WENDEL PATRICK: "Artworks" is made possible in part by the citizens of Baltimore County and by the Ruth R. Marder Arts Endowment Fund, the Robert E. Meyerhoff and Rheda Becker Endowment for the Arts, the E.T.
in Robert B. Rocklin Fund, the Henry and Ruth Blaustein Rosenberg Foundation Arts Endowment in memory of Ruth Marder.
Hi, I'm your host, Wendel Patrick, join me as I delve into the profound art of the spoken word through the lens of Maryland-based artist Olu Butterfly, whose performances weave together personal narratives and social commentary, shedding light on the power and impact of words.
We'll explore how Butterfly harnesses rhythm, emotion, and storytelling to resonate with audiences, creating a visceral connection that transcends the conventional boundaries of poetry.
OLU BUTTERFLY: These notes are made from our intestines, these colors from our bloodlines.
Our dance steps are just our tears in portable form.
And because vicious days have gone platinum made all our songs go, ruby.
We extra with the red, to set the rainbow off after the storm.
Phat ain't gonna be enough to describe this to a friend.
Our eyes, just in time to witness the course in metamorphosis.
Woe to those trying to stop these killer African bees from making honey, our babies with their smiles, our actual masterpieces.
We just a franchise of the very beginning when it was said, "Let there be light."
Lovers that can't help ourselves, creators creating and creating.
Amen.
WENDEL: Olu Butterfly.
It's a pleasure to see you.
How've you been?
OLU BUTTERFLY: Um, lifeing, I have been lifeing.
WENDEL: Yeah, we're here in your office here at the Black Arts District.
I've actually walked past this building many times but didn't realize that this, this hidden gem was here.
OLU BUTTERFLY: Yeah.
(laughs).
WENDEL: Well, you do so many different things and I, I, I have had the pleasure of knowing you and working with you.
OLU BUTTERFLY: Mm-Hmm.
WENDEL: Uh, many times over the years.
OLU BUTTERFLY: Mm-Hmm.
WENDEL: And I first came to know of who you were, uh, through poetry.
OLU BUTTERFLY: Mm-Hmm.
WENDEL: And I was, learned that you were a poet, and so, um, specifically for this episode, I wanted to ask you, uh, spoken word?
OLU BUTTERFLY: Mm-Hmm.
WENDEL: The artist spoken word, does, what does that mean to you?
OLU BUTTERFLY: I love that question because I don't necessarily, I kind of take Jessica Care Moore's position, which she is not a fan of the term because she's like, I'm a poet and I'm in a tradition of poets.
But I understand the, the use of that word.
It kind of, kind of like Neo soul, like it speaks to, you're like, "Hey, I just do soul, I just do music."
But it does speak to an era and a vibe.
And so, um, I love that um, the young people that I have made space for have gone on, some of them have gone on to be English professors, published authors on tour.
So it's really a kind of unlimited, um, expression.
So I don't, I think spoken word sometimes puts some caps around it, but this new generation of poets, I, um, I just, uh, love them.
And in general, I would say we are in a tradition of speakers.
So, um, for example, there's a woman named Henrietta Vinton Davis, um, who's from Baltimore.
She was kind of the, she was Marcus Garvey's inspiration, so I would say like, just as much as we might be out of the tradition of poets, we're out of that tradition as well.
Um, people like Henrietta Vinton Davis that would go on tour and fire people up through their expressions and, um, so yeah, I like to see myself in that tradition.
It's not just anything goes just like our language, just like anything with spoken word or with poetry.
My confession is that I'm an Aquarius and I really like freedom.
So I don't like rules, but some people do, some people find 'em to be fun.
One of the things that I could say also that makes Baltimore unique is, um, I have a partner, um, Slangston Hughes, who came up with a system of elements.
And so, water, fire, air, and earth, like water poets, um, draw more from their emotions.
Fire poets, they use techniques um, and they might use like rhyme and different, um, literary techniques more.
And then earth poets is just real, like, direct, like, um, if they're telling a story, it's like literal sometimes and direct.
And then air, that would be me.
Like we are, um, it might be like metaphors and we are like kind of far out there.
And what that has been able to do is we're not trying to make people be something that they aren't.
We see you, which has been very, I think, liberating for artists to say, it's not that you're doing it wrong or this is the official way to do things, but you are kind of a, a, a kind a, a style, you have a tribe.
WENDEL: For you, when you're writing poetry, do you approach it in different ways?
Do you find inspiration from the life around you?
I know you're a, a, a mother of wonderful children, do you find inspiration from them?
Where does that come from?
OLU BUTTERFLY: I wish I did.
First of all, I love studying.
So sometimes I get caught up in the research with the Henrietta Lacks piece, um, for example, that was a commissioned piece.
And so going from just writing, whenever I get the feeling to hit me, versus like having to, um, like delve into a subject matter and do something that's a little bit more, um, intentional.
Like I already knew a little bit about Henrietta Lacks, but I became a little bit more of a expert, um, on her and her life as much as I could.
I, I connected with the subject matter.
The piece is called "The Goddess versus The Bodysnatchers."
Um, because there's a reputation that, um, our city, which is very much run by they call meds and eds, um, there's a reputation that there would be people, actually family members snatched off the streets, experimented on, and then let back onto the streets.
And so I did not lean out of that, I leaned into that, that concept.
So there's always thought and social justice kind of even in, um, in, in all subject matters, even writing about a flower.
It's like, first of all, Langston Hughes's, um, saying, which is "The prerequisite to writing is, having something to say."
On Henrietta Lacks.
"The Goddess versus The Bodysnatchers."
One foot on the plantation, one foot in outer space.
Traumatized, DNA, been on a rocket, colonized colonies been inside a bomb exploding, not a stay-at-home mom, a stay-in-orbit mom, drinking nectar and wiping butts with other solar-powered women.
We do not look down on you as we levitate.
Flying is a shortcut, naturally supernatural.
Two flammables make a water.
Chemists don't always understand alchemists.
We keep the God in it, changing the world and diapers, because we are magical and can't seem to take a day off.
We weep and we sweep.
Do you deserve this Black goddess?
Could you serve this Black goddess?
Say her name, display her name.
Do me a favor, sashay her name.
That goddess from the colored board.
Those people, no country to call ours, been in the valley so long, it is made of our bones, doing our best three-fifths of a person, impression.
You see me every day, but you do not know me.
Name something Black people do on Sundays.
Name something Black people do when they scared.
What's the news?
Baltimore girl can't get good healthcare.
New day, same old.
Corporations are our body, protected more than this body, gentrified cells worth more outside her body than her whole body intact.
Carefully cultivate that cell division.
Ignore my children.
Just a dark (bleep) carcass, shadows, shouting.
It's my people waiting for a miracle to fall out the sky.
And if not, then for the sky to fall as, the beat drops.
I do not love to see the Black snatch back from the stars and thrown at their feet, turning all gray with winter winds.
Our bodies did not ask for this.
When we cried out for healing.
The Bodysnatchers versus The Goddess.
Doctors had to lie to themselves, that our pain threshold was higher.
Imagine thinking slaves were happy.
Imagine calling people slaves.
Surgery, theater, horror stories, won't use Nazi research but use tortured captive African research without a second thought.
We call this science.
Is this B.S.
in BS?
Basura.
You all Monday morning meeting at the party, you fine print to the friendly greeting.
You don't know what it's like to be a part of something.
You wanted to stand apart from everyone, to be in a contest to the top of a mountain of skulls, carefully measured and classified stepping stones to Nobel prizes.
You might not know what life is with your calculated death.
Killed all those mice, and sacrificed all those Black people, to say you discovered water is wet.
So you could put your names on discoveries, that had already been established by people of color from ancient times.
A piece brought to you by murderers, health brought to you by sickos, civilization brought to you by the ones who have made at least 60% of the world's animal species disappear.
Science brought to you in an atomic bomb lineage.
Are these your leaders?
Are these your healers?
Making a name for yourself with my anonymous state?
Since when was a poor Black woman worthy of your utterance?
Untitled by unknown, bought for zero dollars.
What is the smallest piece of me that you will accept?
Here I am no more.
Now take me to myself.
Got this spice, going to feed you with it.
Got this body all I own, gonna gift it.
Feeding cousins with bread pudding, feeding the world with her womb, racking up miles, dragging halos around.
Put this weight on her wings and watch her fold, laundry.
Why was Earth our assignment again?
Leaving this paradise for workaholics.
A vacation from the blues had to send her children on to a future without her.
At the crossroads of stress and emergency laughter, keeping riot fires to herself, constantly battling poverty with our sense of infinite possibilities, created ourselves to endure, to race spaceships, and time travel.
Thank you for noticing.
Do you deserve this Black goddess?
Could you serve this Black goddess?
Say her name, display her name.
Do me a favor, sashay, her name.
LIZ PRISLEY: I wrote my first suicide note at the age of 13.
By 15, I composed an entire notebook.
My 10th-grade English teacher thought that I was troubled, but no number of parent-teacher conferences could find a solution.
See, I was mourning a loss I hadn't yet identified, struggling with an identity, I didn't yet understand.
Tell me, what does it mean to be a woman?
So I have a poem called "Suicide Note."
I was looking back at middle school, high school creative writing that I found in a folder when I was cleaning out a drawer and was trying to remember it, you know, 'cause nothing was that hard in my life.
My parents were still happily married, like we had a happy home.
See, when I was six, I measured my self-worth and fireflies blanket forts, and kisses from my dad.
And I was like, what was I so upset about at 13?
And so I was trying to think like what was going on.
And the more I dug, the more I realized that I was grappling with, you know, being found physically attractive for the first time.
And being sexualized as like a middle and high school girl.
And like, it just weighed really heavily on me trying to like, figure out how to navigate the world as a person.
See, by 16, I'd exchanged fireflies for desire shining in boy's eyes, blanket forts for some spindly teenage arms, and daddy kisses for foreign lips of approval, where satisfaction is found in the meeting of lips, the pressing of hips, the probing of somebody else's fingertips into places that I didn't know of a mind to begin with.
And so I think some of the lines in that poem resonate with a lot of women who've had similar experiences.
My name's Liz Prisley.
I'm a spoken word poet, and the executive director of Heard Em Say, a youth arts collective, a nonprofit, that empowers young people through creative arts and spoken word poetry.
I've always enjoyed poetry, but it wasn't until I found spoken word that it resonated more.
A lot of academic poetry spaces made me feel like I couldn't talk about my lived experiences, or I feel passionately about kind of like this social justice lens to talking about poetry.
And that was really absent from a lot of my college and high school poetry spaces.
And so it wasn't until that element was there in the spoken word community that it just like really connected for me, I think.
MARTINE COLLIER: One of the things that I love the most about this community is the diversity of the art forms and the number of young emerging artists.
Uh, and I guess I would put Liz in that category, that are kind of bubbling up, especially as we're coming out of this pandemic, to be able to give voice to your fears, to the anxiety we've experienced, to the isolation, to everything.
What a wonderful role for, for poets to play in this and this is kind of Liz's thing.
She really wants to kind of bridge those gaps and open up more people.
Um, and of course, her work with Heard Em Say, uh, working with youth has been great.
LIZ: I've been an educator of some kind since grad school, so I thought I was gonna study to teach college English and essay writing.
And then, uh, I'd always loved poetry.
And I got into spoken word, and so I thought, okay, let me use my educator teaching abilities in this space too.
And I think some of those degrees helped me get in the door in spaces where the community wanted to teach spoken word.
But you know, that like educator background helped open that door.
And so then I started working with Wally B who founded Heard Em Say, back in 2007.
And I joined him in 2012, and it's been magic ever since.
WALLY B: Liz comes from the kind of traditional, uh, academic side of poetry.
Whereas with people like myself, I'm from the contemporary spoken word, art side.
And so one of the areas that I've worked on as a teaching artist is helping to bridge that gap.
And so meeting Liz was really a great revelation and opportunity to really understand the inner workings of the academic side.
LIZ: 'Cause since the age of 13, I have been slowly killing myself, with these beauty magazines, as blades dragged up my wrist, or push-up bra straps wrapped around my neck, fumes of perfume and synthetic desire choking my breath, my manifesto became my poetry.
It is the only suicide note that I have ever left, and with my own hand on the trigger holding this gun to my temple, will somebody tell me, is this what it means to be a woman?
WALLY B: The thing that I really love is she is fearless in all areas.
She's not afraid to hold herself accountable.
And, and she's not afraid to hold you accountable no matter who you are.
She will check your privilege because she's not afraid to check her privilege.
She's not afraid to utilize her privilege and position and the things that she has at her advantage in a way to advocate and serve as an ally for other groups and individuals.
LIZ: An internal memorandum to all White people, myself included.
I love the audience reaction of snaps when a line resonates.
Nobody needs our tears or our guilt or our ignorance or our disbelief.
Making racism all about us is only harming the very people we are claiming to help.
You know so I find I do that in my life now, just when I'm listening to some, I'm like, oh yeah, so tell me more about that.
Um, with snaps, which you know, is maybe weird for non-poetry audience.
We have to stop hiding our hatred behind self-defense.
We have to stop pretending like we don't know the rules when we wrote them.
We have to stop teaching God in our own image.
We just can't replicate like the vibe of an audience who's supporting you and cheering you on and clapping for you, and then walking into that crowd afterwards and having people say, "Oh, that was so great, thank you so much for that."
Or, like, the conversations that get sparked afterwards are just so fulfilling and like so affirming, and it's really hard to replicate that on Zoom.
But gone is the glow of fireflies.
And if I could only find that blanket to cover this skin, if Daddy ever knew where this mouth has been, well, it's probably why he stopped giving kisses years ago.
My advice for creatives would be to just trust yourself.
I think if you're a creative, you're going to create if you give yourself space.
Oftentimes we're just over-scheduled and drained and exhausted and like that is not ideal creative time.
And so I think like carving out as much of your day as possible to be creative and then just believe in whatever you create, even if you think it's awful at the time.
Because I think everything sounds funny until it doesn't.
And you know, it sounds awful until it hits.
And I think just trusting yourself and, and giving yourself the space to write terribly until it's good.
Because it will be.
Because since the age of 13, I have been mourning the loss of my ability to ever be a woman.
And now at 34, I am struggling to decide if I could ever just be.
JESSICA HELEN LOPEZ: So, there's so much imagery in your poetry, how do you use poetry to tell a story?
MARGARET RANDALL: I want the readers of my poems to feel as if they are in the place and of the time of the poem.
So I like trying to put the reader there.
So that's, that's one way.
And then another way I think is since I did oral history for so long, just bringing the voices of ordinary people into my poems, I think that helps make that connection.
JESSICA: And why do you think that's important?
MARGARET: Because I think that's where real poetry lies, you know, that's where it lives.
JESSICA: Mm-Hmm.
MARGARET: So, uh, so yes, I think that uh, if we learn to listen to the way people speak to the way they express themselves, all different kinds of people poetry can do that, it can, um, introduce us to other people, other places, other times.
JESSICA: How is imagery a portal for that?
MARGARET: Well, you know, if you, if you are writing about a tree, and you call it a tree, it's a tree.
But if you call it an oak or you call it a weeping willow, or you call it a palm tree, um, that sort of puts the reader right there.
So I think that the more detail you can get in your images, the more specificity, um, that helps, you know.
JESSICA: Transports them magically.
MARGARET: Yeah, hopefully.
"Made Rich by Art and Revolution."
When I am gone and August comes to my desert, rain will soak sand, its rich scent rising to enter the lungs of another mother or walker, someone whose intention and desire, I cannot know.
When I am gone this painting of little islands, miniature trees, and birds floating in a magical sea of blue will hang in someone else's house.
Will that person tell the story of poor Nicaraguan peasants, made rich by art and revolution?
A granddaughter may inherit my turquoise earrings.
The clay pans I've used for years, their pungency filling the house, will offer up a new generation of bread.
Someone not yet born may read this poem, but who will ask the questions born of the answers I juggle today?
Who will know the heat of this great love or catch fragments of my memory reassembling just before dawn?
JESSICA: What do you mean in your poem by citing "the poor Nicaraguan is made rich by art during revolution?"
MARGARET: It's a reference to, um, a poet named Ernesto Cardenal great, uh, still living Latin American poet, Nicaragua poet, he had a community, uh, on a tiny island on the Lake of Nicaragua where he got the, the farmers, the peasants who lived on that island together, uh, to read poetry, to, uh, hear poetry, to paint.
In the poem, there's a reference to a painting, it's a painting by one of those, by an older woman who, uh, had never had a paintbrush in her hand before.
And so these people were extraordinarily poor, I mean, really, really poor, uh, poorer than most, uh, peasants in most places because they lived isolated on this little island, and they were barely subsistence.
And the art that, that they began to make, the poems that they began to write made them rich.
And it was the revolution that gave them that the Sandinista revolution back in the '80s.
And so I'm, I'm referring to that, I'm referring to their lives being made rich by art and revolution.
Art that they made.
JESSICA: But when you say made rich by art, uh, due to revolution, is that still this lasting legacy that exists through their art?
MARGARET: I think it is, I think it is because, and in Cuba too, you know, we just got back from Cuba, uh, a week or so ago, and, um, it's extraordinary how poor these countries are compared with the United States, and yet how much of their, of their, their gross national product they spend on culture and art and music and writing, and writers.
So I think that you know, the revolutions I've been part of, um, have wanted very much to have believed and believe the Cuban Revolution still believes that art and culture are necessities.
They're no less important than healthcare and education and a roof over your head and food and so forth.
So, you know, you go to one of these countries, it's extraordinarily poor, and yet, um, they subsidize books.
They, you know, they pay their artists to make art.
Um, and so I think that's something that as a poet, as an artist myself, has always just thrilled me about those revolutionary experiences.
JESSICA: So it's this richness of life and experience, what's the wisdom behind this poem?
MARGARET: You know, in this poem, I'm really talking about old age.
I'm talking about, uh, I'm 82 and, you know, I feel like I'm gonna live forever, but that probably won't happen.
So, um, I'm sort of beginning to think about my grandchildren, my great-grandchildren, what I will leave to, to them, these turquoise earrings that I wear every day.
Uh, the bread pans that I make bread in, that I've made bread in for 35 years.
You know, it's a poem full of questions that it, it asks, uh, at the end, uh, who will ask the questions to my answers, you know?
JESSICA: Mm-Hmm.
MARGARET: And, uh, so it, it's about that, it's about passing it on.
JESSICA: Why poetry for you?
MARGARET: For me, poetry is like breathing.
You know, I don't, uh, I can't conceive of a life without poetry.
I would like my work to make people listen, uh, to make them speak their own words.
JESSICA: Mm-Hmm.
MARGARET: I would like my work to, um, give people joy, to get them to ask questions, difficult questions.
Um, and I always think questions are more important than answers.
Uh, I would like my work to be braided into the legacy of poetry, that the poetry you make, uh, the poetry that we have such great poets in Albuquerque and throughout the United States, so, and throughout the world.
So I want my poetry to be part of this extraordinary fabric, um, poetic fabric that exists in every language and in languages that are not written in oral languages.
Uh, so I want my poet, what I aspire to is that my poems will be strands in, in that braid, in that fabric, which is all poetry.
WENDEL: "Artworks" is made possible in part by the Citizens of Baltimore County and by the Ruth R. Marder Arts Endowment Fund, the Robert E. Meyerhoff and Rheda Becker Endowment for the Arts, the E.T.
and Robert B. Rocklin Fund, the Henry and Ruth Blaustein Rosenberg Foundation Arts Endowment in memory of Ruth Marder.
