Line / Break | Season 4 with Jaswinder Bolina

Interview Transcript

Ryo Yamaguchi (00:05):
Hey everybody. I’m Ryo Yamaguchi, the publicist at Copper Canyon Press, and you are tuning in to season four of our interview series Line Break, which goes off the page and into the poems and minds of our beloved poets.

(00:19):
We’ve had so much fun over these seasons, hearing poems, talking about writing, books, life. It’s been one of the favorite things we do at the Press. Friends for season four, a format change. This season we are doing some close reads. Each episode will focus on either a single poem or a single topic, wandering away and returning and wandering away again, along all the little paths we simply can’t resist. The episodes will probably be a little tighter, a little shorter, but we can’t say for sure. Thanks for joining us.

(00:54):
So reading about the dive bars of Chicago and Jaswinder Bolina’s English as a Second Language and Other Poems, makes me feel at home. It makes sense. Jaswinder and I inhabited the city around roughly the same years, in a similar moment of our adulthood, but home is a peculiar word. That’s what I love so much about this book, how shape-shifting the idea of home is in fraught ways, in funny ways. It’s a book that strikes me as one that’s always about becoming. Becoming an American, becoming an adult, and becoming a parent.

(01:29):
That last bit is our focus today as we look at the incredible piece, Probable Poem for the Furious Infant. It’s a wild, funny and stirring work that’s both at the end and the beginning of this fantastic book. More on that later, maybe. For now, Jaswinder. Hello. I’ve been looking forward to this so much. Thank you so much for being here.

Jaswinder Bolina (01:49):
Hey, Ryo, great to be here. Thank you.

Ryo Yamaguchi (01:52):
Absolutely. So I just want to talk, I was just really struck by this poem toward the end here of this book, and I was just kind of wondering if we could maybe start a little bit by talking about that forward backwardness and the layout of it. I know pretty well, but I was wondering if you could describe it for folks tuning in.

Jaswinder Bolina (02:09):
Yeah, it was the first time I’ve ever attempted anything quite like that. The working title for the manuscript for a long time was The Usual Entertainment, and it was based on this quote that I saw in Rome at Hadrian’s Tomb or Mausoleum. It really struck me. It was this translation that I’ve never been able to track down that exact translation again, it was just on a board next to, there’s an inscription on the wall of this poem attributed to Hadrian. And part of it is this idea of he’s lamenting death or the coming death and how he will have to go down into colorless dark places where he will no longer have the usual entertainment. And I just thought that was such a fun way of describing life as the usual entertainment.

(03:03):
So that was a working title for a long time. But then as the poems got written, as the manuscript got built out, things in my life changed. We had a child, I got married, had a child, and my wife had the child. I was just there. And so, as you do, your perspective shifts, your subjects shift, and yet they were still connected to things that I’ve done in my earlier work, things with race and culture and assimilating to the US. I was born here, my family are immigrants.

(03:42):
And really the poem, I mean the poems and the book became about this other thing too, which ends up being encapsulated and the now title English as a Second Language and Other Poems. And as I ordered everything and I did it kind of front ways first, I started to realize that this idea of the usual entertainment, the ghost of that other manuscript that I was working on was still there. And when I had everything laid out in order from front to back, it just dawned on me really one night that I was like, I had always thought I would start the book here calling it this, but now all those poems ended up at the back and I thought, well, what if it was just two books in one, which is rare.

(04:30):
I mean, I think a lot of us read poetry books maybe out of order. We pick them up, we bounce around. And I wanted to be a little more deliberate about the ordering of the manuscript thematically, chronologically. And once it was all assembled, it made sense that you could read it in both directions. And so now you all were fantastic at Copper Canyon and helped to cultivate that. And so we have two tables of contents and the official title and then the unofficial title of The Usual Entertainment, and that’s the manuscript you read backwards where English is a Second Language is the manuscript you read forwards.

Ryo Yamaguchi (05:10):
It’s so cool and I think it works so well. I mean, going back to the initial thing you said about the Hadrian quote, it’s such a funny quote and I can see how it stuck with you for so… It’s funny because it’s so heavy and then there’s that sort of odd kind of end to it and things. And it functions as kind of an epigraph at the end, beginning of it, or at least well of the poem that we’re getting into.

(05:33):
And I really love the way that, well, a very talented production editor, Claretta Halsey helped create sort of back matter that was front matter. There’s another table of contents, things like that, other epigraphs and things. And I think it reads very, very well in that way.

(05:50):
I see it as being both reversible, but then also as recapitulating too. It’s like as though the book is starting over again in this kind of fun way. And I think there’s a neat thematic tie to the generational hand down and stuff that’s happening in this book. That’s really cool. Maybe we’ll talk about that in a bit.

Jaswinder Bolina (06:07):
Yeah.

Ryo Yamaguchi (06:07):
The thing I was going to say too about the position of this poem in particular of Probable Poem for a Fierce Infant is, how do you feel it sits tonally in the book? I was kind of curious about that.

Jaswinder Bolina (06:23):
Yeah, I mean, it’s… On the one hand it’s a macabre poem. There’s something gloomy about it because it’s the speaker contemplating that he is dead and not around anymore really. And that the child who is the infant in the title has grown up and is kind of living their own life in this sort of vaguely half Blade Runner, half Back to the Future part two, kind of future. And yeah, I think thematically it comes at the end of the forward reading of the manuscript because it is sort of life after death, life after we ourselves, the speaker, the reader, are not here any longer. And you’re kind of speaking, I think kind of down through the age, not ages, but down a generation to the next one. And so on that end, it’s sort of an exit poem where the speaker is gearing up to exit stage left or right.

(07:30):
But then if you read it the other way, it’s sort of an introductory poem. I think it’s kind of a hopeful poem because if you focus on the infant in question, I’d like to think that the future is not so bleak despite all of the problems that humanity and our civilizations collectively face. There’s some I hope, hopefulness in it. And from that direction, I think of the subject of the poem being the grown kid himself. And then the kind of progression of the manuscript becomes, sort of here’s where you came from as it tracks the speaker’s life all the way back to an origin story.

(08:16):
So the position of the poem is kind deliberate in both directions. On the one hand, it’s an exit, on the other hand, it’s an intro.

Ryo Yamaguchi (08:24):
Yeah. So that’s just so marvelous how well it works in both of those ways. I mean particularly this kind of tonal element of it that’s like twinning of, I guess a kind of cynicism and hope sort of both things at once.

(08:39):
Well, I’m getting ahead of myself. Shall we hear the poem? What do you think? You want to read it for us?

Jaswinder Bolina (08:44):
Yeah. That sounds good. I have not read it in a while, and actually I found it as a tough read because it is all one continuous sentence across two pages, which is something I keep writing, and you can do it in your head because you don’t have to breathe. The voice in your brain doesn’t have to take a breath. So I’m going to try to get all the way through it. It does have its own epigraph, and it comes from the poet Nâzım Hikmet, and it’s from his poem, a lot of his poems just the first line functions as the title. And so this one is the poem “I stepped out of my thoughts of death,” which really this poem that I wrote is about my thoughts of death. But the epigraph from Hikmet is I put on the June leaves of the boulevards, I stepped out of my thoughts of death.

(09:43):
And this is my poem, Probable Poem for the Furious Infant.

(09:48):
Probably you’ll solve gravity, flesh out our microbiomics, split our God particles into their constituent bits of christs and antichrist probably, probably you’ll find life as we know it, knitted into every nook of the prattling cosmos, quaint and bountiful as kismet and gunfights in the movies probably, probably, probably you have no patience for the movies there in your eventual arrondissement where you have more credible holography, more inspiring actual events, your ghazals composed of crow racket, retrorockets, your glaciers breaking, your discotheques wailing, probably, probably, probably too late, a sentient taxi airlifts you home over the refurbished riverbank beside the rebuilt cathedral, your head dozing easy in the crook of your arm, emptied of any memory of these weeks we haven’t slept you’ve been erupting into that hereafter like a hydrant on fire, like your mother is an air raid, and I am an air raid, and you’re a born siren chasing us out of your airspace we’ve caught 47 daybreaks in 37 days probably and you little emissary arrived to instruct us, we wake now you shriek us awake, we sleep now you give us to sleep.

(11:12):
So I got through it with that.

Ryo Yamaguchi (11:14):
You did really good. Oh, it was beautiful. It was really wonderful. There’s so much energy in this poem. I think some of it’s that anaphyristic quality, which I think is echoing so many poems and famous poems in the English language. What I love about that repeating line though is the probabilistic quality of it. I was sort of curious, well, one of my initial questions was how you landed on that as if that sentence just kind of arrived to you if you were just kind hearing it or if you were kind interested in quantum issues.

Jaswinder Bolina (11:45):
Yeah, I am very much. Going all the way back to my first book, there’s a lot of particle physics and quantum mechanics. I’m not very adept in terms of science and mathematics and physics, but I do read a lot of popular focused media and books on those subjects. Cosmology, physics, I find them really interesting. I think there is something… There are many things there that might offer insight into more metaphysical questions.

(12:26):
But the probabilistic thing of it, yeah, that’s an echo there. But there’s also that notion, just the narrative idea of, I don’t know for sure what will happen or where my son may end up or what will happen to our planet and the various artifacts of it. But I was trying to bring a little bit of hope and optimism to the cynicism too, that it’s possible. It’s probable things will be okay, just different.

(13:00):
I wrote the poem not long after Notre Dame burned nearly to the ground. That’s the cathedral in the poem. And I remember that was such a strange moment, and I think many have noted correctly that there was all this outpouring of money and grief while all these other catastrophes are occurring, and yet people are going to pour all this money into this cathedral. But at the same time, there’s something necessary about our art and our artifacts and those cathedrals.

(13:33):
And this was early on, I didn’t know that they would rebuild it, but I thought probably they will. They’ll do something to fix it up. And all the other things, flying sentient taxis and glaciers breaking, the sort of inevitability of climate change. There are certain things we can always guess are likely, but they’re not guaranteed.

(14:01):
And so I think when we think about the future, in essence, it’s not that different than the past in both directions you’re kind of working with a probability. And we give ourselves too much credit when it comes to memory, and we think that it’s accurate, but really that’s probable too. That’s probably what happened. You probably remember it accurately, but there’s a possibility you don’t. And so predicting the future is a kind of exercise in probabilities too, and in all likelihood you’re wrong. But I wanted to kind of bring that hopefulness into it.

(14:35):
And of course, there’s a bleary eyedness of the speaker. He can’t speak in absolutes because he hasn’t slept. I mean, our kid was a terrible sleeper for the first six months, not the infant asleep for 20 hours a day. Quite the opposite. And so I think that probability too is just trying to capture the haziness of the fuzziness of everything.

Ryo Yamaguchi (14:59):
Yeah. That’s so wonderfully put. And I mean, well, two points I’m kind of holding onto here as I’m listening to describe all this is. I mean, one is that the Notre Dame burning and this kind of reminder of the impermanence of things that we’ve come to just really trust in, at the risk of getting a bit political. I think the overturning of Roe v. Wade, I think was another moment like this also. Of course, a completely separate issue, but I think a moment where we realized great instability. And also, which also creates a lot of dread about looking forward and things too.

(15:35):
On that point though, but looking back, I mean that’s what I’m really, what a profound statement though that I’ve never heard put so succinctly, which is this idea that even the past is probabilistic. And I love that even beyond the failure of our memory, but like… In my own kind of new agedness, I would even venture as far to say that ontologically the past is probabilistic. Maybe actually multiple histories happened. You know? Berenstain, Berenstein, or whatever bears, right? That old thing, you know?

(16:10):
Yeah, yeah, it’s really beautiful. And I’m happy that you located actually Notre Dame because I read Paris immediately from the minute you say Aaron [inaudible 00:16:21], I’m realizing that we’re locating the child in Paris, and that triggered my mind than, oh, your vision is yet another migration for your child in this generation. And I really wanted to ask you about that too, if that was something that kind of happened to you or if it’s something that you just expect. I mean that you have a family history going back generations where that generation is in constant movement. Yeah.

Jaswinder Bolina (16:44):
Yeah. I mean, it’s an interesting thing to have a kid who is born and embedded in the culture that I was born and embedded into. I feel so acutely aware of the way in which that was not the case for me and my parents. And I feel it really every day there are simple… Trick-or-treating, Halloween just happened. And that’s just something those of us who grew up here, know and understand, but to the immigrant, it’s like, “What? They’re doing what now?” And I didn’t go trick-or-treating as a kid because it wasn’t anything that registered with my folks. They were also working a lot and didn’t get to do some of these things.

(17:26):
So that sense of alienation growing up as the child of immigrants, and I don’t mean that alienation is a strictly pejorative and horrible thing. I just mean there’s a disconnect between parent and child and you form your own kind of bond and internal connection that actually is brilliant and wonderful and singular. Right? My connection to my parents isn’t replicable by others because of the different elements of experience and language and culture that we have that others don’t. And you’re always seeking people who can identify with those experiences.

(18:05):
So now to have a kid who is an American, and I’m an American, and it is a very different process of growing up and becoming acculturated and acclimated to a place, he’s learning things that I already know. But if you remove him from our context, our American context, that gets a little bit closer to the kind of alienation. And what I wanted to capture, I simply put it in Paris because again, Notre Dame was on the mind, and I was thinking that might be where that poem started too. The idea of the rebuilt cathedral. I don’t really remember what the kind of triggering image was, but that felt like an early one while I was writing that poem.

(18:52):
And I just thought, there’s every chance the kid will end up in Paris or anywhere else. I mean, I could have put him in Sudan or Bali or [foreign language 00:19:07], I don’t know. But if I’m accessing my risk board memory of different parts of the world. But I think because the Notre Dame thing had just happened that was on my mind, I have, as probably a lot of literary and art minded folks do, a real fondness for Paris because of just its kind of vital part in western literary history.

(19:34):
And so I think there was something romantic about it too. I didn’t want to put the child in danger in my imagination in the future. I wanted him to be somewhere that felt that I had kind of affection for. So it really could have been, I could have put him in Delhi or Beijing or something, but that was on my mind at the time. So I put him there.

(20:01):
But yeah, that tries to capture then I really don’t know where he is going to end up and I don’t really want to know. I hope he ends up very far afield. I mean, for all we know, he might end up on the moon. We don’t know. And I wanted to embrace that a little bit.

Ryo Yamaguchi (20:17):
Yeah. It’s really terrific. I mean, Paris is a great place to end up of course.

(20:23):
So as I’ve been talking to people about the book, and I kind of said this a little bit at the outset of our conversation, was that I really think of this as a book about becoming American and that it actually shows through the immigrant experience, recognizable experiences that we all have in our own estrangement as Americans, and that we’re in some ways that we are all trying to still and constantly trying to become American. And I don’t really know what I mean by that. I think that statement risks some appropriation of the very specific experiences that immigrant folks have.

(20:58):
But I want to pose it to you if you think that there’s a particular kind of estrangement, particularly in our era of our time that’s germane to both those who’ve been here forever and those who are newly arrived, and if there’s somewhere that we all meet in our own estrangement or something like that.

Jaswinder Bolina (21:12):
Yeah, I mean, it’s a tough thing. Your relationship to being American or wanting to be American on the one hand, there’s a lot… I was saying to somebody that America is so full of strife and contention, and it is so exclusionary in part because it’s so inclusionary. Like we get mixed in with the reactionaries and the regressive kinds of conservatives. We get mixed in with ethno-nationalism and Christian nationalism. Our flag also represents that.

(21:50):
And yet for those of us who are immigrants, there are these other concerns. Concerns of language, race, culture, the history of colonial occupation, whether cultural or military or political. So there is always a sense of estrangement to the immigrant. My parents will speak very much about how much they love America, but they also don’t refer to themselves as American except in very specific contexts. Somebody asks them, “Well, are you a citizen?” “Yes, I’m an American.” But American tends to mean normative white culture, and that is something you can’t be part of.

(22:30):
I think what’s… If you’re of color, if you don’t speak the language, and what’s I think horrific about the country, and there’s plenty to celebrate about the US, but one of the things that’s kind of we all know is wildly problematic is the way in which there are those of us who are born here, who go back generations, if you are Black, who are not considered part of that normative mainstream Americanness. If you are indigenous, so-called Native American, you are actually, that word native permanently cleaves you apart from American identity, even as people want to say, well, it’s the most American of course.

(23:19):
That sense of alienation is a really interesting one. It’s one that people who are in any way marginalized in this country, I think tend to feel, and everybody feels it differently. And I don’t want to get into, I don’t remotely want to get into any competition or comparative exercise of, well, I’m nearer to Americanness than you are, or I’m more marginalized than anybody else is. Because there’s always somebody more marginalized than you, and there is always somebody who is kind of more majority included than you.

(23:56):
But I think what’s remarkable about our moment is the way in which, whether it’s kind of the internet and telecommunication, the speed of travel, I think American self-identity, and I mean mainstream American self-identity is being really destabilized. Our economic systems, our government, have all pushed us towards globalization and immigration is part of that. But it’s wild to me that the corporations and the sort of global corporations for very capitalistic reasons have pulled America, the US, into a global kind of crouch. And that’s destabilizing the sense of American sovereignty and American kind of separation, American exceptionalism.

(24:51):
But yet the mainstream wants to blame immigrants who are entering the country as the reason that American identity is being destabilized. They want to blame queerness, they want to blame color, they want to blame progressive notions, but really it’s the corporations that did it. It’s our geopolitics that did it. Those things implicated us in the world. And what that implication does, it tells you “You are not central. You might be a major player, but you’re not central.” And that’s really weird and alienating to I think a certain mainstream perspective here.

(25:26):
But I’m glad for that. Let them feel alienated, let them feel threatened. We have felt that way all along. Let them experience it. And I think that’s one of the things that I try to do in the book, this idea of English as a Second Language. It’s just trying to call attention to the ways in which our ideas of normalcy are constructed, are very much a construction and how easy it is to destabilize that construction just by the inclusion of a foreign word or a foreign perspective. That there’s so much Americana in the book, but the moment the character experiencing the Americana acknowledges race or cultural identity, the Americana-ness gets destabilized.

(26:18):
In my last book, I had some of this too, it was called The 44th of July, kind riffing on similar themes of, and I have a talk about it instead of a ten-gallon hat, a ten-gallon turban instead of just a, I think there’s a sarong mention, but it’s a denim sarong. So this kind of blending of typically American ideas and those that are associated with outside ideas. So that’s probably a messy answer to your open-ended question, but those are the themes that are in the back of my mind a lot when it comes to Americanness and alienation from it. We should all… We all deserve, and it should in fact, I think invite and welcome experiences of alienation. I think they are absolutely vital to perspective, humility and understanding. I think we need them.

Ryo Yamaguchi (27:17):
Yeah. That’s fantastic. Oh God, that’s so nicely put. I kind of want to ask actually about the subject and the tool of jest. I’m going to use the word jest here. I think some of it comes out of maybe a generation that you and I sort of share that was an earlier version of this question was, we lived through kind of what I think I’ve described as the hipster aughts where everything was ironic and we moved into a different time. But that sense of humor and jest is pervasive throughout these works and of great utility. And that’s the other thing I’m really trying to put my thumb on. So I want to ask you, how does humor help you? How does jest help you? And what is its use actually as a political tool as something that we can mobilize? And how you see it in the poems too? Yeah.

Jaswinder Bolina (28:09):
I feel like I could probably blow right pass any time constraints talking about that. Now there is that poem, House Hunters, and it’s actually that one’s trying to depict a white family from watching that show House Hunters hunting. But she is described, the mother, as immigrant on the hunt. And I want whiteness to be cognizant of the ways in which… You know, people watch House Hunters International, but they don’t regard themselves as immigrants, which is odd to me. The difference between speaking of Paris, the distinction between the expatriate and the immigrant, that’s a political decision to call yourself one or the other.

(28:49):
Humor to me, yeah, it’s absolutely enough an artifact. I’m born at the tail end of generation X. I think there’s a lot of recent kind of meme worthy Gen X pride over the ways in which we were raised and the kind of strange moment we were in politically in the nineties, it was called the holiday from history between the end of the Cold War and 9/11. And then of course geopolitics history reasserts itself in the aughts too. Yeah, there is a kind of lingering embrace of irony and sardinism and sarcasm.

(29:24):
I am not actually all that sarcastic. My work does get called cynical, which I don’t really take issue with that. But I do have a kind of, I guess a cynical awareness of history and politics. I mean, Donald Trump was president. How are you not a cynic on the back end of that, right? And that’s not even the worst example of what humans are capable of, which is a hell of a thing to say. But when you’re kind of plagued by that constantly trying to confront the horrors of reality or the downsides, you have to find optimism somewhere too.

(30:13):
And I am actually generally, I’ve said this to a lot of friends over the years, I’m pessimistic when it comes to individuals. I’m optimistic when it comes to humanity itself. I think we might just be 51% good, and that’s just good enough to bend the arc of history, to borrow that quote.

(30:34):
But humor is one of the ways to undercut the darkness. I don’t do well reading. I don’t like dystopias. I don’t like… I grew up, yeah, I loved Blade Runner when I was a kid, but lately, I think even watching Star Wars, I think, “What a bleak perspective this is.” You have this galaxy where religion is self-evident. People can make things move with their mind. There are lasers and sentient robots and what are they doing all the time? They’re at war, constantly. That’s not the future that I want.

(31:06):
And I think I want to introduce optimism. And one of the ways that I do that is by undercutting a lot of truth statements, something that was true culturally in the nineties. I think it’s an artifact of kind of postmodern lit, the constant undermining of the kind of dark cynicism with the joke, DeLillo does it in White Noise. There are all kinds of writers who do this. Going back to Vonnegut. Zadie Smith does it, I think in White Teeth, right? There’s a lot of humor while confronting bleakness.

(31:43):
And I remember too, I was lucky enough as an undergrad to work with Dean Young. He taught at Loyola University of Chicago back then in the nineties. And I remember on the back of one of his books, a reviewer or a blurber had said, “Dean Young reminds us that there is sometimes nothing more serious than the joke.” And that stuck with me, that in our darkest moments, I think about that in my own life when, yep, scary medical news, when something bad is happening, maybe it’s a bad habit. But one of the ways that I contend with that is by trying to find humor in it, making the joke that kind of gallows humor.

(32:23):
And I think the political or philosophical efficacy of that is, I think it decenters, we have a tendency… I don’t want to be an egomaniac. I don’t want to be the artist as tyrant or the author as tyrant. I want to remind myself that I’m not the center of the universe and my concerns are not everybody’s concerns. And so one of the ways I think that gets expressed in my work is this constant undermining via humor. But I hope… I also get nervous about that. I don’t want to undermine so much that it discredits what I’m saying. So it’s more to find a kind of tonal balance. If you’re going to say some really bleak shit, then maybe crack a joke somewhere in there too and acknowledge the kind of frivolity of it.

(33:10):
Life is short. At the end of the day, our individual concerns don’t matter so much. And the joke is a way to kind of encapsulate that. It feels self-aware when you make a joke and everybody gets it and they go, okay. And you get it viscerally. The joke, the gallows humor is intended to acknowledge something that is difficult to articulate. Like, Hey, we’re going to die, but everybody dies. Who cares? Right? Let’s crack a joke to acknowledge that visceral experience. So I think that’s part of, maybe that’s the most succinct I can get right now on that question.

Ryo Yamaguchi (33:52):
No, it’s fantastic. And it’s funny, I’m hearing in that, we’re all going to die anyway. Who care? I’m just so like Monty Python to me or something, but…

Jaswinder Bolina (34:00):
Yeah.

Ryo Yamaguchi (34:01):
I’m going to hold on to the Dean Young quote that what, nothing darker than a joke.

Jaswinder Bolina (34:06):
Nothing more serious than a joke.

Ryo Yamaguchi (34:07):
Nothing more serious than a joke. That’s much better. Yeah. Nothing more serious than a joke. I will hold onto that and maybe the belief that we are 51% good.

Jaswinder Bolina (34:15):
I hope so.

Ryo Yamaguchi (34:17):
Steer us toward the future. Well, I think this does bring us, I am mindful of our time constraints, but this brings us to a nice good pause and actually a good moment I think to maybe hear the poem again. If you’re up reading it again, Probably Poem for Furious Infant.

Jaswinder Bolina (34:29):
Yeah. Would be happy to. Let’s see if it sounds differently this time, and I’ll start with the epigraph again.

(34:37):
I put on the June leaves of the boulevards, I stepped out of my thoughts of death.

(34:42):
Probable Poem for the Furious Infant. Probably you’ll solve gravity, flesh out our microbiomics, split our God particles into their constituent bits of christs and antichrists probably, probably you’ll find life as we know it, knitted into every nook of the prattling cosmos quaint and bountiful as kismet and gunfights in the movies probably, probably, probably you have no patience for the movies there in your eventual arrondissement where you have more credible holography, more inspiring actual events your ghazals composed of crow racket, retrorockets, your glaciers breaking, your discotheques wailing probably, probably, probably, probably too late a sentient taxi air lifts you home over the refurbished riverbank, beside the rebuilt cathedral, your head dozing easy in the crook of your arm, emptied of any memory of these weeks we haven’t slept, you’ve been erupting into that hereafter like a hydrant on fire, like your mother is an air raid, and I am an air raid, and you’re a born siren chasing us out of your airspace, we’ve caught 47 daybreaks in 37 days probably and you little emissary arrived to instruct us, we wake now you shriek us awake, we sleep now you give us to sleep.

Ryo Yamaguchi (36:03):
That’s fantastic. I think I do hear more hope in it in the second reading, and I hear the probably’s just as strong too though. It’s a wonderful poem Jaswinder, I was really happy to take some time today. Thank you for making the time. Today I kind of want to maybe dedicate the conversation to Hikmet and to Dean Young and to your son too, right? Yeah.

Jaswinder Bolina (36:21):
Yeah. No, thank you. I would like to dedicate to all those folks too.

Ryo Yamaguchi (36:24):
It’s really wonderful. Well, thank you. This has been a really enriching conversation and yeah, I hope see each other in person soon enough. Yeah. Thanks again for being here.

Jaswinder Bolina (36:33):
Thank you for hosting Ryo, and thank you for all the work everybody there does, and thank you to everybody reading the book. Appreciate it.

Ryo Yamaguchi (36:38):
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks to all you out there too tuning in. I appreciate you joining us. This go-round, go out, keep well, and we’ll see you next time.

[End Transcript]