AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

VS: Ladan Osman vs. Changing Your Life

Danez Smith: She’s that sweet spot where the sweet potatoes touch the macaroni and cheese, Franny Choi. 

Franny Choi: And they’re the kimchi to my fusion burrito, Danez Smith.

Danez Smith: And you’re listening to VS, the podcast where confront the ideas that move them. 

Franny Choi: Hello, Danez Smith.

Danez Smith: Hello, Frannle. How you doing?

Franny Choi: Hello hello. I’m good. You know, just chillin’ here, trying to get some writing done. Sometimes.

Danez Smith: Oo. A task. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Yeah. Yeah. What a task, jeez. How’s writing going for you?

Danez Smith: Writing for me is local, I feel like.

Franny Choi: What do you mean by that?

Danez Smith: I just noticed that I’ve been writing about home in a major way. Having to be in Minneapolis has made like my poems like, yeah, a lot more here. And my essays and stuff like that. So that’s been like, yeah, that’s been super interesting. I feel changed as a writer. Yeah. 

Franny Choi: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Danez Smith: How about you? What you been thinking about?

Franny Choi: Well you know, I’ve been going back through some old poems recently. I mean not-not old actually, not that old. Like, the book that is my most recent book, Soft Science, came out in 2019. But 2019 feels so long ago.

Danez Smith: Yeah, and you wrote them poems in 2018 and before, you know. 

Franny Choi: Right. Yeah, exactly. And you know, sometimes it’s hard to reconnect to old poems but, you know, looking back at some of that older work and thinking about at what points I was actually kind of ahead of myself in some ways in the writing, like not necessarily in a good way. Or maybe in a good way. But like, I think that going back through old poems makes me kind of like re-confront the ways that I was maybe actually not ready to be writing that poem.

Danez Smith: Hmm.

Franny Choi: You know? Sometimes. I don’t know if you have this experience, but like going back and being like, oh, man, you were like so early in this thinking, like, you are so early in this feeling and like, the poem that you would write is like so different. I’m sure that you have this experience, yeah?

Danez Smith: Yeah, I definitely do. I can think of where the poem is sort of revealing something about your life that your life is not ready for, right.

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Danez Smith: Or a thought that your brain or your heart is not necessarily ready for. For sure. I think, you know, I actually now I’m thinking about this poem from Don’t Call Us Dead, “Crown.” I was just trying to write some sounds, you know, I was just trying to have fun with, like, words and silence and shit and images. And then all of a sudden—

Franny Choi: Because it’s a sonnet, yeah?

Danez Smith: Yeah, because it’s a sonnet. And like also like that poem sort of relishes in this like sort of like lyric, I think kind of like falling over itself that I think it does. And picking up words and different repetitions that it’s doing on the inside. But it ends up being about parenthood. And like I remember like writing that poem being like, kind of hyperventilating a little bit after, because it was the first time that I think I had really started to think about parenthood for myself and how my diagnosis had complicated or altered that for me, or like just put another pressure on it. And so it was one of those poems that, like, you know, it was like, oh, I need—where is my therapist now? 

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Danez Smith: To talk about this because—and then it’s, I think the poem portends the question like, is this me that’s actually saying this or is this just where the poem went? But where the poem went, it felt true. And I feel like I’ve had that moment a lot of times, where it feels like the first time I’m able to even start on telling the truth happens in the poems. And then I’m kind of asked to live up to who wrote that, you know, or that energy that wrote that. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Yeah. No, I feel that so much. Like I think I feel this most looking back to my first book, realizing that there are certain poems in there where I was at the beginning of thinking about them, in that like, implicated myself in them. For example, there’s a poem in there about like dating a white man. And like, kind of what it was like to like sort of look at myself as an Asian American woman dating a white man at the time. And I think like that poem was really important for my development. It felt exciting to write at the time because it was like new. It was new thinking. But I think that that newness, which is like awesome from a craft perspective, was like kind of hard on the heart, you know? And hard on like, my relationships, you know. And so, yeah, it’s not that I, like, regret writing that poem or regret sharing it, but I think that I was kind of like making a path forward for myself in a way that maybe I hadn’t yet been ready for at the time. The poem kind of helped me start to get there. Or it didn’t even necessarily put me on that path. It just like opened the path. So then I was like, looking at it, you know?

Danez Smith: It just happens, yo!

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Danez Smith: I was talking about this with somebody the other day, like sometimes like you get ahead of yourself, you know. There’s the things that pop up into your head, the bits of language, you know, the whatevers, the things that make you run to the page and say, I gotta write this shit down.

Franny Choi: Right, right, right.

Danez Smith: And then, once you get there, sometimes you get and use that, I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, me poem, we didn’t agree to say all that.

Franny Choi: Right, right, right.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS) We did not agree to say all this. And you really have to confront that like, even when you are in that sort of automatic space of writing the poem, once you’re outside of it, you click back into that normal human space. And that, I think, is the frightening part, that you realize like that there was a you that felt free enough to say that in the space of that poem. What does it mean to confront what else in your life that that saying has consequence to, you know? 

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Danez Smith: And those are the type of social agreements between us and our poems that I don’t think we’re always privy to when we get into this game. Because the more you trust poems, the more they will, like, lead you into these, you know, unlockable, automatic, really like freeing spaces where you can tell the truth about some shit. And being able to really wrestle with what it meant to say that in a space of such freedom that is creating the poem sometimes. I mean, you know, I think it can be a challenge, you know, to then say, like, okay, self, we gotta give up, we gotta make more room for what this poem had to say.

Franny Choi: Mmm totally.

Danez Smith: You know?

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Danez Smith: But it’s hard.

Franny Choi: Yeah. Yeah. We are so excited to talk to Ladan Osman, who in the course of this interview said the phrase, “I needed to change my life,” and Danez and I have been like, trying to wrap our heads around that and what it means to manifest huge changes in your life in the space of the art that you’re making, and also in the space around the art that you’re making. So we’re really excited to share this interview with Ladan. She’s one of our favorite writers and we were so, so, so thrilled to have her on the show. 

Danez Smith: Ladan Osman is the author of Exiles of Eden and The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony, winner of the Sillerman prize. She has received fellowships from the Michener Center, Cave Canem, and the Lannan Foundation. Her poems have been published widely and translated. She was the writer for Sun of the Soil, a short documentary on the complicated legacy of Malian Emperor Mansa Musa. It will premiere at the New York African Film Festival. Osman’s directorial debut, The Ascendants, is forthcoming in October. She lives in New York City. I am so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so excited to get into this interview with Ladan with y’all. And she is going to start us off, of course, with a poem.

(SOUND EFFECT)

Ladan Osman: 

(READS POEM)

Devotional with Misheard Lyrics

There are so many boys from other realms
running in your hallway.
It’s been a while since I heard spirits pacing,
chasing each other
or little horses galloping in the sink
whinnying in the walls.
We are in the habit of discussing nightmares.
A pair of sullen eyes.
Women who kill themselves twice.
I’ve met and disregarded them: Your name,
your name again?
My heart is filed to a point, heavy tip,
heavy blade, light handle, no sheath.
Unzip me and I’ll be the same,
but softer, lighter-skinned underneath,
my face and feet the same color,
no blemishes, too much hair.
I feel like my force field is on high power.
I should drink more water.

Afternoon and evening pass, a sequence
of minor tremors in my wrists, forearms.
An algorithm reduces me to one sentence:
I am such a long day.
I’m often tired with my eleven o’clock.
I force a ten into a coin machine
and put all my silver monies
in my breast pocket. My heart is heavy
on the bottom again. When exiting,
I see a woman holding many bags.
She’s tired, I think. Let me move, let me wait.
It’s a reflection. I’m the woman
with Monday-night bags hanging off her wrists.
I smell like figs. Boiled figs.
In Somali, timid sounds like date.
Americans confuse dates and figs.
I can’t eat twice with a man who does this.
You just want to be adored, you said,
then came next to worship over dinner,
rubbery plantains, and two women,
blushing and listening to you praise me:
If it were permissible to exalt
a mortal, you. You didn’t say that.
I’m the most romantic man I know.
I’m simple only in this: I need two-armed hugs.
I sing in the street, small blasphemy
in the diaphragm’s dome:
My lover’s not human. Amen.
At the shrine of your light,
like a dog, like a dog.

* * *

Danez Smith: Wow. And that poem is from frickin’ Hoosiers, right?

Ladan Osman: Yeah, yeah, yeah. (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)
 

Ladan Osman: I just kept listening to it because I misheard. So what I heard was like, how does that song go?

Danez Smith: (SINGS) Take me to church … 

Ladan Osman: Yeah, yeah. I thought—I heard, I thought he sang, “My lover’s not human, she’s a gaggle at a funeral.” Like a gaggle of geese. And I was like, “Oh, wow, this is an interesting song. I’ll listen to this. I’ll keep listening to this.” And realized later.

Franny Choi: Yeah, what are the actual lyrics?

Ladan Osman: “She’s a giggle at a funeral.” Like, I guess she’s irreverent. It’s totally different than what I heard. I was like, she’s a shapeshifter. 

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Ladan Osman: This is terrifying. And I think he says, “at the shrine of your lies.” And I thought he said “light.” And I prefer a shrine of light, so, I was like, well, I’m just going to redo this, I think, to what I heard and what I’m thinking about when I’m listening to this melancholy song. 

Franny Choi: Yeah, “shrine of your light” is better and “gaggle at a funeral” is definitely better. 

Ladan Osman: Because, you know, in Ohio, there are those- there are geese everywhere. And they’re very aggressive sometimes, you know. But I’m sure we’ve aggressed against them a lot, so. The idea that there would just be a bunch of them hanging out while someone is being buried, like it felt like, you know this like bizarre story of Jefferson? He trained his parrot and the parrot cursed him at his funeral.

Danez Smith: Wait, which Jefferson?

Ladan Osman: -The president-

Danez Smith: Like Thomas?

Ladan Osman: Yeah, yeah.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Ladan Osman: That person they called president once. That criminal. 

Danez Smith: Yeah, no, I’m like he just seems—parrots seem too good for him. I’m like, no, no, no. 

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Ladan Osman: He had some kind of—I’m pretty sure like he had a pet- he taught it to, I don’t know, say some things, but it was just screaming obscenities.

Franny Choi: Oh my god.

Ladan Osman: I don’t know if this is real or just like a myth. I’ll try and find the citation somewhere. But I was like, this is one of the most frightening things I’ve heard in a long time. Like, if that’s not a terrible, terrible omen and a judgment, I don’t know what is. 

Franny Choi: Right. God, I would be so embarrassed. 

Ladan Osman: Like, I think they had to remove it. I don’t know that it was just like cursing like, lol, I think it was doing something in an unnerving way. But maybe that’s just how I want to remember it. 

Franny Choi: It was like, “Fuck you, Tom. Fuck you, Tommy.”

Danez Smith: I love the idea that like, it’s kind of a myth now because you hope it happened.

Ladan Osman: Yeah, exactly.

Danez Smith: I mean, that’s the call in the last poem in Exiles of Eden, right, that we need new myths. 

Franny Choi: True. 

Danez Smith: And I’m wondering, maybe just as a way into the book or into the work, how you—I guess what happens when you encounter a myth or a mishearing? I feel like there’s so much about mishearing something in your work and letting that language like then be preserved on the page. What happens when you mishear something? How does it live with you and how does it change by the time it’s got to the poem that we see.

Ladan Osman: What happens for me, in my mind—this is terrible, and I don’t, I’m not trying to, like, mock anybody except for maybe like bros in Manhattan or something. What happens for me is it really energizes me when I mishear something. But the thing sounds closer to what’s true. The thing sounds closer to what language is supposed to be doing. And, you know, even though I’ve been so much inside of English for most of my life, I still misspeak, especially when I’m tired. It’s really a struggle to put sentences together and, you know, to use the word that I’m supposed to use or to follow common syntax. And so when I hear other people, for whatever reason, especially because they’re so angry, they’re sputtering, for example, or something so outrageous happened that there’s not clear language for it, even if they’re, you know, speaking English their whole lives, like that’s the only language they knew, that is another English that is meaningful and needs to be addressed. And so I think, for me, the best way that I can describe what happens to me and inside of me is like, I was at this very weird club with like a former friend. And it just was not the kind of scene like—I feel like when I went dancing, I would go to like small places in Brooklyn or to like the Shrine in Harlem. I didn’t understand the music. I didn’t understand what was going on. It was like a sped up Britney Spears, which is fine, but I was not sure like how to dance that. There were all these people that seemed to be like maybe extremely high from cocaine, like Wall Street type bros that were out with their like giant blonde girlfriends.

Danez Smith: Oh no, why were you there?

Ladan Osman: Somebody took me there and I didn’t ask follow up questions. I was relatively new to New York. I didn’t know what was happening. I was like, oh, okay. I was like in a cardigan. I didn’t know what I was doing.

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Ladan Osman: But there was this guy that was just like walking backwards and walking forwards as if someone is pressing rewind, fast forward, rewind, fast forward. And even his voice is like (IMITATES FAST FORWARDED VOICE). And I was just like, this is so weird, but also amazing. But I feel like that’s actually exactly what my brain does, like, you know, on cassettes back in the day. And you press rewind while play still on.

Franny Choi: Mm-hmm.

Ladan Osman: You know, you can fuck up your cassette that way, but like that sound and that urgency, you forgot to press stop and then rewind. And so that for me when I hear and mishear, it’s like, wow, that person said something so strange. Let me note it in my phone or on a scrap of paper.

Franny Choi: Wait, so the sound that’s made when you press rewind without pressing stop, like that’s the thing that is misheard or like what—

Ladan Osman: Yeah, it’s like that. It’s like that staggering stuttering like run it back, but it’s not like smooth because you’re so excited. Like, I just, whoa, let me just hear that again. Let me translate that to myself. It’s that energy, but also, yeah, the energy of that very strange individual that was just having a moment in, like, I don’t even know what it was. Like a space that also sells objects. Like it was like a—I guess is supposed to be a high-end pawn shop.

Franny Choi: Oh, okay. (LAUGHS)

Ladan Osman: But it had weird things like a giant Ronald McDonald. But I don’t know, it was weird. Zero out of 10. Do not recommend.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS) That is a particular nightmare, to be brought to a party that’s just the wrong party for where you’re at, and then to know that you’re going to be stuck there. Yeah.

Ladan Osman: Oh, I wasn’t stuck there.

Franny Choi: Oh you weren’t. That’s great. (LAUGHS)

Ladan Osman: As I am leaving, I was like, this is not safe for me. It was like being in an Amsterdam airport. Like, everybody was like, why are they so tall? These giant blonde people.

Danez Smith: They are tall!

Ladan Osman: That were extremely high. It’s like, I don’t know.

Danez Smith: They are tall as fuck. You had mentioned, just like what language does. And I think, I was looking like, I flipped over your book, and I was like, “Oh shit, I forgot I blurbed this.” And I looked at my blurb and I was like, this blurb sucks.

Ladan Osman: What! Your blurb is amazing!

Danez Smith: Because I’m trying to praise it, and I look at that blurb and I’m like, “Oh, Danez, you were like flabbergasted because you had just read this book,” and I’m so in love with the way you use language. And I think, like, the actual blurb that I could write would have required me to actually sit with that book on like, two, three reads so I can get past … I look at my blurb and I see myself caught up in what you do with language and not thinking about what’s happening within that language. And like the stories that you’re telling. So I guess I want to know, what do you believe language does? Or what language is supposed to do?

Franny Choi: Jeez, what a question. 

Ladan Osman: Ooof. I mean, I think it can do so much. And language has worlds. It contains worlds in the sense that it has worlds in it, but also reigns them in, encloses them, sometimes in an embrace, sometimes in a much more violent way. Like I think about Jamaica Kincaid’s writings about colony and about voyeurism and uhm… voyaging and the violence it takes to just show up somewhere that you’re not even supposed to be in the first place that you didn’t intend to go, right. Christopher Columbus, he’d be like, “That’s what this place is called. And this other place is called this. And I’m just doing what I’m doing.” Like the carelessness that that takes is something I’ve been really thinking about, to just know something, to just know what to call something, that that’s one limited way to use language. But what language itself is—and I’m not counting just like spoken language or written language, but the language of gesture, the language that is unspoken, the language that like MIT’s labs are trying to capture now through this bizarre technology. Like they’re trying to capture brain waves and make them make commands.

Danez Smith: Whoa.

Ladan Osman: So I guess to be able to like, Google things. Sounds to me extraordinarily dangerous and like terrible things can come of this. But, you know, if they mean well …

Danez Smith: Wow. They’re trying to make language out of like the thought that makes language. 

Ladan Osman: Right.

Danez Smith: Oh wow.

Ladan Osman: So, and this idea that there’s such a thing as a brain wifi, that people who are close to each other in the same home or the way that panic can spread among people in this unspoken way, that maybe there’s a whole other plane that we don’t yet have the technology for. It could very well be 20 years from now something that we thought was just fanciful or sometimes captured in poetry, or there’s an attempt to capture it, is actually totally discernible. It has a wavelength. Apple has a product (LAUGHS) so that we could, you know— In in his unhinged interview in like GQ or something, Donald Glover is talking about how he wants this thing, to be able to do that.

Franny Choi: To be able to, like, send commands to your computer or your phone with your brain?

Ladan Osman: Yeah, it was like something about how he was hoping that like, Elon Musk—

Danez Smith: Ew.

Ladan Osman: —like had to. I was like, sir.

Danez Smith: Anytime there’s hope Elon Musk is involved …

Ladan Osman: I know.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Ladan Osman: I was like, excuse me, emerald mine Elon Musk? Ugh, anyways. 

Franny Choi: I’m just like thinking, just still processing what you said about the colonial violence of naming. And like how we as writers like have to encounter that in, like, the work that we do. Like, how do you get around that? Or how do you move through that, knowing that that violent action is like part of the work that we have to do?

Ladan Osman: Yeah, I mean, I think that I do grapple with that and sometimes feel some distance from the artifact itself, that is a word. You know, the hope is that it’s not immovable for me. I understand that there’s some kind of permanence, that it’s printed in a book. But I think the only way that I can make peace with it is to think about it as something that is evolving, that other people can participate in, that other people can challenge, that other people can add to. Music is like that, right, that we’re still hearing riffs, we’re still hearing bridges that started out from joyful like cries of praise that became tormented work songs that are now an aspect of like, pop songs that we wish that we could dance to in a sweaty club. Like, that act of participation that exists in so many things, I’m always hopeful that that exists in poetry. But it is, it’s a nervous thing. I do feel kind of … not uncertain exactly, because I tried my best in the moment that I had, in the person that I was in the moment that I was trying it. But yeah, I think the distance is what makes me have more peace with it, that the poems that I wrote when I was 23, 24 years old, I stand by them. I know it was my best absolute work, but at the same time, I’ve changed. I’ve been changed by readers. I’ve been changed by other poets, including you two. So there’s a gap right, between book one and two. There’s a gap between the second book. There’s more, I hope for, maturity on a human level of knowing what I don’t know and being comfortable that you can still be a craftsperson, you can still yearn for some kind of precision, but that it’s going to be ungraspable in a certain way, that there’s no such thing as the final word and that that’s okay. 

Franny Choi: Yeah, I hear you saying in that, like, the things that we create, that we don’t control how they move through the world and how they, like, move through people. That feels like something that like, you can either have anxiety about or like and, you can also like, see that as a beautiful opening thing, like a way to allow your poems to change. But also I think that, like, what I hear you saying is like giving yourself as a writer, like a kind of grace to know that like, we as writers are also capable of change. Not just that the way that our work moves through the world, but like that we are capable of change.

Danez Smith: And that we never have to, like, stop our definition of who we are as artists, right. Like, I was sitting with like, three of your bios preparing this interview, right.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: And at one point, it’s like “poet.” And then it’s like “poet and essayist.” And then it’s “poet and filmmaker,” right. Poet and photographer, right. You’re always kind of like imagining more possibilities for yourself for the work and where that can go. And I think it does have to take sort of an openness that I’m hearing you talk about, right. To have the grace to allow who you’ve been to, like, be great and not to have any sort of bearing or constriction upon who you might become. 

Ladan Osman: Mm-hmm.

Franny Choi: Has that been challenging at times to give yourself that grace for change or like, to allow yourself that possibility? 

Ladan Osman: Yeah, I mean, I think it can be because you have to let go of certain ideas of validation and certain ideas of acceptance or success, I think. And every move I’ve tried to make in writing and other things, there was someone, and very often someone that I trusted or someone that was a mentor or something, would tell me not to do it, you know? Oh, “You can’t ask all these questions in one poem.” “You can’t move from one image to the next in this way.” “Why would you include images in the text of something?” “Does it make sense to do a visual essay in this way?” “Oh, I don’t know, can you really do photography? I don’t think that you should do that.” “Oh, filmmaking, how do you think that that’s going to work? Like, why would you even try?” And so it’s just this … other people have, even sometimes in their admiration, they have a very fixed idea of us sometimes.

Danez Smith: Oo!

Ladan Osman: They want to see you in a very specific way.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Ladan Osman: And it’s unfortunate that sometimes what I need to do to gather myself is to have private time. So sometimes when I look back at my work, like, I’m grateful for the opportunity to have been able to do it. And when I say grateful, it’s not like to institutions. Like I’m grateful to God, I’m grateful to be here and among other people. I’m grateful for Lucille Clifton and June Jordan and Toni Morrison and Jamaica Kincaid. I’m grateful for just the opportunity that I got to read these works and that I had time to sit with them and to make something. But at the same time, it requires, as I’m sure you both know, a certain level of solitude. And the self, to reassure yourself, especially when there are some, you know, institutional roadblocks, because there are some ways that I have experienced a lot of fortune and a lot of favor that I don’t ascribe to just like being great or something like that. I mean, there are a lot of things in writing and in this career that are just good luck. Right person at the right time, someone recommending you to somebody else. I’m grateful for the opportunity to do this work, but sometimes it’s been so lonely. It’s like, wow, I could have been doing foolishness, and I was just at this desk, like trying to figure myself out or walking around by myself with a camera, because I needed to break through. I needed to change my own life. And sometimes that intensity means that we lose friendships, we lose or have misunderstood our relationships to family members. It means that, you know, like messy endings to romantic relationships. You know, but I think it’s like anything. You don’t have to be an artist to have experienced that. I think anybody who’s trying to make something happen in the world and trying to make something happen with themselves in any kind of job, any kind of role, at any height, that that is, it’s not the easiest thing when you take your life seriously or you’re attempting to take your life seriously, or you want to put yourself in the company, just even wanting to sit at the feet of people who take their life seriously is sometimes met, especially as a Black woman, is met with a lot of ridicule. A lot of abuse. A lot of harassment. And, you know, I do have to say that part of what has been a torment, too, is the ways that I felt sometimes, up until probably last year, that I failed on a personal level or the ways that I was not able to break through institutionally. I was supposed to try and push some things or some people down on behalf of young African poets, especially, because they are the ones who write to me with the same problems that I was having 10 years ago. The same abuse, the same dismissals. And that was really a torment to me because I was like, what if I had just had coffee with that jerk who was like, harassing me in Instagram DMs? Like, what if I just, like, let myself not be taken very seriously by, like, some dude that’s just like only like trying to do X-ray vision, like looking at my legs or something. Or what if I had just let myself have a closer relationship with like, these people that like straight up bully other writers? Like what if I just let myself be seen more? Maybe I should have just like, went into that group picture with these people. Maybe I should have went to so-and-so’s house party. Maybe I just was making a mistake every time that I didn’t make moves that—I mean, obviously like, submitting to a harasser just because you feel like you have to get stuff, that’s not a choice that I’m comfortable with, but. Not that there’s anything wrong with the social, professional aspects of our work, but if it’s not true to you and you don’t feel safe in it, like, I’ve been in so many writing spaces where like, this would happen in Chicago all the time, and sometimes would be a predominantly Black space, but it sometimes was super regional, or was not very diasporic. So you could see like someone from the South like not being treated that well or something. Or you and like, a Ugandan woman are having like a horrible moment. Or like someone who’s like Jamaican American is having like an odd situation. There’s a loving and really wonderful community, but sometimes in the, you know, fancy people and the decision makers and we’re having a quiet dinner here. We’re going to listen to somebody read some poems and see if you can rub elbows with someone that could maybe facilitate you getting this little fellowship or getting this little residency. Like, you know, there will be people that shake my hand and then wipe it on their pant leg. It’s one thing for that to just, like, happen from the people that I expect that to happen to you. But to feel like you’re not good enough among other Black people, or among like Black women specifically, that was really, really painful. And that was also mixed in with something that I think all of us have heard terrible rumors, right. Like about other writers. So and so it did this way. This is how they fucked their way to the top, which I was never interested in, because it’s like, as long as they can write, like I don’t care what they’re doing or not doing with their booty, actually. Like I don’t actually know what that has to do with me. And if they seem happy, like, more power to them. But maybe this world is a series of negotiations and transactions for certain people. And even if I may be not as comfortable with certain choices—and that’s in part because I’m embodied in a specific way. My association, from the time I was a seven-, eight-year-old girl watching like A Time to Kill was I’m going to end up in a ditch, period. There’s no leeway. I have to do what I can to protect myself. And sometimes to protect people like me. And so, there’s a lot of commotion and violence and gossiping and different kinds of roadblocks. And, you know, I know this is sensitive. This is hosted on like, Poetry Foundation. But like, you know, let’s be real.

Franny Choi: No, yeah, we can talk about it.

Ladan Osman: Like, you know, I remember, like, I was supposed to volunteer there because they were trying to do teaching artist work, and maybe not a lot of people know, I probably have more than 12, 13 years of like, work as a teaching artist in schools. And some of that curriculum is still at play in schools in the Midwest. And so that’s something—both my parents are educators. It’s something that I take incredibly seriously. And have tried to learn from the kids, really. And so was supposed to like volunteer for something. But then when I came at the appointed time, the person who’s at the front desk responded like I came there to murder her. Like she actually got up and like clutched her necklace, like clutched her pearls and was like, “What are you doing here?” Like Masterpiece Theater shit. I’m like, I’m supposed to see this person at 2pm. It’s 1:59. Like, I don’t actually understand what this is about. But that vibe is like, on one hand you can be invited to have a dinner with Patricia Smith or Ed Roberson, and you’re among your peers, and there are all these beautiful readings and beautiful programs, and a number of really lovely people that work there. Like I’ll say, like the people who work on online stuff through the Foundation, especially, were super just on it, trying to make things happen in the Chicago writing community and including the youth, and including maybe like more, I guess, outsider writers or people that are considered to have aged out or whatever. But then there was this other element of like, you’re going to do a reading somewhere, and this isn’t, of course, just the Poetry Foundation. It’s at the Library of Congress. It’s at some of these Ivy League institutions that, you’re supposed to be there, sometimes your head is on a poster, and you’re told not to sit in a chair. “Don’t touch these books.”

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Ladan Osman: It’s like, first of all, who are you talking to you right now? Because I was not raised in the way that you were raised, and there’s a limit to how far you can take this. And second of all, it’s like, I’m supposed to be here. It’s a designated place at a designated time, but the people can’t see you. It’s like there’s forever this mirage over you and others, you know? So that was tough. Like I, 2015, ’16 at the moment where maybe I was getting a lot more attention for my work, I just kind of crashed. Like I couldn’t even physically show up to certain things because it was—I didn’t know who I was, I didn’t want to lose myself. I didn’t want to make certain mistakes. I didn’t want to lash out. I didn’t want to fight anybody. I don’t know a single writer who has not been through that and/or suffered a pretty serious depression, actually, from feelings of failure, feelings that you let down the people who are coming behind you, feelings that you’re just wasting your time. And that’s not about like, just like, winning money or having your name in certain publications. It’s like the recognition that we need as humans. Just acknowledgment that you’re there and you’re trying to do something. And I think we don’t talk about that enough.

Danez Smith: And recognition for your whole humanity, right, what you’re talking about. Because I’ve experienced what you’re talking about, right. You go to these institutions and you’re just a [n-word] until you have a name, right. Or until you’re the [n-word] on the poster. And then everything switches differently, right. I know of so many places I’ve been, until you are what like sort of they have come to see, right, you know, there is this violent embrace of your body in the space, and what you’re asked to do. How many of us have been asked to, you know, smile through somebody else’s grossness because of its benefit of supposedly our career. And I think it’s really hard, too, right, especially institutions like, you’re taught to savor the things that they have to offer you. I think a mission for all of us has to be to disentangle from that vision of success or victory being in the hands of the institution. And it sounds like, you know, we all make it through our—maybe we don’t all make it through. We all travel through or live in this pain and this complication. Ladan, and I’m wondering for you, it sounds like you also have found your way through that to some other answers. And I’m wondering, what did that process look like for you of redefining what victory and success would look like for you and your career? Where do you find your wings coming from now? What do you find yourself holding through in order to make it to the other side of all that violence and muck that we have to encounter or try to complicate and, you know, demolish, hopefully within these institutions? What keeps you lit and lifted?

Ladan Osman: Thank you for that question. Yeah, because sometimes so many of the people you admire are trying to give you advice to push through, and you want to also support other people, knowing that everyone is going through some version of pretty much the same thing. And sometimes that can be really painful to feel like you fell short on the human level, on the community level, that you just don’t have it in you to hear one more story, to have one more sad phone call, to hold one more friend’s hand, because she has to be an event with someone who assaulted her. Like, you just sometimes, as much as you want to be there, you can’t hold yourself together. And so, I had to find freedom in withdrawing, because that is a big privilege to be able to just withdraw and not have very serious consequences from that. I mean, at the same time, a bunch of teaching gigs just like dissipated at the same time. So even though it’s a very financially precarious time, it gave me a huge timeout to just think about what I want. And how I want to be spending time, which is to continue to write. I picked up a camera again. It was to recommit to trying to figure out how to do anything in film. I feel successful when I hear—and Danez, you know this writer, Fatima Kamara’s work.

Danez Smith: Oh, that’s my baby. (LAUGHS)

Ladan Osman: (LAUGHS) Sadia Hassan. Jamila Osman. They’re all in the African Poetry Book Fund chapbook, which is amazing, that they’re all, you know, these people that you read for years, that they end up in the same place at the same time together. It’s really exciting that that’s happening right now—

Franny Choi: It’s wonderful

Ladan Osman: —A Canadian poet, Oubah Osman, Claudia Owusu, who’s an amazing young filmmaker and poet. To just be able to sometimes be in conversation with them, to read their drafts, to know that like—it’s something that my sister would say. Like sometimes the thing that you go through, and I think that this is from one of the things from the prophet, peace be upon him. Like sometimes the thing that you are dealing with is not for you. Sometimes the information is to share with other people. And that’s part of the reason that it’s incomprehensible at first. But now that I can warn people, now that I can reassure some people like, no, this isn’t you, this isn’t your work, you didn’t fail in any way. People are prickly. You’re gonna get some weird emails. Someone that you thought was your friend is just going to ignore you altogether. You’re gonna feel like Boo the fool when you show up all excited with your little clipboard or notebook trying to make something happen. And I seriously don’t know anyone—super famous people, people that are emerging, people who are incredible performers, people that have a ton of followers, you know, people that are just like, disturbingly like beautiful and always have the best clothes. I don’t know any of them that haven’t gone through some aspect of this and had to find a way to put a shell over themselves. And to be able to speak to that and name that and share that with people feels great because I can give some of the younger emerging poets, I hope that I can give them a shortcut. Like, here’s how you can save some time. These are some of the things at play. And now, you know, you’re free to choose. Because many of us just went through it not knowing anything. And you know, we just eat food together and you know, share French fries when broke together, and cry about it and workshop. And that’s something that y’all’s collective was doing for a while, like just making things together, and everybody just—

Danez Smith: Yeah. And knowledge sharing, you know, like stuff like you’re saying like, you know, part of I think what protected my spirit was being able to have those open conversations about the bullshit that was going on in each of our lives and careers.

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Danez Smith: And so, you know, like how Franny’s mistakes or what Franny has to go through with a press gives me some information about what I need to look out for the next time I go through.

Franny Choi: Right or I see how somebody treats Fati, and then I’m—then I understand what armor I need to put on.

Ladan Osman: How dare they mistreat Fati.

Franny Choi: I know, yeah.

Ladan Osman: I will shake someone right now.

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Ladan Osman: Yeah, but also the messaging that we get, you know, especially as nonwhite people, that you should just be grateful. Oh, you know, you’re somewhere that you can’t, your mother could not be, that your grandfather could not be, that your great grandmother could not be. Just do your best with it, you know? But it’s like, I have to live this life. I’m just myself right now. I have to be the best quality person I can be when I’m teaching, when I’m reading someone else’s poems for their MFA applications, or because they’re making their own zine in an art collective. I have to be my best person in my life, you know. And I think that there’s no-no amount of like money or privilege or things that can cover that up. But it is, I think it’s easy to start to get lost in some kind of hustle and proving that you deserve to be somewhere. And it’s very, very tough work. And I am grateful for the people who are braver than me and who sat through painful dinners. And, you know, because I’ve been chastised a lot for leaving, for abruptly turning away from a conversation. Like, I can be very feral. Like I’m not in amazing control of myself in certain situations. Like, you know, I’m not entirely neuro-normative. Like, I don’t understand some of the things that are going on. I don’t know what people are talking about. I don’t know. So how do you share that with other people that, you know, maybe they didn’t go to a certain kind of MFA or they didn’t have a certain kind of mentorship or a certain kind of access, you know, to take that seriously, because as much as I can feel like an outsider, like I am so much an insider. I got my MFA at the Michener Center, like I know (LAUGHS) what it is that I mixed up in and have to be responsible for and to tell the truth about. But, you know, and Jericho Brown is really in my prayers, because that’s someone that has absorbed things or be a little bit of a shield or behind the scenes tell the truth, so that some of us did not have to suffer in different ways.

Franny Choi: Hm.

Danez Smith: Hmm.

Ladan Osman: And I know that [Insert Name] did that. I know that Natasha Trethewey is one of those people. There are a lot of people who are like that. Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani are like that. Matthew Shenoda. All those folks at the Book Fund. You know, where would we be if it wasn’t for people that had to push through? Because, you know, that’s part of their dream, is to really, like, build together or to be a professor and, you know, in a very specific space. What they had to pass through and what it is that they had to have patience through so that I can leave a dinner that I don’t like. You know, it’s something that Evie Shockley talks about, too. It’s like, but I can be able to say now, like you can’t ask me those questions.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Ladan Osman: I’m not having this conversation with you.

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Ladan Osman: Because where did the invitation come from? How did I end up in the place? Okay, some of it is like, I worked hard and some people like my poems, but a lot of it is like, the credibility, you know, the reputation, the archive of people who are still here and people who came long before us. Sometimes it does feel like too heavy of responsibility, but it’s like, I didn’t cultivate other skills, so I’m not actually able to just quit altogether.

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Ladan Osman: I’m like, I don’t know how to be like, a carpenter. I’m not like a horticulturalist. 

Danez Smith: You’re too good to quit, I think—

Franny Choi and Ladan Osman: (LAUGH)

Danez Smith: What you’re chipping away at is like, how do we- how do we change the game and I feel like, you know, this year has really brought a lot of these questions of like, how do we stop playing these multiple games that get us nowhere. And get to the part of it that’s about taking care of each other. That’s about like, you know, healing, feeding each other in like physical, spiritual, mental ways. How do we get to a world where, like, for the poets, you’re able to spend so much time being the craftsman part of the poet and not having to figure out all this other bullshit. That is legit bullshit. And like, how do we just make a world where people can just be their weird-ass selves, making weird-ass poems?

Franny Choi: Mm-hmm.

Danez Smith: But every generation we pick up stewards of that mission, right. We pick up the Toi and Corneliuses. We get Jericho from this generation. We get folks like, you know, you look at—I look at Luther Hughes, you know, who’s so goo—

Ladan Osman: — So good! 

Danez Smith: — and already done so much and so many people. Think about, like, I cry when I think about how many people Luther will help over his lifetime, you know?

Franny Choi: Yeah. I also love, Ladan, what you said, like, I’m not grateful to the institutions. I’m grateful to God. You know? I feel like that’s such a good spirit to travel through this world where you, you know, one has to interact with a lot of institutions and the imperative to misdirect our gratitude there. You know?

Ladan Osman: Yeah.

Franny Choi: And it reminds me also of the line in the poem that you read, “I’m the most romantic man I know.” Which is like, first of all, a line! And second of all, I want to encourage like every poet listening to this podcast to move through the bullshit of pobiz with the spirit, “I’m the most romantic man I know,” you know? Like I’m the one that’s going to feed me. Like, I’m the institution to be grateful to. Or like, we are the institution to be grateful to. Like, we’re the most romantic. 

Ladan Osman: Yeah, I think it’s a community for sure. Like it was other writers, other artists, sometimes teachers, sometimes friends who work totally different gigs or are in between jobs and struggling. It was always those folks that, they shared without me having to ask, you know, when I didn’t have food in my fridge, they were the ones who took me to the grocery store. I remember one time Kenyatta Rogers, who’s a fantastic poet—I feel like people are really, like lacking that he doesn’t have like an award-winning book that’s out.

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Ladan Osman: So, you know, that needs to change inside of this year. You know, I know it’s late in the year, but I don’t care. So I remember this one time, and I feel like he would not like me to say this, but there was a time years ago where, it was like after some event or something, and he didn’t ask me any questions. I think that there was a period of that rough moment that I talked about from stress and just like from not having money, like just dropped a bunch of weight. But then it was weird because people just treated it like it was glamorous, which is like so terrible. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Totally.

Ladan Osman: It’s like, I am struggling. I feel so foolish. But yes, I guess I can, you know, find more dresses in my size now. I guess, like, you know. He made a comment that alluded to looking different, but it wasn’t disparaging. And then everything that he was buying for himself, he just doubled up on. So he grabbed a thing of salad and grabbed another one. So he grabbed a thing of milk and grabbed another one. And then at the end just gave me that. And is like, “I just thought, you know, you can have, you know, whatever. I grabbed extra stuff for you.” And then just like had dropped me off after a bunch of us were hanging out. And so, the quiet way that friends like just take the bill or invite you to their institution to do a reading, or quietly have someone else do it for you, I think that it would be such a lie to pretend that I’m just like so strong and, you know, so long suffering or something, when actually what it is, is that I’ve been held and carried by so many people. It’s actually impossible to name them. And many, many of them were there when I didn’t even know to ask for help. Never expected a thank-you. Never held a grudge over me. And yeah, I don’t know, it’s something that I think about a lot because I guess, like, money’s nice and institutional things are nice. And, you know, it was nice to be at Marfa and to be in this, like, amazingly outfitted house in this massive library and to just like, nobody can see you having, like, 70 books out at once. And you just like, don’t have to worry about anything. You know, everything’s so orderly for you. I have really enjoyed, and I know exactly what to do, especially at this age, with that support. And what to do with the timelines that are prescribed in there. But at the same time, like, is that actually what freedom is? The spiritual orientation is a part of our identity. You know, like how we’re embodied is important. And this is something that I also talk about with one of my sisters a lot. But spiritual orientation, where you are in the world, and spiritual in the sense of what’s immaterial, spiritual in the sense of values, what you do when no one can see you, when no one can verify what it is that you’re up to. I do find it very hard to submit myself to another human being. I don’t expect anybody to do that for me. And I don’t I cannot tolerate, because that’s the familiarity that people have with Black women and maybe specifically with Black Muslim women, to try to dominate me or to try to humble me or something like that. It’s like, you don’t have the skill set to do that. You don’t have the poetry. You don’t have the mind frame. You don’t have the beauty, you don’t have the heart. You don’t have anything to do that. Because the way that I understand spirit and the way that I understand God is a presence that is not interested at all in humiliation. So how can I accept or participate in a humiliation with other people? And I think that that’s something that’s sometimes haunting. And the pobiz stuff, too, is like, what are the times we stood by when other people were being left out, where maybe we weren’t saying or doing anything mean, but we’re hanging out with someone who was or, you know what I mean? You show up in that picture, you go to that dinner, you support the event of someone that you, you know is nice to you, but is dreadful to other people. Whether that’s somebody, you know, who’s a collaborator or someone who’s a colleague or someone who occupies an extremely important position. That’s also something we hope that we learned as children. You know, like who are you when there are three people speaking? Do you just speak to one person or do you make sure to include the other people? I know I fail at that. I know I have made lots of social mistakes and have embarrassed myself (LAUGHS) all over the country and in other countries. But, yeah, that matters to me, like, okay, you’re talented, you have lots of books, you won lots of awards. I don’t even know the bios of some of my close friends, to be very honest. Like, sometimes I’m at their reading. I was like, oh, wow, you—(LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Like, you won that prize?

Ladan Osman: Right! You’re doing so great babe!

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Ladan Osman: This is wild, because that’s not what we talk about. You know what I mean? Like, that’s something that I do not talk about with Donika Kelly. We like, discuss whether we’re gonna have hot chocolate or not. Or like, if we’re at home, what we’re putting in the warm milk this time. 

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Ladan Osman: So I just think, you know, you have to recognize, too, like what you look like to other people, even if you feel like you’re personally failing. There’s people who are looking at the outside like, “Wow, this person has so much and has the admiration and the friendship of people that I wouldn’t even dream of emailing.” And so what do you do, too, with like an aura of prestige that I think is just inherent in poetry business stuff? That’s not something that I’m saying that I take on personally, but it’s definitely something that exists and is a form of currency, you know, and I think ultimately it matters to me, like, is this person nice? Like, are they nice to themselves. Are they nice to the people who are around them? Are they consistent? That’s not meaningful to like, put on a CV, I don’t think, or fellowship application, I guess, but. 

Franny Choi: No, but I don’t know. Sometimes I wish, you know?

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: I wish on the CV it was just like other people being like, “This person was like really nice,” or other people being like, “This person is kind of a jerk.” (LAUGHS) You know? Could we turn to your book? 

Ladan Osman: Sure. Sorry. I also I know that my answers are long, so I don’t feel any type of way about y’all cutting up what you need to cut up. 

Franny Choi: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but the thing is that your answers are beautiful the entire way through. So there’s like, no—

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Franny Choi: Yeah, I keep being like, we, for the sake of the podcast maybe we should interrupt or something. But then I’m like, I don’t want to interrupt this! (LAUGHS)

Ladan Osman: Oh please do! No, please. It’s helpful for me, because my eagerness, I’m like, I have to show respect for this question. And answer it every way that I can. 

Danez Smith: No, it’s all good.

Franny Choi: That’s so beautiful.

Danez Smith: Daniel will cut it up. Daniel will cut it up. But just the affirmation in what you’re saying so far is fucking—

Franny Choi: Gorgeous. 

Danez Smith: Fantastic.

Franny Choi: Gorgeous. 

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Franny Choi: Your book Exiles of Eden, which came out, when was it … last year? 

Danez Smith: 2018?

Franny Choi: ’18? ’19?

Ladan Osman: ’19. Yeah.

Franny Choi: 2019.

Ladan Osman: I’m like, what year are we in now?

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS) I know, right?

Ladan Osman: 2056?

Danez Smith: Look, I like, legit—

(ALL LAUGH)

Franny Choi: Yeah right. I thought it came out a while ago because just like, so much has happened this year. (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: Well, this year felt like two years and so, anything that happened—yeah. 

Ladan Osman: I do want to speak to the grief of this moment. Like, this is a tragic, tragic time. I know that ya’ll recognize that. I know that your work is so serious and is a salve for people right now. But it’s been really scary. And it’s disturbing that there’s not a place for people to put their grief. There’s not—we’re not able to come together like in memorial, in a way, to celebrate each other’s lives, to hold each other up. You know, as we’re grieving and mourning. I personally know so many people that in a convoluted way had to bury people that they love. And, yeah, I mean, I just yeah, want to give a moment to sit with that and to recognize that so many of us are struggling with that now. And that it will take a long time to recover from grieving in isolation, fearing in isolation.

Franny Choi: Yeah. There’s a lot of grief at the heart of this book, too. It makes me wonder what things you learned about memorializing and about writing about and around grief that you think you have been carrying into all of the horror and grief of this year.

Ladan Osman: I think definitely the recognition. Like the practice with “Yearning Theorems”, I think probably are the poems that really have that, where it’s … a comfort to a degree with what is lost or what was almost had, or what feels just out of reach. And that that is also very human and very beautiful, and it’s okay to miss, it’s okay to long, it’s okay to just simply feel like not good enough. And that even if something is a kind of crime against yourself or your humanity, like why should it be punished in such a base way? Why should we approach that with torment, you know? Is there a space where we can recognize that there is difficulty and that you’re going to have difficulty with that? And so, you know, there are a lot of moments in the book that deal with loneliness. And I think something that probably isn’t discussed, which really surprised me—I think there is one interviewer who did. That there is a pretty consistent conversation about climate change as well that’s going on in a fair amount of the imagery.

Danez Smith: Hm.

Ladan Osman: And that is something that has been really tough for me. Like what kind of world is this that we treat the bees like this? We treat the oceans like this? Like, that really scares me. Just when I’m up at like 4:00 in the morning, like that’s one of the things I’m thinking of. Humans are so scary. Like besides racism and colonizing

Franny Choi: Or besides and like, tied up with racism and—

Ladan Osman: Yeah, tied up with. Trying to, you know, this nonstop torment of our trans sisters and murder as well. Like, all that stuff is so terrible and so scary. And then on top of that, it’s like, fuck a coral reef, fuck the Amazon. It’s like, really? I just … this is the thing that really is too much, because the ocean in many ways serves us and takes care of us, as do the bees. And there’s, you know, there are some very powerful forces who don’t even have recognition for that. They don’t even have reverence. And that is truly terrifying to me. I actually don’t know how to get around that, because I think that that baseline—Toni Morrison writes about that in … is it in Paradise, where she’s just like, losing a tether to the earth and being disconnected from it? I think that every every evil thing that we can recognize flows from that, from that irreverence. But also, you know, not letting that rip me up, too. Like this is a thing that’s happening, but there’s still beauty. There’s still so much good. There are wonderful moments that I witness between people all the time. Overall, it does seem to me that humans are trying, that we’re trying to make something happen and … that’s worthwhile, even despite all the loneliness and disparity, we can have some recognition that—I would like to think—that maybe things are not forever, maybe even consciousness is not forever. But like, love is the only thing that’s eternal. Love is the only thing that’s boundless. That is definitely my understanding of what like, God could be, is just love. It’s still depressing as hell. There’s still, you know, sometimes I do just sit on the floor eating a hamburger, or want to sit on the floor eating a hamburger and just cry, like, that’s it.

Franny Choi: Yeah…but I mean, I don’t know. I’m struck by how like, you know, because the bees and the oceans are in danger, they are then called into your poems. They like, beautify your poems. I don’t know, I feel so grateful to have gotten to hang out with the bees and the oceans in your book this morning, as I was reading back over it, you know? 

Danez Smith: I think, reading through both the collections, right, I think you give so much power to things that are seen as in danger or that could be in danger. Right? Like, I think about how much reverence and fucking bad-assery you gave to that kitchen dweller in the first book. 

Ladan Osman: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS) Every time, she is a bad ass, you know, like I am domestic as fuck and like, I don’t know, it’s just such a femme, fierce character, reading through that. And like, these commands and spells, it’s just like, this is a bad motherfucker. And so like, the ocean, right, yeah, I get to hang out with the ocean, the bees. You let so many things live beside the grief, right. So that way, these things are in danger, but they still have, they’re still rife with power. It’s like that one poem where, you know, we’re grieving actively, but we’re also having ferocious sex at the exact same time. 

Ladan Osman: Right. 

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS) And I appreciate how alive grief is in your work then, that it’s not a static feeling, right. But that it moves all the way around. It touches all these other feelings.

Ladan Osman: Yeah, no, it wants things.

Danez Smith: I’m so excited for this fall, because you have like 8,000 film projects coming out.

Franny Choi: Yes! (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: And I’m wondering…

Ladan Osman: (LAUGHS) It’s odd timing. I’m like, well, whatever.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS) I looked, and it’s like, now, now, now, they’re dropping. I’m wondering how, if we, as fans of your work, what we’ll see of your poems whispering in those film projects. And if you could just talk about what they are, what you’re excited about of them, what you’re hoping they do in the world.

Ladan Osman: Yeah. Thank you for asking about that. You’ve always been so great, too, about like, not excluding other things that I do or are interested in, because sometimes people in writing can be really shady about that. They’re like, “Oh, photographs.” It’s like, don’t be funny about this. 

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Ladan Osman: It’s really weird—it’s a weird thing to be funny about. The Ascendants, which is a docu series following four women musicians from Chicago. 

Danez Smith: I’m so excited. It’s a couple of musicians that I really, really love. 

Ladan Osman: I’ll just send y’all the screeners.

Danez Smith: Yay!

Franny Choi: Ooo!

Ladan Osman: Yeah, I’m gonna send it to you. 

Franny Choi: Okay.

Ladan Osman: But yeah, thank you so much for your interest. I’m huge fans of them, so it was just a privilege to spend time with them. And I think where poetry enters there, for sure, is in not only the shot list, because that’s one where I was directing and also writing. So it’s like, what’s this? I want to see light, so much light. I want to see heroic portraits of these women. I want to see them in what they consider their safe spaces. I want to see them in moments of just kind of nervousness or tension, but that they’re comfortable disclosing.

Danez Smith: Hm.

Ladan Osman: And it wasn’t always the easiest thing, because it’s not easy, especially if you’ve never been featured or have rarely been featured in a documentary. It’s super awkward for people to show up with a bunch of equipment and like, hang out with you in your bedroom or in the studio. But also making kind of music video style treatments for their songs, because, I thought it was really important to show young Black women in process and at work. And that’s the project. That’s it. You will sit there, you will take time with it. You will enjoy what they’re up to, and that’s it. There’s no negotiation about that. We don’t need for people to be like, have 10 million followers before they’ve earned that or something. These young folks are incredible now. They’re brilliant now.

Danez Smith: Amen.

Ladan Osman: And we can take some time with that. And so, I think you can definitely see in like, the transitions and in the way that the extra footage illustrates their interviews, and in some of the more creative treatments, just taking time with their stories and their lyrics and their tensions, their joys, their breakthroughs was really difficult, but also a lot of fun.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Danez Smith: Daniel plays the sound. Alright, we are here today to play our first game of the day. This one, Ladan, is called Fast Punch. In it, we’re going to give you 10 quick fire questions that you will answer. You can give us the best of these categories or the worst of these categories. Which one would you want to be today, pessimist or optimist?

Ladan Osman: Oh, usually I’m an optimist and I feel kind of bad because you said that most people pick best, so I’ll just pick worst to help add balance.

Danez Smith: Word. Okay, tight, you’ll do worst.

Franny Choi: Worst? Great. Love it.

Danez Smith: Love it. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Wow. Okay.

Danez Smith: All right. I can start us off. Worst place to cry. 

(TIMER TICKS)

Ladan Osman: (LAUGHS)Oh, you know, when I need to cry, I just let it happen. I think crying in front of people, especially ones who are trying to be aggressive, just feels very impossible for me. So that is—I absolutely reject and rebuke that. Crying in front of haters. 

Franny Choi: Okay, worst American holiday.

Ladan Osman: (LAUGHS)Fourth of July.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)Greatyeah perfect.

Ladan Osman: Presidents Day. Columbus Day. Shit, all of them. Fuck that.

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Ladan Osman: Solidarity with my indigenous peoples this Monday. 

Danez Smith: Worst book to read in the morning.

Ladan Osman: Huckleberry Finn or something, I don’t know.

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Ladan Osman: Yeah, like, really dreadful. I don’t own it, so I wouldn’t know. I think that that would be a really terrible way to start my day.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Yeah. Yikes. Worst fruit to eat fresh.

Ladan Osman: That’s wild. I just love all fruit so I can’t even front. I don’t know. I love them all.

Danez Smith: I’ll answer. Papaya.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Ladan Osman: Oh that one, yeah. That one’s a little tricky.

Franny Choi: Danez, it is not your turn.

Ladan Osman: Thank you for your help (LAUGHS) I can’t—I’m doing exactly the things people think that I’m doing at home. Like I sometimes have my head wrapped. There’s incense. I’m eating a lot of produce, drinking a lot of water. Slightly embarrassing.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS) Incredible.

Danez Smith: Worst word. 

Ladan Osman: Mange. 

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Ladan Osman: I don’t like that. That’s the first thing I thought of. I don’t like it.

Danez Smith: Ooo, it is kinda ugly.

Franny Choi: That’s a great answer.

Ladan Osman: It’s like something is matted and, ew, I don’t know like, smelly spit. Like something, I don’t know.

Danez Smith: And not even mangey, mange. 

Franny Choi: Okay, worst dried fruit.

Ladan Osman: Oh, I’m not into apricots.

Franny Choi: Hmm.

Ladan Osman: I think that’s doing a lot. A dried apricot. Oh dried mango. My mistake. It’s dried mango. Don’t do that to the mango.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Ladan Osman: I know people like it. It’s like the adults Whole Foods fruit roll-up or something. But you know what, the mango is delectable. It’s beautiful. It’s perfect in all of its creation

Franny Choi: Danez and I are in shocked silence right now… we’re not speaking because we’re stunned!  (LAUGHS)

Ladan Osman: I’ll take that position out of deep love for the fresh mango.

Franny Choi: Wow.

Ladan Osman: Do not dehydrate my babies.

Franny Choi: Wow, wow. Alright.

Danez Smith: Worst advice to give a writer.

Ladan Osman: You know, I would definitely say that telling people like right out the gate, especially in school, that they’re not going to make a way unless they focus on the first book prize route. I think that creates a lot of pain. And problems. And the fees are very expensive for people. It’s obviously very nice. I’m the beneficiary of a first book prize, but I think that being the main focus or being told before you even finish school that that’s super important for poets specifically is not so good.

Franny Choi: Amen. Worst Britney Spears song.

Ladan Osman: I’m not wild about that one, that’s “Not a girl. Not yet a woman,” even though it’s emotional. 

Franny Choi: Hmm.

Ladan Osman: I’m not—something about it feels not so like … we have “Lucky.”

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Ladan Osman: I don’t know that I need that.

Danez Smith: “Lucky” is a better version.

Ladan Osman: (LAUGHS) that melancholy…like I don’t need that tone again from Britney. Sorry to say, Miss Spears. I don’t know, she seems like an ally. Her dad keeps fucking with her. We wish her the best, you know.

Danez Smith: Amen. Free Britney. Free Britney. Worst job you’ve ever had. 

Ladan Osman: (LAUGHS) Working at the call center for the Delia’s catalog.

Franny Choi: Oh my god.

Ladan Osman: That was pretty bad. That was in college. I was not into that.

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Ladan Osman: There would be these people that call and order like, corduroys in 20 colors. It was a nightmare. 

Danez Smith: Oh, wow. (LAUGHS)

Ladan Osman: But you know. It wasn’t a hard job, but it was a lot more like abuse and tension than you would expect from people ordering like Picadilly bed sheets.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS) 

Franny Choi: Delia’s. Oh my stars.

Ladan Osman: It was not fun.

Danez Smith: Actually maybethat’s the exact amount of abuse I would expect—(LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS) Right.

Ladan Osman: Now that I’vegrown up and been to places where they serve like, sparkling blood orange drinks and a lot of cheese, I’m like, oh, that’s exactly right.

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Franny Choi: Okay, this is the last one. Worst pen.

Ladan Osman: The fake crystal Bics.

Danez Smith: Oh yeah.

Ladan Osman: Especially for a lefty, they’re very like, it’s like you’re just writing in morse code or something.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Ladan Osman: And then they suddenly just all spill out. And so, I have no idea what brand it is or what they’re called or maybe even Bic does themselves make a terrible version of this. But I just shudder when I see those. Like, why did you bring this here? 

Franny Choi: Wow. I love—bootleg Bic crystal pens as an answer is really, really good. 

Ladan Osman: Yeah.

(TIMER DINGS)

Franny Choi: Hooray!You won the game!

Ladan Osman: Thank you. Wow, feels great. I’m a winner. 

Franny Choi: You are a winner. You’re a winner, baby.

Danez Smith: (SINGS) You’re a winner, baby.

Ladan Osman: It’s a fun game. I feel like I don’t get invited to play games.

Danez Smith: If people don’t invite you to play enough games, when I move to New York, we can have game nights, because I—

Ladan Osman: Yo, I own—maybe I have it in storage. I own Operation. I’d bring that to game night. Like, we’re gonna do this, like a fully functioning operation with the batteries and everything. 

Franny Choi: Operation!

Ladan Osman: This is gonna get intense. 

Danez Smith: Okay, we can play Operation. I’m gonna lose. I will win and maybe get a tad bit too emotional if we play Catan. It’s like less colonizing than like Risk or whatever.

Franny Choi: Yeah, definitely.

Ladan Osman: Oh Risk is, oh my goodness.

Danez Smith: This one is more like, hey, you’re not like, fighting wars, but it’s like, you’re making roads and building cities and like trading sheep and wheat and all this other kind of stuff.

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Danez Smith: So it’s like very slightly colonization. There is also an army at foot, but they’re not like attacking people. So there’s like.

Ladan Osman: That sounds fun.

Franny Choi: Yeah, slightly sus game. But Risk is like, straight up col—I mean, I have cried so badly playing Risk.

Danez Smith: Playing Risk?

Franny Choi: Yeah. Risk can be devastating. Well also I was playing with all white men and then they were like, “I rolled the dice, like, take Asia from you.” (LAUGHS) Like oh my god!
 

Ladan Osman: Right, that’s really traumatizing. 

Franny Choi: So traumatized.

Ladan Osman: I walked into a room once and these people were just hunched over Africa on the Risk game, and I just wanted to flip the whole table over.

Danez Smith: Oh no.

Franny Choi: Yeah, it’s really, really rough.

Ladan Osman: I didn’t know this game existed. I like the last game, like triumph in a game was, I once played the Pokémon card game and got Pikachu and I was like, I’m going to evolve this into a Raichu and fucking destroy all of you. And people were like, “That’s ridiculous. I have these special outer space-ass Pokémon.”

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)
 

Ladan Osman: Victory was mine that night. I was like—

Franny Choi: Stick to the basics.

Danez Smith: We never played like—

Ladan Osman: I was like the overseer of Pokémon.

Danez Smith: We didn’t actually play by the rules. It was just like, whoever had the best Pokémon card won.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)Just like, “I have a Blastoise,” “Well, I have a Mutu.”

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Ladan Osman: It’s like, wow, Mutu. That’s very subjective and thrilling.

Danez Smith: It really was. No strategy, pure class. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: It’s just like a pageant. That’s just like a Pokémon pageant. (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Ladan Osman: That actually works.

Danez Smith: Alright.

Franny Choi: Okay, so now we are going to play our game, This vs. That. Ladan, thank you so much for coming on to this podcast also. And thank you so much for agreeing to play these games.

Ladan Osman: Of course. Thank you both for everything that you’re doing and building and resisting for all of us and for this community. It’s really my pleasure to be here.

Franny Choi: We are so lucky to have you. And we are going to squander that luck by asking you to play another stupid, stupid game. Which is- (LAUGHS) 

Danez Smith: We build all this respect and intimacy and then we bring it crashing the fuck down.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Ladan Osman: It’s exciting. 

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS) Alright, so this is the game where we pit two things against each other and you have to tell us which will win in a fight. We have been talking about the business of poetry and moving through institutions. We’ve also been talking about the grief of climate change. And so for this This vs. That, we’re going to do biz vs. bees.

(BELL RINGS)

Ladan Osman: I’ll just share a brief story. First of all, once I was at the DMV in Columbus, Ohio, and this woman had a voice that sounded like a bunch of bees were inside of her.

Franny Choi: Whoa!

Ladan Osman: She was like, “Izz you in the lineup?”

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Ladan Osman: It was just like a zzz. Like, it was amazing. So I just like—I should have taken her information or something because she should definitely be like, recording poems and things.

Franny Choi: Wow. Shout out that bee-haunted lady.

Ladan Osman: Shout-out to the woman who yeah, the bee sound created a kind of accent. For me, it’s definitely bees. It’s always bees. Fuck a business or biz. The bees, first of all, are like, perfect. Like they didn’t even really need to evolve. They make these like, raw-ass hives with these perfect shapes in them. They know what they need to do. They have a sense of structure. They pollinate. They’re heroic. I love bees so much. I love how they attend you. I love how they show they like, you know, some natural product that you’re wearing or that’s in your hair. I love how they linger in the lavender and the lilacs. Everything about them is great. I never want them to die or to flee or to be put in a tough position. And business can wait. Business behind the bees.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Ladan Osman: Get back, biz. Bees first. 

Franny Choi: Yay.

Ladan Osman: Biz down.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS) Bees first, biz down. Great.

Danez Smith: You pulled such beauty out of that question. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: I know, out of our absolute foolishness. Once again, may I say thank goodness for Ladan Osman. (LAUGHS) Ladan, thank you so much again. Will you do us the honor of closing us out with the poem?

Ladan Osman: Oh, yeah. Maybe I can read the poem that Danez mentioned, because I also don’t usually read this. I’m going to read one from the first book. So this is “The Kitchen Dweller’s Interlude.”

(READS POEM)

I will put into this bread a storm gathering water.
Do not take me, do not include me in this,
its plea a cat’s purr, or a tree full of cicadas.

I will uproot your olive tree. I will smooth the bark or send
something to build a fungus like a small sun in its cavities.

What is the smell of trouble?
Love-trouble is poison on the roof of the mouth.
I want to have museum-trouble, the way the air changes
before someone cuts a portrait.

Into this bread I put the dog that runs after his owner’s car, free as a horse.
Also a horse’s tail trying to unbraid.
And a muzzle.

And the taste of gutter water. I stare dumbly at it.
Abase myself.
Is our love water I can’t drink?

I blow a note into the hot oven, into the gap
between oven and countertop.

* * * 

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Franny Choi: That was Ladan Osman. Pearl after pearl of wisdom. Jeez-us.

Danez Smith: I feel like that just became a lot of y’all’s favorites. That was great. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Danez Smith: Said all the necessary things. And like, I just feel like a lot of what she was saying about like how this world needs to change, and also, like, really feeling, you know, even just her saying the name of a Fatima Kamara. Like calling in those hopes to real people, right. Like those are real young poets that we know out here that like, deserve the world, you know?

Franny Choi: The world. Yeah.

Danez Smith: Deserve the world. Yeah.

Franny Choi: Yeah, and I love the ways that she was talking about what changes are necessary or that she hopes for, for kind of like the future of people navigating the literary world. And, you know, Danez, we were people who navigated the literary world and all of that stuff.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS) Sometimes still do!

Franny Choi: I mean, yeah. Like, together. I mean but in those early stages, you know, in 2012 when we were, when both of us were working on our first books and we were still talking about how to move from being a slam poet to somebody who understood things about line breaks.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: You know? 

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Franny Choi: And we had folks who helped and guided us through that process as well as us laying paths for ourselves. Do you have a particular hope that you wish for the people who are like, us in 2012 now in 2020? For the younger poets who are coming up, or more emerging poets who are coming up alongside of us?

Danez Smith: Yeah. And they might even be younger, right.

Franny Choi: Yeah, exactly.

Danez Smith: It’s just like anybody, you know, sort of entering this world or this like, you know, this thing that we call being a poet. I think my more constant hope is that we continue to like, create and transform spaces so that people can be who they are the whole time, instead of only after they show up.

Franny Choi: Mm.

Danez Smith: You know, I think so many of us feel like it’s almost like a dress code, you know, like we have to, like, be right, whatever, a certain way, in order to get through the door. And then maybe we can, like, do what we really want to do one day. And I also hope that there’s a continued spirit of like, trying to share the wealth, too. And I think, you know, let’s get people paid for this stuff. I wish more people got paid for being poets, you know? (LAUGHS) That’s a hope, you know, and that it wasn’t such an expensive thing, where you think about how much money you can put into like, getting a first book, all these other kind of stuff. I just wish more people the space to, like, do their thing, right and to be adequately seen and like fed for the work they do. That’s my hope.

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Danez Smith: How about you? I know you got—I want to hear the good hope in your good heart. 

Franny Choi: Yeah. I hope that folks keep inventing new traditions. Like, new artistic traditions. And not just kind of like, trying to emulate what’s come before. Although that’s also great, you know, but like, I hope—I just am so excited to see what, like, new kind of writing is going to emerge in the poets who are more emerging than us. Holding tight to the people around you and loving them, while also like, making the next new mind blowing thing.

Danez Smith: Boom. I love that.

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Danez Smith: Shall we thank some folks and get on out of here? 

Franny Choi: Yeah, let’s do it. I just want to thank anybody who lets me pet their dog these days.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Because I know that, I know that there’s like, you know, there’s some risk in letting a stranger pet your dog. And I understand that. And I think that for you to allow me to say hi to your little friend is something that I just cherish and really appreciate. So shout-out to you dog owners who are letting me particularly, not necessarily everybody else, but me in particular, pet your dog.

Danez Smith: Word. I’m gonna thank app delivery drivers who I’m having a lot of face time with these last couple of months. I appreciate y’all. Thank y’all to the ones who have y’alls masks on and stuff like that. I’ve been trying to tip extra a little bit because I’ve been trying not to go as many places as, you know, one tends to go. And y’all niggas be driving quick. I be watching on a little app. I know how long it takes to drive from my house to Chipotle. And y’all be zooming. And so I appreciate you bringing me that burrito so quickly. 

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: All of y’all. Keep yourself safe. And you know, I feel like that’s just a great side hustle, too. I’ve done it a little bit. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: We would also like to think about Ydalmi Noriega and Itzel Blancas at the Poetry Foundation. Thank you to our producer, Daniel Kisslinger. Thank you, Postloudness. And thank you to all of our listeners for continuing to follow us on this season of VS.

Danez Smith: Mhm.Make sure you like, rate, and subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts, and make sure you follow us on Twitter @VSthepodcast. We were suspended for a little bit. I don’t know if we had did something. 

Franny Choi: I don’t know.

Danez Smith: I don’t know, maybe I accidentally posted a nude to the wrong account. I don’t know what happened, but. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Oh my god.

Danez Smith: I guess you can get suspended for that on Twitter, but anyways. Make sure you follow us there. And until next time, y’all be great, be well. I love you. You specifically.

Franny Choi: Bye, y’all. 

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)