Kwame Alexander on 'The Late Show with Stephen Colbert'

 

[I watched The Late Show, the CBS late-night talk show with Stephen Colbert as host, on Monday night, 13 January 2025.  One of Colbert’s guests was poet and writer of children’s fiction Kwame Alexander, of whom I didn’t think I’d heard.  (It turns out he’d been on The Late Show before about a year ago, but I either forgot that appearance or missed that episode.)

[Alexander’s Encyclopedia Britannica entry says:

Kwame Alexander (born August 21, 1968, New York, New York) is an American poet, author of young adult and children’s fiction, and advocate for introducing literary works and the art of writing to schoolchildren. He gained national prominence after winning the Newbery Medal in 2015 for his novel The Crossover (2014), much of which he wrote in free verse.

Alexander was born to literary parents: his father was a writer and publisher and his mother an English teacher. When he was 12 years old, his family moved to Virginia. After first studying biochemistry at Virginia Tech, Alexander switched to English and developed an interest in poetry under professor and poet Nikki Giovanni. He began his career as an editor, producing The Flow: New Black Poets in Motion (1994). Among his other literary pursuits, he founded the Alexander Publishing Group and its imprint, BlackWords Press (1995–2005). In 2019 Alexander teamed with publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to launch the Versify imprint, under which he helped choose children’s books to publish.

Alexander’s first poetry collection for adults, Just Us: Poems and Counterpoems, 1986–1995, was published in 1995. His other collections include Kupenda: Love Poems (2000), Dancing Naked on the Floor (2005), and And Then You Know: New and Selected Poems (2009). The book Crush: Love Poems (2007) was written for young adults. In Out of Wonder (2017), Alexander and poets Chris Colderley and Marjory Wentworth created poems in celebration of 20 of their favourite poets. Ekua Holmes, who illustrated Out of Wonder, won the 2018 Coretta Scott King Book Award for her work. In 2020 Alexander published Light for the World to See: A Thousand Words on Race and Hope, a collection of poems on historic events, including the killing of George Floyd, the protests of football player Colin Kaepernick, and the election of Barack Obama as U.S. president.

Among his other writing accomplishments, Alexander wrote stories for children. Indigo Blume and the Garden City (2010) tells about a little girl and her rooftop garden. Acoustic Rooster and His Barnyard Band (2011) introduces jazz to young children through animals. Surf’s Up (2016) follows the adventures of two frogs, one who likes to read and the other who likes to surf. In Animal Ark: Celebrating Our Wild World in Poetry and Pictures (2017), Alexander contributed verse to go along with photographs of animals. Published in 2019, The Undefeated is an homage to Black life in the United States. The book was named a Newbery Honor Book in 2020. Kadir Nelson, who illustrated The Undefeated, won the Caldecott Medal and the Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award in 2020 for his artwork.

Alexander also wrote books for an older audience. He Said, She Said (2013), for teens, explores the relationship between two seniors in high school: a football player and a social activist. Alexander’s award-winning book The Crossover follows a year in the lives of twin African American 12-year-old boys and their love of basketball. Rebound (2018) is a prequel to The Crossover, focusing on the twins’ father. In Booked (2016), Alexander again used free verse—this time, to explore a boy’s relationship with his family and friends as he navigates a soccer injury, bullying, and his reluctance to read. Working with novelist James Patterson, Alexander combined prose and poetry in Becoming Muhammad Ali (2020), a fictionalized retelling of the boxer’s youth. Solo (2017) and Swing (2018), both written with Mary Rand Hess, deal with weightier topics, such as drug addiction and social divisions, respectively. In 2022 Alexander published The Door of No Return, the first novel in a trilogy about a boy living in what is now Ghana who becomes entrapped in the transatlantic slave trade.

Alexander also wrote about the technical aspects of being an author. He published Do the Write Thing: Seven Steps to Publishing Success (2002) with Nina Foxx. In The Write Thing (2018), he discussed how writing workshops can benefit school-age children.

Besides writing, Alexander has been active in community-based initiatives. In 2006 he founded Book-in-a-Day, a nonprofit educational literacy service. The organization helps to promote reading and writing skills by encouraging children to write poetry and publish their work. In 2012 Alexander cofounded the Literacy Empowerment Action Project (LEAP), which is dedicated to increasing educational opportunities in Ghana. He is also a frequent contributor to Morning Edition, the daily news program on National Public Radio.

[In any case, I was very impressed with him as a talk show guest.  He had a charming and engaging personality and was a great raconteur, so I thought, if I could find a transcript of his interview, I'd run it on Rick On Theater.  I did find one, but it wasn’t like the News Hour transcripts I’m used to—these are full of errors and have no speaker identifications (except "Stephen" for the host, and a symbol for the guest, but no name, and no formatting).  So there was a lot of editing to do, and then I needed to listen to the video to fix all the mistranscriptions and gobbledygook.  (The transcription is clearly machine-generated and no human checked it.)

[So, I re-edited the transcript, which aside from the errors, had little punctuation, so I pretty much repunctuated it as well.  So what you’re about to read is about half computer-created and half mine.]

STEPHEN COLBERT: Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen!

My friends, my next guest is a New York Times best-selling author of 42 books, who has won the Newbery Medal [2015; for “the most distinguished contributions to American literature for children” for The Crossover, his children’s novel in verse] and an Emmy Award [The Crossover (2023) for Outstanding Young Teen Series; on Disney+].  His new book is How Sweet the Sound [Little, Brown and Company, 2025].  Please welcome back to The Late Show, Kwame Alexander!

[CHEERS, APPLAUSE, AND MUSIC.] 

We love poets on The Late Show.  We love having the artists on here who paint the pictures with the words and the rhythm and inflection and unexpected twists and turns and combinations, and I’m just curious: you as a poet—what is it that first drew you to poetry?  When did you discover poetry as a human being?

KWAME ALEXANDER: I was three years old.

COLBERT: You remember!

ALEXANDER: I remember.  I was living on the Upper West Side.  My parents were in graduate school at Columbia University.  My mother read to me every day—Lucille Clifton [African-American poet, writer, and educator; 1936-2010], Nikki Giovanni [African-American poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator; 1943-2024], and Langston Hughes [African-American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist; 1901-67].

But my favorite book was a book that went like this: “Fox / Socks / Knox / Box / Fox in socks / Socks in box” [Dr. Seuss, Fox in Socks (Random House, 1965)].  So, ummm . . . at my preschool, there was this kid who didn't like me, and one particular day, I built a castle out of wooden blocks to show my mother so she’d be proud of me when she came to pick me up, but this kid knocked ’em over.  So I went up to him and I used the only weapons I had.  Those were my blocks that you flipped.  Lest you want some quick payback, better fix my quick blocks stack.  [LAUGHTER.]  And he started crying.  [LAUGHTER.]  And so, when my mother came to school, the teacher was like, “Mrs. Alexander, we have a problem.  Your son Kwame is arrogant.  He intimidates all the kids with his words,” and my mother said, “Thank you.”

[NOTE: Alexander recited the Dr. Seuss lines from memory, but he misquoted it slightly.  He did the same with the Nikki Giovanni poem below.  In both cases, I’m transcribing verbatim what the poet said on camera, then I’ll post the correct verses as published in an afterword below.    ~RICK]

[CHEERS AND APPLAUSE.]

COLBERT: Mission accomplished!  

You were last here [on 1 February 2024] for your collection of poetry This Is the Honey [Little, Brown and Company, 2020].  You now have How Sweet the Sound: A Soundtrack for America.  This is your 42nd book—who’s counting—and many of your books are for kids.  Do you change anything in the way you write, if the book is for children as opposed to a general public?

ALEXANDER: Not really.  I try to write books that I would have wanted to have read when I was four or ten or 12 and I would love now.  So I’m writing about topics that I think families can read and enjoy together, but certainly, I have a soft spot in my heart for young people because I believe that the mind of an adult begins in the imagination of a child, and what better way to enhance . . . elevate that imagination than through the words on a page.

[CHEERS AND APPLAUSE.]

COLBERT: The book is a love letter, How Sweet the Sound . . . [APPLAUSE] . . . the book is a love letter to music.  What makes up the soundtrack to America to you?

ALEXANDER: Well, I believe it’s a symphony of refuge, it’s a score of redemption, it’s a . . . .  Last night I was at the Blue Note [Jazz Club, Greenwich Village] and I saw Sweet Honey in the Rock [all-female, African-American a cappella ensemble].  

COLBERT: Oh.  [SINGS:] “We all . . . everyone of us . . .” [We All . . . Every One of Us, 1983].

ALEXANDER: They sang that. 

COLBERT: They did?

ALEXANDER: Yeah.  And I don't care where you are from, what you are feeling . . . when you hear music, music can heal, it can give you hope.  It can open up a world of possibility, which is what the same thing I think children's books do.

COLBERT: Poetry and lyrics are . . . well, what is the difference to you?  Are they the same thing?

ALEXANDER: No.  I think maybe they are cousins.  Maybe they are kissing cousins. [LAUGHTER – ALEXANDER LAUGHS – MORE LAUGHTER.]  Imagine this, Stephen: lyrics, when they are done right, they need a beautiful guitarist, they need a sax player.  They need musicians to help elevate those words that are on the page.

COLBERT: They’re in relationship to the music that they’re dancing with. 

ALEXANDER: Poetry is the whole band.  Like, you have to do it all in those words on the page.  And I think that makes it special. 

COLBERT: Have you written lyrics?

ALEXABDER: Umm . . . not successfully.

COLBERT: You’ve given it a shot.

ALEXANDER: I’ve given it a shot, and that's when I found out they’re not the same.

COLBERT: One of those first poets that was read to you, the acclaimed poet Nikki Giovanni, passed away a few weeks ago [d. 9 December 2024; one of the world’s best-known African-American poets], and I know that she was your mentor.  How did the two of you become close?  That’s an extraordinary experience, to become close to someone who influenced you when you were 3.

ALEXANDER: Well, I met her in 1987.  This was the beginning of our relationship.  I was a sophomore at a place called Virginia Tech [Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg; Giovanni was University Distinguished Professor Emerita at VPI since December 2022].  And she was a visiting professor.  Me, deeming myself a pretty fantastic poet, took her advanced poetry class. 

I think she gave me a C-minus. [LAUGHTER] And so, I was livid and I went to her office and I—I had just discovered jazz music—and so I went and sat down in her office during office hours and I said, I don’t understand why I got a C-minus.  I’m a poet.  I listen to Nancy Wilson [jazz singer; 1937-2018] and I’m channeling my inner jazz and I know what I’m doing.  And she said, “Kwame, I can teach you how to write poetry, but I cannot teach you how to be interesting.”

[LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE.]

COLBERT: Oh-ho!  I felt that.

ALEXANDER: That was the beginning of a 37-year relationship.

COLBERT: Are there any words of hers that you would like to leave us with here tonight?

ALEXANDER: Yeah.  Can the band join me on this?

COLBERT: Yeah!  Can you guys . . . [MUSIC.]

ALEXANDER: I know you just wrote a cookbook with your wife [Stephen Colbert and Evie McGee Colbert, Does This Taste Funny? (Celadon Books, 2024)], so you might find this apropos.

COLBERT: Okay.

ALEXANDER: It’s called “Still Life with Apron” [in Chasing Utopia: A Hybrid (William Morrow, 2013)] by Nikki Giovanni. 

I would like to see you
Cooking
I would like for you to cook
For me
I would like to see you decide
Upon the menu
Go to the market
And pick the fruit
The vegetables
The fish
I would like to see you smell the fish I would like for you to Test the
     flesh for freshness and firmness
I would like to watch you
In the bakery by the dinner rolls
Deciding: Rolls or Crusty Bread
I would like to watch you run back
To get the Goat Butter
 
I would like to be sitting in a corner
And you
Intent upon your meal
Not noticing me
When you go to the wine store
I would like to watch you wrestle with red or white wine
Of course, because it is fish, but red
Is so Seductive and who ever fell in love
Over a glass of white wine?  [LAUGHTER]
 
I—uncharacteristically on time—
Would like to greet you
I would like for you to greet me
In a butcher’s apron
I would like for you to greet me only
In an apron
I would like to watch the movement inside the
     apron
As I undress for you
I would like to watch you walk
No
Stroll to the closet
Where you bring out your buffalo plaid
     dressing gown
Your pilly much-washed dressing gown that
     smells like you
After you shower After you brush your teeth
After you comb your hair
I would like to embrace your odor
I would like to embrace
Your essence as we sit down to eat
I would like you to cook for me
Yes
I would like that
Very much

[CHEERS AND APPLAUSE.]

COLBERT: Thank you for that.  How Sweet the Sound is available tomorrow!

Kwame Alexander, everybody!  We will be right back!

[The verse from Dr. Seuss’s Fox in Socks goes like this (I’ll try to duplicate its original typography as well):

Fox
Socks
Box
Knox
Knox in box.
Fox in socks.
Knox on fox in socks on box.

 [Nikki Giovanni’s 2013 poem “Still Life with Apron” (as published in Chasing Utopia; again, I’ll attempt to replicate the poets format and typography):

I would like to see you
Cooking
I would like for you to cook
For me
I would like to see you decide
Upon a menu
Go to the market
And pick the fruit
The vegetables
The fish
I would like to see you smell the fish Test the
     flesh for freshness and firmness
I would like to watch you
In the bakery
In the bakery by the dinner rolls
Deciding: Rolls or Crusty Bread
I would watch you run back
To get the Goat Butter
 
I would like to be sitting in a corner
And you
Intent upon your meal
Not noticing me
When you go to the wine store
I would watch you wrestle with red or white
White, of course, because it’s fish, but red
Is Seductive and who ever fell in love
Over a glass of white wine?  
 
I—uncharacteristically on time—
Would like you to greet me
In a butcher’s apron
I would like to watch you greet me only
In an apron
You would ask me to undress
To undress for you
Before I sit down at the beautiful table
Before you hand me my glass
You would ask me to undress
I would like to watch you watch me
Undressing for you
I would like to watch the movement inside the
     apron
As I undress for you
I would like to watch you walk
No
Stroll to your closet
Where you bring out your old buffalo plaid
     dressing gown
Your pilly much-washed dressing gown that
     smells like you
After you brush your teeth
After you shower After you comb your hair
I would like to embrace your odor
Your odor Your essence as we sit down to eat
I would like for you to cook for me
I would like that
Very much

[And for those interested in Alexander’s new book, How Sweer the Sound, which brought him to The Late Show earlier this week, here’s a review from Kirkus Reviews, 12 October 2024:

HOW SWEET THE SOUND

by Kwame Alexander; illustrated by Charly Palmer

A work whose lyrical and artistic genius only becomes more apparent upon rereads.

A journey through American music history as shaped by Black artists and traditions.

Fittingly, given the U.S.’s long and complicated racial history, this work takes its title from the beloved hymn “Amazing Grace,” written by a slave trader turned abolitionist [John Newton (English; 1725-1807)]. The book begins on the African plains: “Listen to the fireside chorus / of the motherland / to the talking drums / dancing beneath the gold sun / that beat a bold tapestry / of yesterday’s stories / and tomorrow’s dreams.” Likewise, the author has created a beautiful tapestry, woven with song titles and musical references. With each introduction to a different genre, he implores readers to “listen.” Laced with powerful imagery, alliteration, and onomatopoeia (“BUM-DUN! BUM-DUN!”), his verse begs to be sung. Taking a comprehensive approach, Alexander explores regional styles such as go-go alongside internationally known genres, including gospel, jazz, and hip-hop. Palmer’s distinctive illustrations offer the perfect accompaniment. Bold colors set the mood, while his brush strokes evoke movement and convey strong emotion as he depicts everything from enslaved people joyfully dancing in New Orleans’ Congo Square to fists raised high for Black power to performances by Chuck Berry [1926-2017], Prince [1958-2016], Lauryn Hill [b. 1975], and other musicians. Detailed backmatter defines terms and explains the significance of the music referenced.

A work whose lyrical and artistic genius only becomes more apparent upon rereads. (Informational picture book. 5-10)

[How Sweet the Sound is available through Amazon ($17.09), Barnes & Noble ($18.99), Strand Book Store ($18.99), and Books of Wonder ($18.99).]

Music & Moods – Poetry & Pain

 

[I’m posting two transcripts from segments of the PBS NewsHour from last month.  The first one, below from 24 October 2022, is from two student reporters who explored the connection between music and our moods.  (“Music,” as I’m sure you’ve heard, “has charms to soothe the savage breast” – William Congreve, The Mourning Bride, 1697.) 

[I’m pairing it with the text of a slightly earlier segment on Afghan poets and how they find hope through their poetry even in exile from Afghanistan.]

“EXPLORING THE CONNECTION BETWEEN OUR BRAINS, OUR MOODS AND MUSIC”

Have you ever wondered why a piece of music makes you feel a certain way? As part of our Student Reporting Labs’ ongoing look at youth mental health, student journalists John Barnes and Brigitte Bonsu explore the connection between our brains, music and our moods. It’s for our arts and culture series, “CANVAS.”

Judy Woodruff:  Have you ever wondered why a piece of music makes you feel a certain way?

Well, as part of our Student Reporting Labs’ ongoing look at youth mental health, student journalists John Barnes and Brigitte Bonsu explore the connection between our brains, music and our moods.

That’s for our arts and culture series Canvas.

John Barnes:  Hey, Brigitte. How was your day?

Brigitte Bonsu:  I don’t know. I feel like I never have time for myself.

John Barnes:  Haven’t you been playing the cello?

Brigitte Bonsu:  No. How about you?

John Barnes:  My day wasn’t too bad. I was actually playing this really peaceful and calming song last night.

Brigitte Bonsu:  I know how that feels. I always felt that way when I played the cello.

John Barnes:  Wait. You were there the whole time?

So, how does rhythm affect our mood? That is, why does me talking like this feel different emotionally than me talking like this?

Dr. Bruce D. Perry, Northwestern University:  That probably starts in utero, when the little fetus is developing.

There’s this rhythmic input. Our maternal heart rate, the aorta and the heart sort of tap on the diaphragm. And so three different sensory routes, vibration, touch and sound, have this syncopated rhythm that is continuous.

And so the brain essentially comes to connect pattern, repetitive, rhythmic, sensory input with being safe and regulated.

John Barnes:  That may be why we pace around before giving a big speech or tap our feet to a rhythm when we’re nervous.

Brigitte Bonsu:  So, what about lyrics? How do they affect us?

Dr. Adenike Webb, Temple University:  When I work with clients to write songs, I often start with the words first with them before we get into the music.

Brigitte Bonsu:  This is Dr. Webb and Dr. Thomas, music therapists I spoke to about the significance of lyrics.

Dr. Adenike Webb:  You know, when there’s a song that’s like, I am so sad right now, I don’t have words for it, but this singer does, or reminding us we’re not alone in whatever were feeling.

Brigitte Bonsu:  So how do we use music to make us feel better in our daily lives?

John Barnes:  Try taking breaks to do little rhythmic activities throughout the day.

Dr. Bruce D. Perry:  Calligraphy or doodle in a lecture, graphic use of your hands, it’s rhythmic, and it has the same rhythms as conversation, the same rhythms as being rocked as a baby.

Brigitte Bonsu:  And you can also try what Dr. Thomas calls the tunnel playlist.

Dr. Natasha Thomas, Purdue University:  A lot of times, in our, like, anxiety spirals or depression episodes, there’s a moment when you know you are going into it.

Then we think about, OK, when you’re in the tunnel, when you’re in those deepest, darkest moments, what music can help affirm where you are and not make you feel like there’s pressure to get out of it, but just sort of be with you?

John Barnes:  Our last tip, try playing some music yourself.

When the pandemic happened, I spent a lot more time learning guitar and songwriting. Music can help us make sense and relate to events, and when we know that other people are going through it. So it kind of helps us feel seeing. When everything comes together perfectly, it’s just euphoria.

(CROSSTALK)

John Barnes:  Thank you. Thank you so much.

Brigitte Bonsu:  When I play and I really focus on a note or a section in a piece, I feel like, actually, I play 10 times better, and I really like that experience. and it just makes me feel more empowered.

Music lets me know that I can get better.

Judy Woodruff:  Some of us would never play an instrument, but it is so inspiring to watch these young people.

[John Barnes, a member of the Class of 2025 at the University of Virginia, is a filmmaker, songwriter, and actor from Arlington, Virginia.  He has completed two fellowships with PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs.

[In 2021, Brigitte Bonsu was one of eight students from the Washington, D.C., area to join the PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs for its annual Homegrown fellowship.  She is now studying English as a member of Roanoke, Virginia’s Hollins University Class of 2025.]

*  *  *  *
“AFGHAN POETS FIND INSPIRATION IN EXILE, USING ART TO CHANNEL THEIR PAIN”
by Ali Rogin 

[The transcript below is from a 14 October 2022 segment of the PBS NewsHour broadcast.]

Judy Woodruff:  Poetry has a special place in the heart of Afghans. It has played a prominent role from the country’s ancient history to its present day.

But when the Taliban took over, many of Afghanistan’s most popular poets had to flee. They are now figuring out how to find inspiration in exile.

Ali Rogin talked to several masters of the art for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Ali Rogin:  In post-Taliban Afghanistan, the new constitution was written in prose. But the idea of the new Afghanistan, peaceful, pluralistic and democratic, was cloaked in poetry, starting with the lyrics of the new national anthem written in 2006.

Abdul Bari Jahani, Author, Afghan National Anthem:  This is Afghanistan. And this is the honor of every Afghan. This is the home of the soul. And this is the home of the peace.

Ali Rogin:  It’s such a hopeful message.

Abdul Bari Jahani:  Thank you.

Ali Rogin:  Was that intentional?

Abdul Bari Jahani:  Yes.

Ali Rogin:  Abdul Bari Jahani is one of Afghanistan’s most prominent contemporary poets. He’s spent most of his adult life in the United States, fleeing Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion in 1979. Since then, he’s wielded his most powerful weapons, his pen and his voice.

Abdul Bari Jahani:  This was – all the artists and the poets and the writers were doing their part in the jihad or in the – in fighting against occupiers. In the same role, deeply against the civil war after the Soviet withdrawal, poets were opposed to the Taliban too.

Ali Rogin:  Above all, Jahani wrote about the need for Afghans of all ethnicities to unite, a theme that the then new President Hamid Karzai wanted to promote in the new anthem.

Abdul Bari Jahani:  It’s about the pride we have taken in our country, in our history, in our – our present.

Ali Rogin:  Karzai’s choice of a well-known Pashto-language poet was also deliberate. Poetry is central to Afghanistan’s past and present, not just as a storytelling method, but as part of the story.

One of the most famous examples, Malalai of Maiwand, the namesake of Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai. In 1880, Afghans were fighting their second war against the British. During the battle of Maiwand, the soldiers grew demoralized. Malala roused them with a stirring short poem in the Pashto language known as a landay.

Person (reciting off screen):  “Young love. If you do not fall in a Battle of Maiwand, by God, someone is saving you as a symbol of shame.”

Ali Rogin:  These types of verses [i.e., landays], usually written by women, are what drew Shafiqa Khpalwak to poetry.

Shafiqa Khpalwak, Poet:  It’s a way of resistance for women. It has been throughout the history against patriarchy.

Ali Rogin:  But patriarchy was part of the Taliban. When it came to power in the mid-1990s, women were largely erased from public life.

So too were modern music and poetry, except for the Taliban’s own, which fixated on war and martyrdom. When the Taliban fell in early 2002, Khpalwak was 8 years old. As a student and poet, she flourished. In 2014, Khpalwak recited a poem at the presidential palace, paying tribute to another symbol of Afghan national unity, the flag.

Shafiqa Khpalwak:  I kind of glorified the flag as the flag of a land where there was love, it is free, it is prosperous, it is flourishing, it is youth, it is beautiful.

The Taliban website wrote about that, that this is a very erotic poem, and [that] she actually disrespected the Afghan flag.

Ali Rogin:  The poem, “My Flag Is Made of Colors,” became a surprise hit, catapulting Khpalwak to fame.

Shafiqa Khpalwak:  I was not expecting that it would go that viral.

I think it was one of the most important events of my life.

Ali Rogin:  In those years, the poetry scene that Khpalwak was part of embodied modern Afghanistan. Men and women took part in sher jangi, a traditional game that’s a mix between a poetry slam and a rap battle, like this one Kabul University in May 2021.

Just three months later, all of those forms of expression and the drive for gender equality were lost when the Taliban took over Kabul and the Americans withdrew. Khpalwak escaped Afghanistan and is now in Canada. One year on, she feels no more settled.

Shafiqa Khpalwak:  I think I’m not only exiled from my country, but I’m exiled from myself.

Ali Rogin:  For now, she has put down her pen.

Shafiqa Khpalwak:  This grief is so – it’s like an ocean. It’s drowning me. And I don’t know how to swim.

Ali Rogin:  Sometimes, though, grief inspires, as it did for poet and singer Goodar Zazai. Now living in Pakistan, he wrote “Akh Watan Watan,” “Oh, Homeland,” after celebrating his first Eid holiday away from loved ones.

Goodar Zazai, Musician:  We had lost our homeland. So, in a very disturbed and crying state, I wrote the poem “Akh Watan Watan,” and then I was able to sing it with music.

Ali Rogin:  Back under Taliban rule, popular music is once again considered sinful.

Jahani’s national anthem no longer plays, nor does the tricolor flag fly. But Jahani says that’s just Afghan history running its course.

Abdul Bari Jahani:  This is the luck of the – of the Afghans. Whichever party comes to power, they change the flag, they change the coins, they change the banknotes, they change the constitution.

Ali Rogin:  What remains is the desire for knowledge and freedom. Some women have opened unofficial schools to teach girls beyond grade six, when the Taliban says they must stop learning.

And a favorite act of public protest, gathering to read.

Do you believe that will continue, despite the Taliban being in power again?

Shafiqa Khpalwak:  Oh, yes, of course. This is how we survive. This is how we survive. And we will survive.

Goodar Zazai:  Those who think they can destroy our identity, culture and music by removing artists and poets should think again. No one can take Afghanistan from us. And each of us can work for our people in our professions from any corner of the world.

Ali Rogin:  The Taliban may have reconquered the country, but, in Afghanistan, history shows that the pen always outlives the sword.

For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Ali Rogin.

Judy Woodruff:  It’s an enduring reminder the pen does outlive the sword.

Thank you, Ali.

[Ali Rogin is a correspondent for PBS NewsHour Weekend and a foreign affairs producer at the PBS NewsHour, writing and reporting pieces for TV and the web.  Her reports have also appeared on MSNBC, ABC, SiriusXM, and nationally-syndicated FM radio shows..  Rogin joined NewsHour from ABC News in 2019, where she spent five years covering Congress and other beats in Washington, D.C.]

Mac Wellman

[About a year ago, the New York Times published an article about playwright Mac Wellman (Antigone, 2004; Second-Hand Smoke, 1997; The Hyacinth Macaw, 1994; A Murder of Crows, 1992) as a teacher at Brooklyn College.  His teaching techniques and his tutorial points about playwriting are very reminiscent of his own writing—not just in his play scripts, but also in his essays about theater. 

[I‘ve seen three of Wellman’s plays (Sincerity Forever, 1990; Hyacinth Macaw; Energumen, 1985) and an anti-Iraq war collage called Collateral Damage to which Wellman contributed in 1991.  (I posted a brief report on Energumen in “I’m So Confused . . . !” on 4 July 2012,  Unhappily, there’s no report on Hyacinth Macaw.)  As part of my research on Leonardo Shapiro, the founder and director of The Shaliko Company on whom I’ve written many times now on Rick On Theater, I looked into another Wellman play, Whirligig, which Shaliko commissioned.  For that same research, I also read Wellman’s wonderful—but idiosyncratic—essay “A Chrestomathy Of 22 Answers to 22 Wholly Unaskable and Unrelated Questions Concerning Political and Poetic Theater,” published originally in Yale School of Drama’s Theater magazine (Vol.  24, No. 1, 1993).

[So I’m going to republish “A Mentor Whose Only Mantra Is Oddity” by Alexis Soloski below and then close this post with my description of Whirligig.  I hope you all will find both (or at least one, please) interesting.}

“A MENTOR WHOSE ONLY MANTRA IS ODDITY”

by Alexis Soloski

[This article first appeared in print in “The Arts” section of the New York Times on 18 February 2015.]

On a recent Tuesday afternoon, Mac Wellman, the Donald I. Fine Distinguished Professor of Play Writing, sat at the head of a table in a Brooklyn College classroom. It was the first meeting of the semester, and he needed to arrange tutorials with his graduate students. He asked them to draw up a plan for the term’s work: something small, something secret. “Pick something you’re a little afraid of,” he advised in his gentle, raspy tenor.

“Pick something that scares you. Plays that are covered in fur, for instance.”

Since Mr. Wellman joined the Brooklyn College faculty in 1998, he has trained many of New York’s wildest and woolliest playwrights. Annie Baker, who won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for “The Flick,” studied with him. So did Young Jean Lee, Thomas Bradshaw, Tina Satter and members of Nature Theater of Oklahoma and the National Theater of the United States of America.

This winter and spring [i.e., 2015], JACK, a theater space in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, is devoting much of its season to recent graduates of the program. The festival is called Damnable Scribbling, a nod to Mr. Wellman’s favored appellation, the one that graces his website: Damnable Scribbler.

There are other places to study playwriting, of course. And other professors to study it with. No one sniffs at a master of fine arts degree from New York University, a certificate in playwriting from Juilliard. But Mr. Wellman’s program has the distinction of turning out audacious writers with very little in common with him or with one another. Try to find the overlap of Ms. Baker’s empathetic neorealism and Mr. Bradshaw’s scabrous provocations. Look for the intersection between Ms. Lee’s canny deconstructions of identity politics and Sibyl Kempson’s rapturous nonsense. Keep looking.

Mr. Wellman, 69, came to playwriting accidentally. As he explained over a glass of rosé at a cafe near his Park Slope apartment, he was hitchhiking in the Netherlands during a junior year abroad when the Dutch director Annemarie Prins happened to give him a ride. He gave her a few of his poems, and she asked him if he had ever considered writing plays. “No,” he told her. “I don’t like plays.” But she persisted, and he obliged her, writing plays for Dutch radio.

In his own estimation, his early poetical plays “were really pretty awful.” It took him a decade of constant theatergoing and constant practice to learn how to write. Since then, he has won three Obies and numerous grants and awards and has completed more than 80 plays, some epic and one only a single word long (“Psychopannychy”). He has written history plays, mystery plays, biographical plays, political plays, science fiction plays and plays composed of gleefully bad grammar.

He loathes what he calls “the theater of the already known” — the predictable, the formulaic, the tasteful, the complacent. As a consequence, his work is strange. He favors, as an article in the journal Postmodern Culture suggested, “wrongness, ceremony and a bit of demonism.”

There’s an exacting attention to language — every sentence, every word, every syllable — that would seem exhausting if the works weren’t so mischievous, so exultant, so fun. (He signed a scheduling email, “See you tamale!” This was not a case of autocorrect.) And he’s fond of impossible stage directions like “something strange happens” or “a furry pause.”

To Mr. Wellman’s annoyance and delight, his students tend to treat him as a cross between a favorite uncle and a minor deity. He teases them, mispronouncing their names or kidding them when they turn serious, but when he offers one of his playwriting koans — “The theater is a very strange and elusive thing to do,” he told his seminar participants — they reach for their notebooks.

Mr. Wellman and his colleague Erin Courtney, who graduated from the program in 2003, design an individual curriculum for each student. They’ll assign readings in philosophy, poetry, structural anthropology, nonsense or an early American novel about a murderous ventriloquist.

Ms. Kempson, who graduated from the program in 2007, wrote in an email: “He taught me that we have the right to read whatever the hell we want, and write whatever the hell we want, whether we’re smart, dumb, worthy, irresponsible, interesting, boring, pious, satanic or confused, and whether we ‘get it’ or not. And he’s right.”

He asks students to write bad plays, to write plays with their nondominant hands, to write a play that takes five hours to perform and covers a period of seven years. Ms. Satter recalled an exercise in which she had to write a play in a language she barely knew.

“I wrote mine in extremely limited Russian,” she wrote in an email. “Then we translated them back into English and read them aloud. The results were these oddly clarified, quiveringly bizarre mini-gems.”

Mr. Wellman explained: “I’m not trying to teach them how to write a play. I’m trying to teach them to think about what kind of play they want to write.”

Alec Duffy, the artistic director of JACK, enthusiastically described the work that emerges from the program as “plays that don’t really behave like plays, plays that feature an adventure in form.”

Mr. Bradshaw, who graduated in 2004, said in an email that Mr. Wellman is “an expert at helping you unlock your mind.”

“He’s not interested in getting you to write like him,” he added. “He never attempts to force a particular aesthetic down your throat. He wants everything that’s unique about you to emerge on the page.”

And once that singular voice emerges, Mr. Wellman will champion it. He follows the careers of his current and former students avidly. He mentioned a dozen or so in the course of an hourlong conversation. Then he sent a follow-up email mentioning more. Then a second email. Then a third. Then a fourth. At the end of the last one, he wrote that he loses sleep worrying about all the writers who haven’t yet received “the attention they deserve!”

Mr. Wellman’s own work no longer receives the attention it once did, although he’s still writing plays, as well as poetry, novels and opera librettos. He’d like to see these new works staged, though he worries about taking opportunities away from young writers like his students.

“I’ve had a lot of productions,” he said as he finished his wine. “I would like to have more. But if it means somebody I think highly of can’t get a production, I don’t need it.”

[Alexis Soloski is a contributor to the New York Times and the theater review-writer for the U.S. edition of The Guardian.  She’’s a reviewer former  for the Village Voice, and a writer for American Theater and Capitol New York. She’s a lecturer in Literature Humanities at Columbia University.]

*  *  *  *

WHIRLIGIG (1989)

[I’ve written many times now on Rick On Theater about Leonardo Shapiro and his work with The Shaliko Company, his East Village experimental theater company.  While the company began reimagining classic plays (Children of the Gods, based on several Greek tragedies; Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts; and Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, included in the first part of my “Faust Clones,” posted on 15 January 2016) and ended with company-built pieces (Strangers, examined in “Shaliko’s Strangers,” 3 March 2014; The Yellow House; Mystery History Bouffe Goof), in between Shaliko commissioned works by contemporary playwrights.   In the spring of 1989, Shapiro staged Whirligig by Mac Wellman at the Cooper Square Theatre in New York City (producer:  MaryEllen Kernaghan, music:  Charlie Morrow, set designer:  Kyle Chepulis, scenic artist:  Polly Walker, cast:  Geza Kovacs – Man, Cecil MacKinnon – Sister, Elena Nicholas [Prischepenko] – Girl, Michael Preston – Bus Man, Cathy Biro and Tess Kahmann – Girl Huns).  The play premièred from 5 April to 7 May 1989, right after Doctor Faustus.  From my research on Shapiro and Shaliko, I compiled a brief examination of this sci-fi-based play.]

From the demons of Hell in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Shaliko shifted to demons from space in Whirligig, commissioned from Mac Wellman in 1989.  Described by photographer and writer Allen Frame in a Bomb interview of Shapiro as “William Inge meets Rod Serling meets The Three Stooges,” Shaliko’s Whirligig was a display of pyrotechnical language and sight gags featuring a green-haired runaway girl at a bus station (Elena Nicholas) who meets a metallic spaceman (Geza Kovacs).  Visiting Earth to discover why we are so happy, the Man, known as a Weird, had escaped a marauding band of female space warriors, the Girl Huns (Cathy Biro and Tess Kahmann), and the Girl had run away from her goody-goody, materialistic sister (Cecil MacKinnon).  Alisa Solomon characterized the play in the Village Voice as Wellman’s “wry look at our hopeful fascination with the final frontier.” 

Not that the plot was so easy to follow, or so significant to begin with.  (The Village Voice’s Michael Feingold disparaged it as “nonsense . . . like having the first act of The Tempest suddenly followed by two reels of a schlocky Cinecittà flck about women warriors.”  The Show Business reviewer, Martin Blake, dubbed the plot “whimsical” but “at times unfocused.”)  It was Wellman’s language and the political satire, biting if sometimes obscure, that drove this production.  As James Rasenberger wrote in City Paper: “As a respected poet, Wellman understandably delights in linguistic trickery: his characters speak with twisted eloquence, turning the American idiom inside out and upside down.”  Calling the play’s language “an amazement,” Martin Blake insisted that Wellman “is a poet of formidable power and biting wit,” asserting, “Poets can make great playwrights if they pay as much attention to form and structure as they do words”—though I’m not convinced that Wellman would buy the caveat.

Like all Shaliko work, Whirligig is political—the bus stop in the middle of nowhere is Wellman’s stand-in for a fascist universe.  When the Girl describes her sister, she is describing Wellman’s idea of the American middle class:

This is my good sister, Jennifer.

Jennifer, meet Xuphus.  Xuphus meet

Jennifer.  Jennifer is a normal American

cunt.  She can’t stand the idea someone

might not want to be like her.  She hates

anybody is different, or looks different,

or aspires to strange gods.  She thinks

the Arabs should unilaterally accept UN

resolution 242.  She thinks South Africa

is America’s best friend in Africa.  She

believes in god, Somoza, Swaggart and Margaret

Thatcher.  Look at her, Xuphus, she’s a closet

religious maniac who wants to be reborn so

badly she’d blow the world up gladly.  Pleasure

is lost on her, simple fun means nothing to her.

Human life horrifies her unless it’s a famine

on TV that reminds her how much America is not doing. . . .

Further on, in a speech by the Man, Wellman evoked what is clearly his vision of the rules governing American society:

God curse those who do what is

Forbidden.  And chief among the things

which are forbidden are the combing of hair

not our way, the eating of food not to our

taste, the enactment of dramatic scenes not

to our liking, and the rubbing out of our

very being, when we have merely been

engaged in the working out of our destiny,

as described in the Big Book of Tlooth,

who you may not reckon as amounting to

a pot of piss compared to your god

Tengri, but I assure you it is not so,

because Tlooth [. . .]

is called Tlooth for good reason.  For Tlooth

is truth made manifest and angelic and eternal.

And the truth is eternal, that is why it is

called truth [. . .].

Politics aside, Whirligig was also a very physical play like much of Shaliko’s work.  The small cast included Cecil MacKinnon and Michael Preston, veteran circus performers, and Wellman created a piece for this group.  The playwright had actually been working on something very different when Shapiro told him Shaliko had gotten a grant to commission a play from Wellman. 

I met with Leo’s company, which at that time consisted of the two women, Cecil and Elena, and basically talked with them about what they wanted to do—what sort of theater they liked to do—and tried to figure out a play that . . . .  Both of them were fairly interested in physical theater.  Cecil in particular: she has a background in clown work.  So I tried to figure out something that would do that and then also allow me to do what I wanted to do with language.  And we worked on it, and the result was Whirligig.

The production was also loaded with special effects—low tech, though they may have been.  A body, for example, manages to turn up repeatedly and inexplicably in bus station lockers—among other sight gags.  Show Business’s Blake characterized the FX as “remarkable, featuring an outerspace ride to rival the Hayden Planetariums’ [sic] splashiest shows.”

With a backdrop painted by artist Polly Walker and real bus station lockers designer Kyle Chepulis found somewhere, the production ended with what City Paper reviewer called “one of the most transporting theatrical sights I’ve ever seen.”  In an interview I did with the director in 1992, Shapiro described that moment as we looked through some production photos:

The end of that show—you can’t see it, the pictures don’t show it because it was so dark . . . .  The Ride of the Valkyrie thing was done . . . .  The backdrop, you see, is these stars which are—I don’t remember what they are.  I don’t know if there were holes in the canvas or light bulbs.  I think they were light bulbs.  Anyway, at the end what I did was, I had a strobe go off and over the whole set we dropped black, velvet drops—covered the whole set.  The set disappeared [. . .] and they were covered with stars cut out of glow-tape.  And we had hit them with two strobe flashes so that it lit them as stars for five minutes.  And the last scene took five or six minutes and it was done totally in the dark with these stars, and it was totally illusionistic.  Nobody had any idea how we created this.  Nobody would have guessed it was glow-tape— something so low-tech.  And they did their choreography . . . .  They had helmets that were made out of plexiglass with tubes that had light-emitting diodes in them so their antler-things were lit.  And there was a little light on their eyes that was made by a little, tiny flashlight inside the helmet.  So their faces were lit and their antlers were lit but you couldn’t see their bodies at all.  And they’re in this infinite black and their riding horses.  [. . . .]  And the horses’ heads were hollow and they had a light inside—a colored light—and they were made by Polly.  So you could see the glowing horses’ heads and the faces and the antlers, and they’re doing this sort of riding choreography.  But they’re floating in space.  One is on a chair and one is down and low, and you can’t tell where they are, and so there’s an illusion of infinite space with these things.  It was really beautiful, but it doesn’t show up in any photographs or video because there’s literally no light.  There’s no light that goes out of anything.

           

The press, however, showed little interest.  Frame felt  that Shaliko’s Whirligig, a “highly original satire of the American scene,” was “a sleeper” that had been “underrated by critics.”  The playwright thought that had Whirligig been delayed until the fall of 1989, after he had done Bad Penny in Central Park, Whirligig would have attracted much more press attention.  After liking his first play, Wellman contended, the New York Times “didn’t like a couple of things, then they wouldn’t review me for four years during which time I did Whirligig.”  After Bad Penny, however, Wellman’s work had gotten good coverage. 

Those reviewers who did come, including Feingold of the Voice, mostly conceded that they did not understand the play, but some enjoyed the theatrics anyway; Feingold was not among these last, though Wellman recalled that other Voice critics—Erika Munk and Alisa Solomon—liked the production but did not publish full reviews.  Solomon published a capsule notice in the “Voice Choices” section of the paper in which she described the production as “[b]ending language like blues guitarists bend notes.”  In his notice, Feingold declared that “Whirligig, like earlier acts of Wellmania. rapidly reduces itself to repetitive trash entertainment, in this case the comic-book scit-fi kind.”  The play, lamented the Voice reviewer, “could have been developed into something witty, scathing, painfully true.” 

In City Paper, James Rasenberger affirmed that “the play fully lives up to its title: its plot is convoluted, its meanings obscure—Whirligig is dizzying.”  The reviewer continued, “But this is not the kind of stupefying experimental theatre that leaves one feeling numb.  You may not ‘get’ Whirligig—I sure didn’t—but it is so entertaining and electrifying that it doesn’t matter.”  In TheaterWeek, Neal E. O’Hara wrote that “boy is my head spinning” and reported that once MacKinnon’s Jennifer “arrives on the scene, the dramaturgical fireworks ignite.  And it’s not even the Fourth of July.”

Show Business’s Blake asserted that Whirligig succeeded “mostly because of [Wellman’s] masterful and imaginative use of language.”  He specified: “His monologues are not merely emotional episodes or opportunities for  character development, but twisters of words that fill the theater and set the atmosphere.”  The trade weekly’s review-writer pronounced, “The audience is hypnotized . . . .”  Comparing Whirligig with the work of Twilight Zone’s Serling, “whose influence is palpable,” Blake applauded how well, through Shapiro’s direction and design, the play “communicates a marvelous creepiness.” 

[My quotations from Whirligig were taken from the unpublished text used in the 1989 Shaliko production, but Wellman’s play was published in 1989 by the Theatre Communications Group as part of its Plays in Process series and subsequently in The Bad Infinity: Eight Plays (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).]