EPISODE 11 DANIEL SUMMER HILL — DIVINE, DIVINE, DIVINE
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This is Story Behind the Story. I’m Clara Sherley-Appel, and my guest today is the poet Daniel Summerhill. An Oakland native, Daniel teaches Poetry and Social Action and Composition Studies at CSU Monterey Bay. He has performed his poetry on stages around the world, including at the Kwamashu Center in South Africa as part of a workshop sponsored by the US Embassy. He is the 2015 New York Empire State Grand Slam Champion, a 2015 Nitty Gritty Grand Slam Champion, and a recipient of the Sharon Olds Fellowship for Poetry. His poems have been published in the Lilly Review, Califragle, Button, and Blavity, to name just a few, and he edited the collection “Black Joy: An Anthology of Black Boy Poems,” which came out earlier this year. He is currently in the process of editing a new collection of his work, titled Divine, Divine, Divine, to be published by Nomadic Press.

Clara Sherley-Appel (CSA): Daniel Summerhill, welcome to Story behind the Story.

Daniel Summerhill (DS): Thanks, Thank you for having me. I'm excited to do this interview and to chat.

 (CSA): Thank you for being here. For listeners who may not have read your poetry or seen you perform before, how would you describe your style?

 (DS): My style I would say is as transparent and as honest as it can be, so I would say that it encompasses that that kind of rawness or transparent style or aesthetic that, I think, poetry begs for in a lot of ways.

 (CSA): What do you mean by that raw and honesty? How does that come through in your work?

 (DS): So oftentimes poetry is a lot of introspection, or, like, self-reflection and introspection and things like that. So when it comes to being honest or transparent or raw, what comes out on the page is oftentimes things that your deepest down intimacies and places that you don't always expose outside of poetry. When it comes to my writing, I strive to be as honest and transparent and try to do some soul searching, and that's the things that I strive to put on the page. Those things that I think a lot of folks don't want to grapple with for one reason or another.

 (CSA):  Tell me how you came to poetry when you came to it? How did you find your voice?

 (DS): Sure sure. So that's two questions (CSA giggles). So, I came to poetry — this would be a really cool story… I always say 50% of the reason why I started writing poetry is my older sister. Her name is Tanisha Smith, She's also a poet and she's 15 years older than I am. When I was in middle school, I was in 8th grade, she had just got married and she moved to New York with her her new husband. She and I were the most most alike, and I think we were the closest out of all of my my siblings. So anyways, when she left it was really a heartbreak. However she left behind this photo album filled with poems that she had written when she was in high school. And so I, like most middle schoolers, you're trying to figure out who you are, what you want to do, who you want to be, and how to kind of take your place in the world. I found this photo album of poetry; I opened it and I was reading the poems, and the photo album served as a catalyst for what was already inside of me. I think I was already a poet before that, I just think it took finding that full album of poetry that still inspires me to this day. That's what kind of sparkedmy curiosity with with poetry and what language can do.
So that was 50% of the reason why I started. The other 50% is I had an English teacher in the 9th grade named Mr. Ross…Justin, yeah. Justin Ross. Mr Justin Ross. We had a unit on poetry during English class, and we got to write poems and share poems. I wrote a poem and I ended up sharing it with the class and it was received well; Everybody thought I did a really good job with with the poem. The very next day, Mr. Ross pulls me aside after class. He hands me two things: one, a journal with a poem in it, and then the quote by JD Salinger and also wrote “So much talent, never wasted”. He also bought me the first novel I ever read which is The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Betty.
Anyways, his 50% wasnt this grand gesture, and I think what’s missed in a lot of… when it comes to education, what a lot of people miss are those small gestures that I think spark big differences. I think Mr. Ross taking his time to go and buy me a journal and a book to read, I think that meant a lot. I think honestly, he's responsible for at least encouraging me to write, and wanting to be interested in words and what they can do. So, yeah, that's how I came to poetry. There’s probably a whole lot more that you probably don't have time for. (DS chuckles).
But you said how did I find my voice.

 (CSA): Yeah

(DS): I think I found my voice through a series of trial and error. I think initially, again I didn't start off with wanting to be honest with myself in poems. I think it was a way — cuz I was a quiet and reserved kid — I think it was just a way to journal, an outlet. However when it came to poems, and in poems that I would share, later on it wasn't… those poems I don't think represented my authenticity or my voice. It wasn't until maybe college / undergraduate school when I actually decided that I'm going to do some more digging, and I'm going to try to make each poem as honest and as transparent and as real as I can make it. And if that means me dealing with some rough nights or being uneasy at times, then so be it if it's going to mean poems that are more authentic to me and my voice.

 (CSA): Did you feel a difference when you started owning that voice and writing those types of poems?

 (DS):Sure, sure. I think so. I think it's kind of a liberating experience cuz I just finished up an Intro to Creative Writing class. The very last assignment we did was this mini-memoir assignment, where they had to write a memoir. Oftentimes, memoirs — in terms of creative writing — are the toughest things to write. Because they do a similar thing, where they do beg for you to do that soul searching and reflection, and oftentimes try to access places that you may have compartmentalized or put away that you try to stay away from. In explaining that exercise or, you know, that assignment, what I realized is a lot of them were in a place that I was when I started out writing or when I was trying to find my voice. What I realized is that up until that moment or that point when I decided to be more honest and transparent—what happened was I was consuming a lot of prescriptive instructions on what I should do or how I should sound. The language I should use, the discourse I should participate in. It wasn’t until college when I decided that I have a whole culture, a whole discourse, a whole language of colloquialisms that I have access to that I use, just not when it comes to poetry. And that's what I should be using when it comes to poetry, cuz if it's anything but that, then that's not authentically myself for me. It was a whole… a couple years of a philosophical mental reflection, and toying with what it means to to exist as a black male in the world of literature, and to have you work thought about it or accepted or listened to the same way as as your peers — and that includes being authentic, right? Oftentimes, being authentic in my skin looks different than other folks. I had to really grapple with the balance between the two, and what that looks like. The repercussions of that, right? What is it going to look like once I decide to be authentic and be as honest as I can. So yeah, I did, I see a huge difference, mostly just in myself, and I felt a lot better when I came to the page. 

 (CSA): And your poetry, of course, isn't just about what's on the page because you perform a lot of it. Not all of it, but you have a lot of performances of your poetry. So you're constructing these performances as well as the actual poems, right? You're not just working with words, but you're working with your body and with your voice and with all these other things. What's your process like for that? When does a poem go from a written object to a performance?

 (DS): That's a really good question! I'm going to try to answer the question the best that I can, and I'll kind of unpack it. I think a poem moves from page to stage when the confines of paper can no longer hold it or do it justice. You mentioned that not all the poems get performed, and that's very valid. I think everything does begin with the page. It does begin with writing. I think what's lost a lot of times when folks think about performance poetry is the fact that the folks that do it are writers first. The things that they craft and come up with are thought about on the page, and are thought about in terms of craft, too. I think a lot of folks missed out or look it over because they say… they write folks off as “You're just a performer,” or “You're just this-or-that,” but I think you have to write well in order to perform well. If you perform a poem that's terrible, then it's going to show that the poem is terrible.
But yeah, I fell in love with performance after failing for a couple of years. My first… I remember the first time I actually decided to read publicly my work, and folks were not receptive at all: They were having conversations, and chuckling in back. And there were doors being opened—

 (CSA):God that must be hard

 (DS): —Yeah. And so I could have quit there and said “Forget it, I'm never going to share my work ever again.” Or I could go back and figure out, “Why wasn't I engaging enough? What was it about my performance that didn't hold their attention?” I decided to, of course, do the latter. Ultimately folks don't usually talk or open doors or anything anymore (both chuckle). I'm also a performer. That's a huge part of what I do.

 (CSA): I kind of want to unpack something that you said, cuz you said that people tend to write off performance poets as just performing and not being good writers. That's fascinating to me once, you start to look at like the history of poetry, and actually of storytelling altogether, right? Storytelling started as an oral medium. Some of our most famous poems are the Odyssey, which was passed down orally for generations and generations before it was ever written down. What do you think accounts for that shift? Why do you think people now look at a performance poet and try to write them off?

 (DS): I think this shift is actually in the performance favor, now. Currently. But in recent history, not so much, right? And so that I say that it's in the favor of performers now because a lot of the folks that are in the spotlight now, in terms of poetry, actually did come from poetry slam backgrounds or performance poetry backgrounds. You think of Danez Smith, Franny Choi, you think of Clint Smith—you think of all these folks that actually began performing poems or came to fame through poetry slams and winning these slam competitions and things like that. Those are the folks that are actually being published, and actually are achieving awards that, typically, folks that came from the page would do. Again, there's a trend now that folks that are coming from the performance side are being recognized. However, prior to recently, there was, of course when a slam and spoken word came about in the late '80s / '90s , they were completely stepsistered or thought of as kind of “other”, and not a part of the actual cultural art or craft of poetry. I'm glad that it's swinging the other way because, like you said, I mean I even teach a poetry class and we talk about the same thing: about the fact that all written word derives from some sort of orality. You think about the first folks to do poetry — the true French troubadours or African griots — these storytellers that use lyrics to deliver their stories, and that was poetry. Things were oral before, way before they came to page, and before they existed as font and text. A lot of my work I strive to break that, to break the notion of poetry just being found in text. I think it shatters those walls, and it should shatter those walls.

 (CSA): So you do write everything on the page; What role do things like experimentation and improvisation play in your writing and play in your performances?

 (DS): I think, what I stress… I keep on plugging these classes I'm teaching (he chuckles)... This class I’m teaching in spring is a Page to Stage class. It's about performance poetry, and one of the things that we’ll be talking about is the fact that your movements, your dramatization—those do still derive from the page and what the poem wants to do on the page. You shouldn't just be moving or doing things just for the sake of it, or because you thought about a movement; It's really how the poem directs you to make those movements and do those things. Cuz at the end of the day, when it comes to performance poetry, it's still the poem that's being performed. It's not anything else but the poem, so how can you illustrate the words on the page by using your body or whatnot? I think about it the opposite direction, I think about it from the vantage point of the actual poem and the page. That's including line breaks or including section breaks, or how it's arranged in stanzas, or if it has a certain form, or whatever it is. I try to let that kind of influence the way that the performance goes. Then, over time, there's poems that I have now that I've performed for six or seven years. Those poems also transformed over the years and take different shapes. That's only, again, after it's been explored from the vantage point of the poem.

 (CSA): So that's actually one of the things that I wanted to talk about, because there's a few different recordings of a couple of your poems. I think Ode to Elijah is one of them, where you've done it a couple different times. 

 (CSA): So you do write everything on the page; What role do things like experimentation and improvisation play in your writing and play in your performances?

 (DS): A hundred different times! (They both laugh)

 (CSA): …And then Preservation, where there's a recording of you doing it solo, and then another recording of you doing it with Amen’Auset, and I have been really curious about that process, because they change over time, right? Even Ode to Elijah, which is I think all the same words, the presentation change is very different. And then, in Preservation, when you bring in Amen’Auset, there's new words, there’s a new perspective in addition to a new presentation. Talk to me about that editing process: How is it informed by that sort of repetition of performance?

 (DS): One of the main things is the more you perform a poem, the more comfortable you are with it, and the more you're able to take risk and do certain things differently or try new things out. A lot of the changes come from the fact that, again, I’ve performed those poems, like, hundreds of times now. Not just recordings, but also live, and doing readings and things like that. After that many repetitions, you start to understand how certain things are received. How the audience reacts to certain things, or trying new ways to pronounce words, or to pronounce different lines or pauses or things like that. You play around with the performance after a while to just get a feel for what works, and then also what works in certain spaces. I wouldn't perform Ode to Elijah the same way at a TED Talk as I would at a library reading. It'll be kind of a different reading of the poem.

 (CSA): Yeah

 (DS): And so I think it also depends on the platform of the space. One thing that I'm huge on is collaborating with musicians and live bands and things like that, so of course when I'm delivering a poem with live music or even with a vocalist, like with Amen’Auset, it's going to be a different reading or different performance of the poem. I think all those different variables have a role in the way that the poem is delivered ultimately.

 (CSA): And a lot of your poems, as you said, they're performed in very different ways from other poems. Ode to Elijah is this very… I think so much of meter and rhythm in your poetry, and so in Ode to Elijah the delivery is quick. It's very precise, you're building momentum all the way through until the very end when it slows down again. But then in something like Ode to Slow Dancing, the rhythm is slower and it's more even throughout. And you said that there is some relationship between what's on the page and what you're performing. Can you describe a little bit about the differences between those on the page?

 (DS): Sure. So for instance, in Ode to Elijah what you’re talking about is the tension that's built throughout the entire poem. There's actually… I think there's two instances of tension. There's, like you said, there's this crescendo of cadence and rhythm up until semi- end of the poem, and then it's released. And then there's one more quick build and release towards the end too, and that just mirrors what it looks like on the page too. So when you're reading this poem, as a reader, you have all this tension that's built up, and as a reader you kind of expect it to be released at some point, just it’s a matter of when. When you think about tension as a rubber band, and something adds weight to that rubber band and it's kind of bouncing, so tension is of course that— eventually the rubber band has to has to snap or retract at some point. All the same things that happen on the page, that's the same kind of things that I'm striving to deliver when it comes to inflection in voice and to pacing and to rhythm — to things like that. Something like Slow Dancing is not meant to have that same level of tension or suspense that Ode to Elijah is. It's meant to be more of a reflective, and more of a meditative poem, and so it demands other things from the performance other than that that tension. I think it just depends on the page. The way that it's designed on the page, the way that the tension works, the way that it's all played out. I think it all it's all wrapped up in that.

 (CSA): I just found it very fascinating, especially some of the ones that do change over time. One of the other ones that I thought of was 19 Letters to my Father, cuz there's a reading that I think is in a classroom or some kind of lecture hall that is fairly straight, where it reads more like a list. And then there are other readings that you have done where the numbering sort of moves around and it shifts to being at the end of the line rather than marking the beginning of a line or something like that, and it does change the way that i… it does change the tension and changes, for me, the interpretation of how a poem like that, reading your poem in all of these different spaces and having these different sort of interactions and engagements with audiences, does that change the way that you understand them?

 (DS): Oh yeah, absolutely. I always say that once I write a poem and the poem is published either in print or through some kind of performance or something like that, I always say that the poem is no longer mine. I'm giving it to whoever's consuming it at that point, and so it's always interesting to hear other folks with feedback or after a performance or reading to say, “Hey, I got this,” or “This stood out to me,” or “I really resonated with this this image,” or whatever it is .... It's always interesting to hear the different takes when I have one intention for the poem, and then someone comes with this completely different spin. It's always interesting to hear those. I don't know if they necessarily affect the way that I write or even perform. If somebody takes it and has a different spin on it or thought about it, then that's completely up to them because it's their poem at that point

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 (CSA): If you're just joining me, my guest is poet/performer and CSU Monterey Bay professor Daniel Summerhill. There's another interview with Jeneé Darden at KALW (which I highly recommend everyone listen to. It's only 10 minutes long.) And you talk to her about how hip hop, and particularly Tribe Called Quest has influenced your writing. It made me curious how you distinguish between lyricism and hip hop in poetry, or if you do.

 (DS): Yeah yeah yeah, I actually think that… you mentioned that a lot of my work has to do with like rhythm, and I think it does come from my love of hip hop, and particularly A Tribe Called Quest in the way that they use cadence and rhyme and rhythm too. I think that of course they're connected. I think it's not necessarily the way that the things are delivered. I think it's ultimately a lot of times… content, right? So content is is vastly different when it comes to poetry as opposed to hip hop or rap. Oftentimes rap is less narrative based, it's more so this outward expression of self-identity or culture. Poetry can be that, but I think poetry is also many times lyrical and introspective and meditative too. It doesn't always come out the same way that like a rap would, or some hip hop too. Usually it's always thought about in the same vein as music, too. Poetry, of course, you can definitely write poems to music and that's a thing, but it's usually word first or image first or thought first or idea first. I think it's just another form. It's another brilliant form, but of course it's poetic, of course it's lyrical, of course the words are important in both things.

 (CSA): So I'd like to get into some of the specific poems that you've written. I'm going to play a recording now of your poem, Oakland for the Untrained Eye, and before I do, can I ask you to set it up? Just tell us a little bit about it?

 (DS): It's called Oakland for the Untrained Eye, or it's called Oakland. The reason it’s that way cuz I have like four poems called Oakland, and so I have to differentiate them somehow. Anyways, that poem came about from the fact that I had been reading, when I wrote it, that, I think, Oakland was ranked, I don’t know, like, top five most dangerous cities or something like that in the United States, or top five homicides, or whatever it was. I'm reading all these reports and these news articles, and I'm just thinking to myself, “these are the things that folks want to write about, but they never want to write about anything else outside of these negative or these big negative connotations.” So, me growing up there, me knowing Oakland first hand, I said, “I'll do the reporting.” That's where the poem came from; it’s me thinking about, what does Oakland mean to me? And what does it mean to the folks that actually live here and grow up here and experience Oakland?
(pre-recorded tinny audio) Coming out of New York, it was about flavor and different shit like that — not to diss New York. I learnt a lot, but I never knew the game. I never learnt the game. And when I went to Baltimore, I didn't learn the game. Nobody ever took the time to show me the game. When I got  to Oakland, that's when I learned the game.
(reading at live event) In Oakland, they lynched negroes. In Oakland, they decapitated freedom songs. In Oakland, we all alone. In Oakland, we sing redemption songs. In Oakland, we artistic novelty.
I was only 8 years old when I inadvertently drove my first car, directly into the car behind me. Until this day, I'm still trying to learn how to take my foot off the gas peddle. You see, in every city their lies a little boy or girl with a $5 dream and a million dollar ambition, a fist full of crumpled up paper mache wishes, and a mask. A mask of uncertainty in those cities that rest in the shadow of i-80 West / 5 South / 87 North, and maybe just east of the Mississippi, where dreams are illegal. Where aspirations are smuggled on the backs of single mothers and latchkey children. A world moving too fast in a gas pedal glued to the pavement. Too fast for a story to be read. Too fast for an equation to be worked out and too unforgiving to ask for a second longer. I'm a city boy — Oakland to be exact. A place where you can still smell the aftermath of Oscar Grant in the mornings; where you can scrape the DNA of Souls of Mischief, Digital Underground, and even remnants of PAC from the mic in any studio; which you can hear echoes of Goapele's Closer or maybe Curtis Mayfield bumping through the speakers of an 89 Park Avenue or Place, where they mistake colors for gods and play Russian roulette with souls, but I would have it no other way. 
I would say, my city has saved more than it has killed. I would say, We built the city with the cold bricks they dealt us and protected with the technology they left on the railroad tracks of Sobrante Park back in the '80s. My city. I'm a city boy. The east side of Oakland, the murder capital crime epicenter, Huey P Newton, Bobby Seale, Black Panther marching, MC Hammer, rhyming Noma, pure at a crack, and Black White Asian Latino orange yellow blue brown skin folks; Free thinkers, free spirited, free love, but expensive homes across street between Brooklyn and Chicago. The offspring of Harlem and Atlanta conceived in a summertime so it's always 75°cumulus clouds. My city. But my city isn't always in sixth gear, you see there's a unique stillness that ad libs for the big mouth reputation and the uprising population. There is a little boy who catches the dreams most spend their life chasing and believes not even gravity can hold him down. He's from the city. He's a city boy. He's from Oakland. He writes poems about 360,000 people who write the history of the inconspicuous rights they've never seen in thier dreams that money cannot buy, and why brown skin bodies are like mortar for police raids. The ugliest city of gorgeous people you will ever mind, and a cipher of brilliant 17-year-old minds on a proverbial death row, who will never see adulthood because boys in black and blue carrying Glock 22 will stunt their growth. But in Oakland, in Oakland we self-made joyous. In Oakland, we sing freedom songs. In Oakland, we Oscar. In Oakland, he lives.
 (CSA): So, you grew up in Oakland, you spent most of your life in the Bay Area. Talk to me about the role of Place in your writing.

 (DS): In the same way that I try to be honest and transparent in my work, I think it's also something to be said that wherever you grow up, the things that you see — the weather, the culture, the music scene, the food, the food places — all those things also influence and aid in your work too. And so when you talking about Oakland and all the things that I mentioned in the poem, the fact that it's super eclectic and down to earth and exciting and colorful, yet revolutionary and rebellious place, I think all of that comes through in my work, or at least I strive to encompass all of that in my work. So place is huge, and most folks are very proud of where they're from, or they mention where they're from, right? Or, you know, when folks ask, “Where’re you from?” And there's a reason for that; there's few things in the world that we can hold on to, but I think place is one of them. It's one of the things that, you grew up somewhere, you lived somewhere, and so that place influenced you as a person. If you're a writer, it influences as a writer. I think place is huge, it's important, and hopefully it comes through my work too.

 (CSA): What I really love about this piece is you cover a lot of territory, and some of it is quite painful but some of it is also joyful, for lack of a better word. I think you really see all these multifaceted components of this place, right? Oakland is not one thing in this poem, it's a thousand things — from a city on stolen Ohlone land, to a place where poets grow up, to a place where Oscar Grant was murdered. But this sort of conclusion at the end is, I think, really uplifting. “My city has saved more than it has killed / It's the ugliest city of gorgeous people / In Oakland we self-made joyous / In Oakland we sing freedom songs / In Oakland We Oscar / In Oakland, he lives.” What is the message that you want to convey here, and what does it mean for you to say that in Oakland, Oscar Grant lives?

 (DS): I'm a firm believer in not being too prescriptive in poetry, and so when it comes to that poem or any poem, I always say it: My job is to paint this picture or lay things out, and then you take it and you come to your own conclusion based off of the picture I painted. My goal for the poem was just to illustrate or juxtapose, rather, some of the things that do appear in the media, with some of the things that I've seen personally that are self-made and are our joyous moments or joyous occasions. And I also wanted to illustrate some of the tragedies that may not even be self-inflicted. I think that, if anything, the message in that was that Oakland is complex, and it's rich and it's historic. I think that, if anything else, I wanted to spark a dialogue or a conversation about those things so that folks don't just take one person's word for it, or one outlet's word for it. That they can investigate it for themselves.

 (CSA): Well I think you do that very well. Like I said I think it gives you a sense of Oakland as something much bigger than even… than any depiction of the city in the present moment, but also then the whole city made up of a bunch of pictures in that present moment. I really liked the connections with history and the past. Do you consider your work political?
 
 (DS): (He chuckles) Yeah, yes. Yeah, I think this is the age old debate or discussion around you know political poetry, but yeah, I think all poetry is political. I'll get shot if I say that in the wrong space but I think that demonstrates that poetry is political. But anyways, I think Absolutely.
So, Nina Simone — I mention her pretty often in spaces, because she did an interview and she says that the duty of an artist or the artist duty is to reflect the times. And she says that's true of painters, of sculptors, of musicians, of, you know… any medium across the board. She says how can you be an artist and not reflect the times? She says, “that, to me, is my duty,” and then she goes on to say, like, in these tragic times, there's nothing else I can do right now but to reflect the times. So, I started out writing and thinking about quotes like that, with Nina Simone in mind, and it's like, at one point I was asked, ‘Why are all your poems so sad?’ or ‘Why are all your poems so heavy?’ And I really did some thinking, I thought about it and I said to myself, I don't… that's what's going on, you know? That's what I'm seeing. My poems are heavy, my poems are sad because that's what I'm looking at right now. I can't write anything else, and if I write about something else then that's inauthentic, that's not true, and that's not honest or transparent. If you're going to be honest or transparent with yourself and in your writing, your poems are going to be political in some facet. Even if you write about flowers, there's politics in that somewhere.

 (CSA): What is your process like when you’r writing a poem like this? Especially when, I think there is a lot of structure involved in this, right? The end mirrors the beginning, there's a lot of repetition.
 
 (DS): Well, most of my poems spark from a word or an image or a thought, and I build the poem around that thing. Most of the time it changes, so I'm not… I don't even remember what the thought of the image of the the thing is that I started writing that poem from. But I think, process wise for me, I'm always carrying a backpack — or I used to be, not so much anymore. Now I use my phone for just about everything, but I used to carry around a backpack, and it had in it a ton of journals or pieces of paper, and all is was is I had these ideas or these thoughts of these lines or these words, and I would need to write them down. I would usually do that; I'd write them down in my backpack, and then at some point I'd sit down and actually compile all those images or thoughts or whatnot and make poems out of them, and so that used to be my process, especially when it came to writing poetry. But I'm thinking about for that poem, and others about Oakland, typically I kind of imagine myself moving through Oakland. From like, literally the start of Oakland — from, you know, like North Berkeley, and I move through Oakland, maybe even like going down San Pablo and it crossing over onto International Boulevard — which we call East 14th still — and to San Leandro. I imagine myself just riding my bike through Oakland. What do I see on my right? What do I see on my left? What is my feelings? What's the weather like? You know, thinking about the historical implications of Oakland. Those are the kind of things and images and lines and thoughts that I think came through in the poem. It's just imagining myself there, and what Oakland looks like physically, and then, again, unpacking those physical things.

 (CSA): You alluded to the fact that the name of East 14th Street has changed to International Boulevard; There’ve been a lot of changes in Oakland in your lifetime. How does that come into your poetry?

 (DS): Honestly, I actually don't have one poem that even touches on Oakland changing in recent times. Outside of that, I haven't really thought much about it creatively. I know that I struggled to survive when I was there later on cuz it just was so expensive and things were were changing. I think it was getting a little less… What often happens is these places that are really really eclectic and cultured and down to earth and vibrant, they attract folks for the right reasons, right? Because they are these really cool places. But in that, of course, that's when capitalism thrives, and so what ends up happening is the reasons for that culture, that eclecticism ends up getting pushed out. Then you end up having, of course, the rise of capitalism in these places. Again, I don't know if I've thought about a creatively, I just I think about it that… my heart hurts. That Oakland is changing, and that folks that I know from before I was born have been there are not only no longer able to exist there, it’s no longer feasible for folks to live. I mean, it's really saddening to think about the fact that it's changing, like many places. Especially New York; we talked about New York earlier before we started the interview, and yeah New York is another place, like Brooklyn and Harlem, that are changing. It's a sad thing, I just I don't know if I have gained the courage to to capture a creatively yet.

 (CSA): I kind of feel like Oakland is fighting back in ways that other cities haven't. 
 
 (DS): Again Oakland is rebellious and hard-headed, so it's not. (both chuckle) Yeah, it's not just going to roll over.

AD BREAK

 (CSA): If you're just joining me, my guest today is poet, performer, and CSU Monterey Bay professor Daniel Summerhill. I'd like you to read another one of your poems from your new collection, the one that's called, We Usually Fought Before We Knew Why. And again, if there's anything you want to share about this before you go into it, by all means.

 (DS): Yeah I'm not going to share too much. I think everything that you would need to know is in here, so I'll just go ahead and get into it.
Reading: We usually fought before we knew why 
Nick was a looter, and by looter I mean he started every sentence off with, “Let me get a —” 
His tongue a stick up eager to take the last ounce of a kid's dignity, as if his slick black hair wasn't intrusive enough. The irony of his anti-war leather jacket left the blacktop both afraid and confused. By the time first period closed, he had already captured the wrinkled $5 bills of nearly every sixth grade boy on campus and the gleaming eyes of every girl. As suburban as Albany Middle School was, nothing saying Power like the faces of Jamel, Delroy, Clifton, Nana, and I as custom was to glue our black bodies to each other in order to stay fist. Our huddle a fortress not to be tempted or broken.
One afternoon, Clifton launched a kickball which turned the courtyard into a civil war. Nick's tongue infantry, our unmeditated response, was an inaugural war drum. A tempo racing as fast as our heartbeats, Nick swung, then we fought like we were Pennsylvania, and the Confederates were attempting to take our lunch money.

 (CSA): You were talking earlier about how, in a lot of your poems you start with a central idea or metaphor or concept, and the sort of war and military metaphor is here from the beginning and sort of amps up. Can you tell me about that, and tell me how you think about the metaphor and how it evolves as you're writing?
 
 (DS): What I use oftentimes to… what I enjoy doing is using extended metaphor, and all that means is that, like you said, there's a centralized metaphor that's used in different ways throughout the poem instead of just in one sentence or one line or one stanza. I'm not even sure that it started off as a military metaphor. I think that initially, this poem came from me thinking about my time in middle school, and then also the… what I spent most of my time doing, and it was hanging around these other other young men. I remember that it was really important for us, as Black boys in this setting, to really stay close and to stay, and to have each other's backs and to look after one another. That's what the title comes from. It's, you know, we didn't ask questions. If it was an injustice against one of us, it was an injustice against all of us. In a lot of ways that's the same thing as military camaraderie; oftentimes soldiers don't have no idea why they're even fighting or what their mission is about. They just, they’re told to do one thing and they execute it, and it's based off of the fact that they're fighting, ultimately, for some kind of freedom or some kind of political gain, or you know… there's some agenda out there. But at that point it doesn't matter. And so I was kind of thinking about that when I when I wrote this poem — that it doesn't matter what the agenda is, as long as we stuck together, we'd figure it out collectively.

 (CSA): Much like the cadence and rhythm of your delivery changes when you perform different poems, the poems in this collection (or the ones that you showed me, anyway) are laid out on the page in very different ways. This one is is laid out as complete paragraphs, kind of like prose. How do you settle on the structure of a poem, or that sort of formatting or layout? Is it something conscious or does structure and formatting come out organically as you're writing?
 
 (DS): I think it's a combination of both. I think there's been… so, poems know what they want to be. Oftentimes, poems write themselves, cuz again, if you get out of your own head, poems typically know what they want to do and what they want to be. When it comes to the form, I think oftentimes the content also influences the form. So if you're going to write a poem that includes a few different smaller stories, or something like that, little vignettes, and they do follow some kind of narrative arc or they do follow some kind of story, then you know prose / poetic form does emulate that. I think it has to do with the content and how the content informs the form or the layout on the page.

 (CSA): Talk to me about poetry as storytelling, cuz it's come up a couple times.
 
 (DS): Yeah, so my oldest sister — I talked about her before — but anyways, she had this… When I was growing up (she's 15 years older than I am, again), so I remember she had in her bedroom maybe three out of the four walls were books. From floor to ceiling, just books. I just remember her reading, and then also sharing with me, the stories that she would read in these books, or just different things she thought about when reading those books. I think my root is in storytelling. My root is in seeing something or experiencing a moment or thinking about a moment, and sharing that out. I wouldn't say all of my work is narrative based, but a lot of it is. There's some lyrical quality to some of it, but I think a lot of it is rooted in the narrative and in following some kind of story.

 (CSA): How do the poems in Divine, Divine, Divine fit together in your mind? What makes them work not just as individual pieces but as a collection?
 
 (DS): When I was putting this manuscript together I worked with a mentor of mine, her name is Laure-Ann Bosellar — a phenomenal world-renowned poet — and so anyways, we were working together on putting the manuscript together and figuring out what order they would go in, and how we should cluster them, and what not. In a lot of collections, poetry collections, things are clustered based off of subject matter, or they’re clustered together maybe similar themes, or things like that. When I was thinking about Divine, Divine, Divine, what I wanted to do is, instead of clustering them together based off of those subjects or themes, is to make each set of poems converse with one another. And so that this middle school me was conversing with, maybe an adult me, about the complexities of Oscar Grant being killed and what that looks like. Of course, they also take different forms like you said too, so I think it's also a balance between the narrative, or the more choppy and rhythmic poems; I think all of those things ultimately paint this larger picture, so each poem stands on its own, but I think if you were to look at the collection as a whole, they also make up this this larger brick collage of of poems and images and thoughts.

 (CSA): You edited another collection which came out earlier this year, Black Joy. Tell me about that project.
 
 (DS): That project came out of… so chapter 510, which is a literary non-profit in Oakland— they do beautiful work, so it's worth checking them out. They reached out to me and they asked me to design a workshop, and asked me what that workshop would look like, who I like to work with… And so I did some thinking, and then, in Oakland and in other parts too, there’s a huge gap in the literacy of black boys and everybody else. They're typically, they usually have the lowest reading level and things like that, so I said, ‘Okay, who can I work with and I would have the most impact on through this workshop?’ I also thought about the fact that I didn't just want to have a poetry workshop or writing workshop, I also wanted to include conversation and discourse, too, around something. I arrived at Black Joy, and what it means to be Black and to be happy about that, because that in itself is kind of a rebellious act. What I wanted to do is have these teenagers, they were 13 to 18, and we came together for a few months on Saturdays, which was amazing because getting a teenager to hook up with you at 2 o’clock on a Saturday is a feat in itself. So anyways, we met and the first half of the workshop was literally just having dialogue, conversations, writing exercises, these little mini field trips, and just discussing what joy looks like to them. ‘What are you guys into? How do you guys express yourselves?’ and then, ‘What does that mean for black joy? What does that mean in the larger landscape of being Black and existing?’ Ultimately, that led to the poems that were in the collection, which again were poems that were sparked from writing prompts about Black joy. I came up with these prompts, they would write these poems in response to these prompts, and then we, of course, edited those poems and went through revisions, and we workshopped and looked at each other's poems and made each other's poems better, and then that was ultimately what was was published.

 (CSA): What were the biggest surprises for you in that process of leading that workshop and turning it into a collection, and that whole thing all the way through?
 
 (DS): Well one of the biggest interesting and funny aspects that came was that they didn't really understand the publishing world, or what it meant to write something and then have it published. That realization came at the launch party; The book was published, they did this phenomenal reading—you know the participants in the workshop did this reading, shared their poems. And then afterwards, folks were lined up around the venue to get their book signed. I think it was literally in that moment that they realized that having poems published in this bound book that is out in the world is a thing, and it's a big deal, and there's thousands or hundreds of thousands of folks out there that want to be published, or want to have their things published. It was the fact that those students, even in all of my attempts to expand their view, still realizing that they still have a very narrow and confined view of the world, to not even understand what it means to be published. That in itself was an interesting and funny thing, but also it's a really disheartening thing to think about, too.

 (CSA): Are You still in touch with the students?
 
 (DS): Yeah yeah, many of them. Absolutely, and some of their parents reach out. Because most of them, they didn't show up because they wanted to. They showed up… so at the very beginning of the workshop, they were asked, “Why are you guys here?” and most of them are like, “My mom dropped me off,” “My mom signed me up.” They were asked a similar question at the end, and of course they were actually invested in the writing and the workshop and the dialogue. So they got bamboozled into being there in the beginning, but they ended up really enjoying and becoming a family at the end of the workshop.

 (CSA): Do they still write?
 
 (DS): That's a good question. I know there's two or three of them that I know do. The other ones I'm not in contact with as much, so I'm not sure. I mean, I would hope and pray that they do still write. I would love for that to happen cuz I think it's beneficial, not just to be a writer or published writer, but just in general. Especially as them and who they are and their identities, I think is important. But I'm not sure, I'm not sure.

 (CSA): How did working with those students and taking students who really had no idea about the publication process and leading them to publish something — How did that impact you?

 (DS): I guess it's really sobering. It's really sobering to think about the fact that I was one of them at one point, that I guess didn't fully understand the world or didn't fully understand literature or poetry. It really made me just think about my own process, my own practice, and you know I think I wrote and grew and shared with them, too. I did facilitate the workshop, but in a lot of ways I was a participant just as they were. If anything, I think it was just cool to get to hang out with a group of young men that are pure and imaginative, and in a lot of ways innocent, too. To think about that in in my own work, again, it kind of sobered me to think about our relationship with them, but then also all of our relationship with the world and how we operate in it.

 (CSA): The theme, as you said, was Black joy. Did you have preconceived notions about what that meant to you going in, and did those change as you heard what other people have to say about it?
 
 (DS): I had ideas, and I still have ideas about Black joy and ultimately Black joy is just being, existing as a Black person and being happy about it in any form. So then in the workshop —there was an actor in my workshop, there was a football player in my workshop, there was a musician in my workshop, there was a gamer in my workshop — so all of them... It was great. They all expressed their joy differently, and so through our dialogue, through our discourse it's like, ‘What does Black joy mean to you who thrives in gaming?’ ‘What does it mean to you who is really into skateboarding?’ ‘What does it mean to you, that's already in art?’ and whatnot. Just being exposed to all of their different interests, I wouldn’t say it changed my thought about Black joy, because my thought already was really all encompassing, but I think it just added other components for pieces to to my thoughts about Black joy.

 (CSA): What are you working on now?
 
 (DS): Yeah, next step… I've been really interested in writing these essays, or a collection of essays, rather. So two major things: I'm actually working on poems, but I'm also working on this collection of essays. The collection of poems is actually a response, or it's a love letter, in a lot of ways to Frank Ocean’s album Blonde, which is one of my favorite albums of all time. What it does is it dissects like each track, and it's kind of a meditation on each track and my responses to those things that he was discussing in his songs.
The essay collection has to do really with a lot of mundane Black culture or discourse themes. One of which is gospel music and what it means. Like, what does gospel music mean? What does Black gospel music… What does it look like? What's the definition of it? What's included and what's not? And in large part it has to do with, like, Kanye West recently released a gospel album (quote unquote, right?). What constitutes that as being a gospel album, and what doesn't? Cuz there’s other folks too, other rappers that lean into gospel music, but then there's also the traditionalist that would frown upon their music, and say that it's secularist, or it shouldn't be included for one reason or another. So anyways, I'm working on these essays that explore those kind of things and those conversations.

 (CSA): Well Daniel Summerhill, it has been lovely. Thank you for being here today.
 
 (DS): Thanks a bunch for having me it's been great I really appreciate it 

 (CSA): To learn more about Daniel’s work, see videos of his performances, or get updates about his forthcoming poetry collection Divine, Divine, Divine, visit his website, danielsummerhill.com. You can purchase Black Joy: An Anthology of Black Boy Poems on the Nomadic Press website or from other online retailers.

Catch story behind the story the first Saturday of every month from 12 to 1 p.m. on KQSD FM to share your thoughts on this or other shows, drop me a line at clara@ksqd.org. THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY is produced for KSQD 90.7 FM by me, Clara Sherley-Appel. Our sound engineer is Lanier Sammons. He also wrote our theme.