. For me, I felt that the poem created a space where I can experiment with a thought experiment, just what it would it be like if she could travel into the future. She traveled so much in her life. If she traveled into the future, what would she think? What would she think of Bruce Lee? What would she think of all these films that came out after her death. So, that was something I really wanted to tap into.

Jo Reed: I’m curious about the way you tackle history in your work and the way you imagine these moments that have been lost in history.

Sally Wen Mao: Yes. So much history, the history of the Chinese in America, for example, I really had to go out and seek it. I had to do research independently because it was not something that was taught growing up in school. I remember, for example, when I was 12, I was removed from my class because there was a citywide project that was about kind of preserving the history of Chinese in California and so, I was pulled out of the class along with my friend, who is also the only other Chinese girl and we learned about Chinese immigration into California. They even took us on a field trip to Angel Island, which was an immigration station from the early 20th Century that housed a lot of-- that detained a lot of Chinese immigrants because it was an immigration station was built, essentially, to enforce the Chinese Exclusion Act and I just remember even as a 12-year-old thinking like “This is crazy. I didn’t know this history. Now I’m learning it. Why am I the only one learning it? Why isn’t it taught in my class? Why aren’t the rest of my classmates learning this history?” And the history of Chinese immigrants to California, it’s such a huge part of California history. Now, as an adult, I have learned that I have to seek out that information and sometimes, I feel this like very strong desire to take that information and turn it toward the lyric moments of poetry because one thing that struck me when I visited Angel Island so many years ago was that these detained immigrants, they were writing poetry on the wall. On the walls of the detention center, there were poems that were carved and the immigrants who were detained and desperate and just miserable were turning to poetry and I think that there’s something really significant about that.

Jo Reed: I agree. Throughout your poems, you really push at that boundary that can be very fluid between spectacle and image.

Sally Wen Mao: Yes. I mean, so much of, again, if we’re talking about like Chinese American femininity is bound up in spectacle, right? Even with Afong Moy, she was a spectacle. That’s essentially what she was. She was an object to be looked at and consumed. Same with Anna May Wong and in my book, I also think about social media and technology today and how in a way, even now, when we can kind of like upload images of ourselves and when we can kind of curate like an Instagram or go on a webcam, things like that, even now, I still don’t think that women have total control over their images and that was something that really fascinated me and not just women, obviously. I have a poem in the book that looked at a particular spectacle that occurred almost a decade ago, of this man who was pushed into the subway tracks.

Jo Reed: "No Resolution."

Sally Wen Mao: Yes.

Jo Reed: Yeah, I was going to ask you to read that later, but do you want to read it now?

Sally Wen Mao: Oh, yes. Yes, so, the story about this was that his-- somebody took a picture of him on the subway tracks, and then it ended up becoming the cover of the New York Post. And-- like there's just something so I guess like traumatic about seeing that, I remembered. And this-- and a year later, in 2013, I ended up, by chance, meeting the man's daughter. And we just had this exchange, and this poem is kind of about that. So,

 "No Resolution." And the epigraph says,

         "In December, 2012, a father from Queens, Ki Suk Han, was pushed into the train tracks of an oncoming Q train. This poem is for his daughter, Ashley Han.

 

The cover of the magazine. I throw it open,

          I throw it out. This man announces

the headline. THIS MAN IS ABOUT TO—

 

Blood broadcasts the story. noise rakes

          the story, and pummels it to the ground

 until there's nothing left. No story. No Man.

 

No wife and daughter, no life in Queens.

         His daughter doesn't speak, she closes

her eyes, and the lids sear the whites beneath.

 

At the press conference, she hides her hands

          inside her hoodie. All the cameras, they point,

they shoot-- she reels, she shatters.

 

A year later, I will meet her. We will walk down West 4th,

         MacDougal. Under the arches, on a crisp

October day, we will eat crepes in the East Village,

         watch a man play piano in the square.

 

She will talk about her father-- the story

          of all of our lives-- how she didn't have the chance

to connect with him fully, and then suddenly—

          it was the story of none of our lives—

 

and she was 21, an only child, with her father's

         fate on a magazine cover, piled in grocery

stores across America, in low-res, hi-res,

the pixels blurred like smudges.

 

For now, it is December. The shadows on the platforms

         elongate. I have not yet met her. I turn off the television,

afraid of its heft, its volume, its relationship to gravity.

 

Lately, I can't go underground without shielding

         my body with my hands. The train winds

and goes. The stories about our lives do not have faces."

Jo Reed: That's "No Resolution." I think it's a devastating poem. This mammoth, personal loss, turned into a blip in the news. I've seen your book described as looking at the violence of the spectacle, and I think this poem certainly does that.

Sally Wen Mao: Yes. I guess, I mean, in recent news, you see these videos of elderly Asian folks being brutalized. And I really think back to that moment in December 2012, when we all learned about this incident, where this man was just pushed into the train tracks. And one of the huge, you know, outcries, related to that, was the fact that the New York Post just like decided to run that cover, and it was so lurid, and it was so dehumanizing, to use like an earlier word. And again, like you can't see his face. Like he's looking at the train. And, I remembered the pain that a lot of people felt, in the Asian American communities, just this feeling that, if we die, then our deaths might turn, or be made into a spectacle, might be exploited in that way. So, yeah. I don't know if I can properly talk about it.

Jo Reed: It's hard, this week, too. Do you fear that same story for the women who were murdered in Atlanta?

Sally Wen Mao: Well, one thing that I noticed, as the news was unfolding is the central focus of this shooting, of this massacre, is this conversation about what to call it, right? Is it a hate crime? Is it not? And this policeman said that the shooter had a bad day. That's the theme heard around the world, right? The shooter had a bad day. He had a sex addiction, you know, it was not motivated by race. And then, I remembered like somebody from this shooter's life came out and said, oh, he loved Asian culture. He was not racist. But like one thing that I realized is that a lot of white people-- a lot of people-- you know, a lot of people aren't aware that that kind of fixation on Asia, that kind of like obsession with Asia, it can be racist. Because where does that fixation come from? It's a long, you know, brutal history of subjugation, and the intersection of fetishization, of a hyper-sexual Asian woman, and that type of sexualization is highly racialized, it's highly racist.

Jo Reed: And tied in, with that very particular stereotype, I think, that's highly sexualized, is also passivity.

Sally Wen Mao: Mm-hm, yes. And, I mean, like Asian women, I think  the American conception of Asian women has to do with imperialism, it has to do with occupation, and also, you know, these long histories of exclusion and brutalization. And one of the things I've found in my research, just for my poetry, is that the first waves of immigrants, women immigrants from China, were sex slaves. They arrived in San Francisco, and as soon as they arrived, they were carted off into-- to a barracoon, where they were stripped naked, and inspected, and then they were sold to the highest bidder. Not something that I learned in school. Not something that, I think, is public knowledge. But it's deeply wrapped in-- you know, in this country's history, and its perceptions of Asian women.

Jo Reed:   Your poems confront those perceptions.  You draw on visual culture a lot in your poems. I’m curious about your own relationship with visual culture?

Sally Wen Mao:  Actually, growing up, I loved drawing. I loved visual art. And I was always drawing, I was always painting, and I think it just kind of translated into my writing.

Jo Reed: Where did you grow up?

Sally Wen Mao: I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, but I was born in Wuhan, China, and my parents moved to the US when I was five. We lived in Boston for four years, and then, we moved to the Bay Area, when I was around nine years old. And yes, I remember those times. I really looked to drawing and writing as a solace for feeling-- you know, feeling different. Feeling alone. So, all of that, I think, is-- are things I want to think about in my work.

Jo Reed: And how did you land on poetry, rather than visual arts? How did you make that turn?

Sally Wen Mao: Well, it's kind of funny, because I think, in middle school-- this is probably a very typical story, but my mother told me that I couldn't be a visual artist, because artists don't make any money. And up until--

Jo Reed: Oh, and poets strike it rich all the time.

Sally Wen Mao: Yes. Well, you know, what's funny is because-- like up until middle school, I just kind of assumed that I would become a visual artist, and that was just what I was going to do. And then my mom was like, oh, yeah, artists don't make any money. And then, I switched to writing. I started writing poetry, I started writing fiction. And by the time I reached high school, you know, this is what I wanted to do. I wanted to write poetry and fiction, and I wanted to become a writer. And this time, you know, my mom would tell me, no, that doesn't make money, and this time, I wasn't going to listen to her. I was a teenager, so. So, yes, I just kind of stuck with that.

Jo Reed: You dedicated the book-- and it was very, very moving to me. You said that you wrote this book for women of color.

Sally Wen Mao: Yeah. And I guess, you know, I'm not making an attempt to speak for women of color, or even for Asian women, because, again, within Asian America, there are so many disparate histories. And like to me, I was really fascinated, in Chinese history-- the history of Chinese in America. But I do think of this book being for women of color in general, because of the multiple valences of this particular type of oppression, that might manifest in different ways. In very different, diverse ways, like across the spectrum. And, you know-- and I think that there's something powerful about acknowledging that, and acknowledging that we are a part of a larger struggle, you know, against this intersection of misogyny and racism. And other valences, too, like homophobia, like transphobia, like classism, and-- you know, and so many types of exploitation. Gosh. But, by coming together, I feel-- I really believe that something can be birthed.

Jo Reed:  This book, Oculus, has been out for a year. Have you heard from Asian Americans, Asian American women about it? Have you gotten feedback?

Sally Wen Mao: Yes, I have. I've gotten a lot of feedback, and to really means everything to me, to hear from them. They are my audience, right? They're the people that I want this book to reach. And they're often the people who never come across some of these themes in their reading. So, yeah. I mean, I have heard from a lot of-- particularly-- like in particular young women, young Asian women. And again, to me, that is my audience. That is who I want to be in conversation with, that is who I want to affirm and validate.  

Jo Reed: I'd like to end with the poem "Resurrection," the poem you end your book with. Do you want to say a couple of words about it, and then read?

Sally Wen Mao: So, this poem came out of this experience when I came to New York in 2014, I was working on the poems of "Oculus." And so, I was deeply thinking about Anna May Wong. And I noticed that there was a billboard that was being shown all around the city, that had her face on it. And it was an advertisement for like a new exhibition at the New York Historical Society. And it was about Chinese Americans, and the history of Chinese immigration. And the thing that I really noticed is how, even, you know, to the present-day, Anna May Wong has that burden   representing this entire, huge, like diverse population of people. Even in 2014, like her face is standing in for millions of immigrants, right? And I think the thing that really got to me is that, like, her name was like kind of in this small text, much smaller than, you know, Chinese American. And so, it made me wonder if the people around me, on the subway, or like in the stations, like if they recognized her face. Because I recognized her face, it was so familiar to me, but it might not be familiar to other people. They might not know who she is. And they might see her face on the signs, and think, okay, Chinese. Chinese, right?

So, this poem is called "Resurrection

 

In the autumn I moved to New York,

I recognized her face all over the subway

stations—pearls around her throat, she poses

for her immigration papers. In 1924, the only

Americans required to carry identity cards

were ethnically Chinese—the first photo IDs,

red targets on the head of every man, woman,

child, infant, movie star. Like pallbearers,

they lined up to get their pictures taken: full-face

view, direct camera gaze, no smiles, ears showing,

in silver gelatin. A rogue’s gallery of Chinese

exclusion. The subway poster doesn’t name

her—though it does mention her ethnicity,

and the name of the New-York Historical

Society exhibition: Exclusion/Inclusion.

Soon, when I felt alone in this city, her face

would peer at me from behind seats, turnstiles,

heads, and headphones, and I swear she wore

a smile only I could see. Sometimes my face

aligned with hers, and we would rush past

the bewildered lives before us—hers, gone

the year my mother was born, and mine,

a belt of ghosts trailing after my scent.

In the same aboveground train, in the same

city where slain umbrellas travel across

the Hudson River, we live and live.

I’ve left my landline so ghosts can’t dial me

at midnight with the hunger of hunters

anymore. I’m so hungry I gnaw at light.

It tunnels from the shadows, an exhausting

hope. I know this hunger tormented her too.

It haunted her through her years in L.A., Paris,

and New York, the parties she went to, people

she met—Paul Robeson, Zora Neale Hurston,

Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein. It haunts

her expression still, on the 6 train, Grand

Central station, an echo chamber behind

her eyes. But dear universe: if I can recognize

her face under this tunnel of endless shadows

against the luminance of all that is extinct

and oncoming, then I am not a stranger here.

Jo Reed: And I think that is a very good place to end it. Thank you so much, Sally, I really appreciate you giving me your time. And thank you for this book of wonderful poetry.

Sally Wen Mao: Thank you so much for having me, it was a pleasure.

Jo Reed: That was Sally Wen Mao—We were talking about her collection of poetry, Oculus. You’ve been listening to Art Works, produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed, stay safe and thanks for listening.

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Healing the Invisible Wounds of War: A New Virtual Exhibit Featuring Work By Creative Forces Artists

detail from a mask which is painted black and has a scrap with the word help embedded in the forehead of the mask

Within (series) by Chris Stowe. Photo by Amanda Voisard

A new virtual, interactive art exhibit spotlights visual art, music, and performances created by active duty military service members and veterans as part of Creative Forces: Military Healing Arts Network.