Jasmine Gibson
Seen on these playlists
Beyond the Rented World
Two of my favorite Bernadette Mayer writing experiments propose that we “write a work that intersperses love with landlords” and "attempt writing in a state of mind that seems least congenial.” Mayer, our poet of real talk about money, asks us to look for the landlords always there in the workings of our lives together, refusing repairs, evicting low-income tenants (more than 1 in 10 NYC public-school students have no permanent address), and all the time undercutting the potential of our relations. There’s nothing inherently protective in poetry—some poets are landlords—but these poems think through processes of imagining an unrented life in stages ranging from the fed up to the least congenial. [If you can, support anti-gentrification work in your area. Some NYC-based organizations: Brooklyn Anti-Gentrification Network, Equality for Flatbush, Queens Anti-Gentrification Project, Bronx Community Vision, Association for Neighborhood & Housing Development, and CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities]
View playlistDon't Let Them See Me Like This
It’s interesting being asked to make a playlist of my book when I had my own playlist while creating it. While writing this book I was reading "Black Marxism", "Heroes" and "Everything You Could Be If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother". I was also listening to stream of doom metal like Electric Wizard & Sleep but also the oldies like Black Sabbath or Alice Coltrane. People often ask me what my book is about or what it means for the moment. My answer is my book and work can speak for itself, don’t ask me, ask it, it can speak for itself. Maybe this is comes across as a flamboyant refusal of my work to being package as a commodity, and that is partly the truth, but also an encouragement for readers to make up their own mind about what it means for them. My book carries its own mood and weight in the world and it doesn’t even answer to me anymore. I think I’ve most appreciated my work when I’ve seen it on my mother’s bed, tucked in my sister’s purse, a friend’s mother telling me “man, you’re heavy” after a reading or on my friend’s instagram story. That is how this book has developed meaning for me. That it's become a love language between those I love the most. I think I wrote and completed this book to spite many people. But ultimately, in the end the people who I love welcomed it the most and everyone I wanted to spite just fell away. Of course the book works with current events that have happened and lead me to question my own existential being. Reading the news, being involved in protests and other political actions can often lead you to a psychosis like state. However, in these moments, in the middle of a march, getting kettled or whatever things that are better left unsaid, I felt like I had seen a glimmer of what it truly means to be a part of collective. A (love) supreme ego death. During the day, I work as a mental health professional, and when I have moments I am a poet and writer. But in totality I am a Black communist, hungering for freedom and deliciousness, and that is how you should read these poems. -Jasmine
View playlist