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HBO sits down with Def Poet Jerry Quickley . . .
HBO:
The poem you read for Def Poetry, the Bitter Ex Girlfriend Poem, can you tell us a little about how it came about?
Jerry Quickley:
I started it a few years back and wrote it in sections. I had these independent stand-alone poems that I came to realize worked better as a single piece. It helped to reveal my own sickness and stupidity. In some ways it's kind of a composite of various women who were foolish enough to allow me into their lives, and how things tended to end badly at that particular time. But I think women need to know - I am much healthier now. Ladies need to know, Jerry is okay.
HBO:
What would you attribute this change to?
Jerry Quickley:
Heroine. No, I'm joking. Self-reflection and growth and working on stuff...the ability to look at yourself and laugh at yourself, to know that you made bad decisions and bad judgments. And to know that, without a sense of humor, where would you be.
HBO:
So have any of your exes heard this poem?
Jerry Quickley:
They will now. (laughter) I've actually written about 4-5,000 poems in a series I call "The Bitter Ex Girlfriends", like #98764 is "Cats and Money." Then there's "What I did to Your Grandmother." But they're more about my own bad choices.
I'll get really nervous when I'm performing them in front of different audiences, colleges and other venues. What's really scary, frankly, is when guys come up to me afterward and identify with it. They'll say, 'You're so awesome!' I'm thinking, 'Oh my God - you didn't get it'. The misogynists don't understand that it's sarcasm and tongue in cheek, and that scares me a bit.
HBO:
Do women come up to you afterward?
Jerry Quickley:
Sometimes. I haven't had anyone come up and say, that's terrible, what were you thinking? It's more along the lines of, that was really funny, or, hey did that really happen? I'll tell them, yes, it did happen. Or someone will ask, does that woman have good therapy? Do you have that woman's phone number? Is she part of any support group? (laughter)
HBO:
So how did you get started as a spoken word performer?
Jerry Quickley:
I started MCing when I was 11 year olds. I grew up in New York during the birth of hip hop, and I feel like I won the lottery. It turned from these 10 or 15,000 kids running around the projects to what it is today. There came a point when I was about 16 or 17 when I felt constrained in some ways by the forms and structures within the form of hip hop, and I just considered it a form of poetry, like a sonnet. So I started reading other poets on my own, then in college. And I started writing in different forms more and more.
HBO:
Did you grow up in the projects?
Jerry Quickley:
No, and I felt really cheated because I didn't grow up in the projects. A good chunk of my early years were spent right next to the Stanley Isaacs projects on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. My parents were proud that we lived in a nice walk up tenement a block away, but I wanted to be in the projects. That's where most of my friends were. We also lived in one of those villages in Queens and for a time in Brooklyn, so I have a real connection with New York's institutional housing.
HBO:
You also went to private schools and to college. Sounds like you've bridged a few worlds?
Jerry Quickley:
Yeah, at one point we were in the United Nations International School, surrounded by rich diplomats' kids. But my father was like, these kids are not gonna live these ivory tower lives so my sister and I were uprooted and planted in the local ghetto school down the block. On the playground, there was this game where, if you flinched, they got to slap you in the face as hard as they could. So yeah, it's been a repeated theme and pattern in my life - bridging very different worlds.
HBO:
What's the strangest contrast or biggest divide you've experienced?
Jerry Quickley:
One of funkiest places I performed was at an Iraqi amphitheater in Babylon next to the Street of Processions. I went to Iraq before the war as a correspondent for Pacifica - then again during and after the war, or during the insurgency. But just before the war started, a group of Iraqi archeologists asked me to perform for them. Poetry is really big in Iraq. It's common for them to read poems to each other at restaurants and in coffee houses. They don't perform them before a mike, but mostly read them to friends or to each other. So I did some freestyle hip-hop for them. Two of them understood it really well, the others were just happy to see someone performing, being demonstrative. But I did a call and response, asked them to repeat stuff I was saying, and they all went along with it.
All over Iraq, when I told people I was a poet, some of them would run home and get their poems. It is really, really big there.
HBO:
Why do you think that is?
Jerry Quickley:
I think the bigger question is, why isn't it big here? Everywhere else you go in world, its huge - Kenya, South Africa, China, Tokyo, Brazil, Great Britain, Scotland. Here in America we give it short shrift. Part of it is our narrow vision commercialism, and the bad poetry that's been foisted on us.
HBO:
Do the Iraqis emulate the hip hop style of poetry?
Jerry Quickley:
Yeah, hip hop is really big in Iraq. I remember when I went back in 2003, my second trip, I got stuck in traffic. Someone was blasting 50 Cent from a cassette. It was 110 degrees and bus fumes were everywhere, and we're all in these really old cars listening to a terrible cassette of 50 Cent turned up to an unbelievable level, with American soldiers stopping us at every checkpoint. All I could think is, this is like Sartre's No Exit. This is the closest I've come to hell.
HBO:
So you've covered a pretty broad range - from Iraqi war correspondent to hip hop artist to the "bitter ex girlfriend" poetry. Is there a common thread behind your work, something that drives you to write and perform?
Jerry Quickley:
What drives me really is connecting with other artists I like. That's what inspires me, pulls new stuff out of me. I'm always trying to hook up my friends with something, either stuff that's not right for me or stuff that is, but they'd be better at it. As poets, we're all fundamentally wounded in some way. We're a pack of wordy feral velociraptors. Those Jurassic park dinosaurs. As a group we're generally so easily wounded and offended. At the same time we're so resilient. It's this paradox that takes place - outraged and angered at injustices, yet so easily wounded. Weird folk with no choice but to live and breathe and find poetry and art.
HBO:
Who are the other poets and artists that have inspired you?
Jerry Quickley:
Charles Bukowski. Kamau Daaood, who wrote the Language of Saxophone. Bob Kaufman. Ginsberg. And William Carlos Williams. But the folks who really inspire me tend to be my peers: Roger Bonair-Agard, Jeff McDaniel and Gina Loring are exceptionally talented poets. We've all performed together at different venues and most have been on Def one time or another.
HBO:
Do you remember the first time you got up to perform a poem?
Jerry Quickley:
Yeah, it was at ABC No Rio on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, 1991 or 92. I finally got up the nerve at this anarchist style reading. People would just sit around all sullen, not even acknowledging each other, no sign up list, and one by one someone would get up and read their poem. Sometimes the audience would look at you; sometimes they'd just smoke their cigarettes - no reaction or response. In some ways, it seemed so disconnected it was fine. I had been observing it for a while, sat through 8 or 9 poems. They weren't applauding shit. So I got up and read a piece about my dad, and they applauded! Someone asked me to read another one, so I did. Then I ran out of poems.
HBO:
What would you tell others who are thinking about writing and performing their work?
Jerry Quickley:
You tell yourself, I'm creating this art for me and myself. It will never, ever be shown to the world. That little fake conceit, that game that we play, can help to free you up. Don't worry about what people will think or say about it. Just try to create something that's fearless. Tell yourself, this is just for me and not for anyone else. This is from me - the world be damned!
Quickley is also the host of "Beneath the Surface" on Pacifica Networks radio every Wednesday through Friday at 5pm PCT on 90.7 in Los Angeles -- or streamed live from KPSK.org.
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