David J. Bauman (00:01)
One day, the apolitical intellectuals of my country will be interrogated by the simplest of our people. They will be asked what they did when their nation died out slowly, like a sweet fire, small and alone. No one will ask them about their dress, their long siestas after lunch. No one will want to know about their sterile combats with the idea of the nothing. No one will care

about their higher financial learning. They won't be questioned on Greek mythology or regarding their self-disgust when someone within them begins to die the coward's death. They'll be asked nothing about their absurd justifications.

born in the shadow of the total lie. On that day, the simple men will come, those who had no place in the books and poems of the apolitical intellectuals, but daily delivered their bread and milk, their tortillas and eggs, those who mended their clothes, those who drove their cars, who cared for their dogs and gardens.

and worked for them. ask, what did you do when the poor suffered, when tenderness and life burned out of them? A political intellectuals of my sweet country, you will not be able to answer. A vulture of silence will eat your gut. Your own misery will picket your soul.

and you will be mute in your shame.

That was a poem by Rene Otto Castillo of Guatemala who stood up to the CIA when the US conspired to overthrow a democratically elected leader Castillo was eventually killed by the Guatemalan army the same year I was born. His poem was translated into English by Margaret Randall who kindly gave her permission for me to read it here.

Welcome to In Three Poems, I'm David J. Bauman. Our guest poet today is Hannah Levy, and this episode's a little different than usual due to circumstances in our own country right now. She joined me in conversation from California yesterday and has agreed to return next season when we'll talk at greater length about her own work. I will conclude this episode with a poem by Renee Good, the poem that won her

an Academy of American Poets University Prize back in 2020. I want to be clear about something. I will not debate what we all saw from multiple angles now with our own eyes. And I will not debate about human decency have clearly turned a corner here. And we are no longer talking about conservative policies versus liberal policies.

we are talking about human rights. Here's my conversation with Hannah from yesterday.

David J. Bauman (03:10)
We have Hana Levy as our guest today. And Hana, tell us a little bit about yourself. You're an editor of a publication.

Hannah Levy (03:19)
Yeah, I live in Berkeley, California, and I am the editor and founder of a tarot-themed literary anthology called The Rebus. It's a print-only, comes out once a year, and every issue we unpack a single archetype of the tarot through poetry, artwork, creative writing.

David J. Bauman (03:42)
We're going to have my friend Ann Keeler Evans later on this season who is working on some tarot writing. So it's fun to talk to somebody else who's into that. And I've really enjoyed looking at the connections that you make with other people's poems as well as your own and particular tarot cards on your social media. Tell me about Rebus. What's that come from?

Hannah Levy (04:09)
Yeah, it's a stage of the alchemical process. So in traditional medieval alchemy, there's all these varying stages in which matter is pulled apart and diluted and then comes together. Of course, I am just glossing over some of the intricate details there in the interest of time. But at...

David J. Bauman (04:30)
just threw that at you without telling you ahead of time.

Hannah Levy (04:34)
The Rebus is the final culmination of the process in which ⁓ it comes from Latin res bina, which means like the union of opposites, it's double matter. ⁓ And so it's when everything comes together, everything that's kind of taken apart comes back together. And so I thought it was really fitting name for a publication in which you take all these different pieces.

of tarot and spirituality, psychology, creativity, and you kind of weave a tapestry.

David J. Bauman (05:07)
I didn't know anything about your work until I saw this poem online. And I'm so glad I found you. It's horrific that this is how, you know, we have to find each other sometimes is through something like this. A lot of people have been writing poems about what basically was a public execution in Minneapolis last week.

I know Cornelius Eaddy has written a poem and published about it. Amanda Gorman, Danez Smith even wrote a little elegy in prose. But when I saw yours,

I reached out hoping that maybe it would get to a person. And you were so gracious to respond to me so quickly and to be so enthusiastic about participating. I know this is a little bit different than our normal episode where we'll have two poems by the guest poet and then a poem that you choose by another poet.

So you've also graciously accepted the invitation to come back again next season and we'll get a chance to hear more of your work and I'm very much looking forward to that. But would you be willing to read your poem for us now?

Hannah Levy (06:13)
Yeah, and it was such an honor to have you reach out. Like you mentioned, writing this came out of a lot of grief and rage and heartache, and the connections that have happened because of it have just been kind of like keeping me afloat over the last week or so. Okay, so I'll give it a read.

David J. Bauman (06:27)
Mm. Yeah.

Hannah Levy (06:34)
The day a poet is murdered by ICE is a school day like every other in the first week of the year. Time isn't real, but still it's January and scientists say we're gaining about 60 seconds of sunlight even as the sun sets. I wake up and feel closer to death than the day before. I am a mother, so I wait for my daughter at the bottom of the stairs.

and I hold her hand when crossing the street. And when we stop at the corner, I run my fingers over her ponytail, like it's my own hair. She says there's a cloud in the sky that looks like a heart, but I can't see what she sees. I am a mother, so when she is hungry, I feed her. And when she asks me how to spell wolves, I explain how some nouns transform in the plural. Man is men and tooth is teeth.

and person who is murdered becomes people.

David J. Bauman (07:39)
Thank you. Thank you for writing it and thank you for sharing it The poem title as basically the first sentence kind of grips you right by the neck Maybe part of that is because we all connect to this in the moment as we're hearing it.

I think about all the school shootings and the police killings, like Trayvon Martin, the boy ⁓ Daniel McClain, ⁓ so many. Of course, right there in the same town, George Floyd.

And then for me, somebody as a queer poet who sees this

I guess when I think of like the boy McClane, ⁓ I feel like that could have been one of my sons, you know? I wrote a little bit of a piece privately on my own Facebook page about how the day after the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, I was so shaken up and I drove out to a little lake near where we lived up in Northeastern Pennsylvania at the time.

And when there were no fishermen walking past my vehicle, I finally just broke down and wept. ⁓ You know, because you're thinking, I have friends in Orlando. It could have been one of them. It could have been, you know, if I had been down visiting. And when you have that connection, you know, to people and maybe in this case, maybe your connection to is also being a mother when you.

witness such a horrific act. sometimes writing about it, you had something on your social media today, something about, you said something about, sat writing today and then I erased it all. Because sometimes writing is just getting it out. And sometimes you're able to get it out in a way that helps both you and other people. And sometimes it's just practice. And in this case, it did both things.

Hannah Levy (09:25)
it happen.

Yeah.

David J. Bauman (09:37)
and I'm grateful for that. Do want to tell us a little bit about how this poem came together? You told me a little bit the other night. So I'd like you to share that with us if you could.

Hannah Levy (09:46)
Yeah.

This poem feels like the most honest account of what it felt like to experience that day. I was kind of off of the news while I was spending most of the afternoon with my daughter. ⁓ We went, I picked her up from school. We had to walk to an orthodontist appointment, had to come home.

snack time, helping her with her homework. I was there with her alone. And when I finally plugged back into my phone and the news and ⁓ there was a lot more information about the shooting that had happened and I felt it's like this fragmentation that happens when you have to perform as a parent, but the world is going up in flames around you. think any parent

who has been taking care of children over the last five to seven years has experienced the escalation of state sanctioned violence, brutality, ⁓ the Trump presidency, and the fear that grips us. And yet the need to be grounded and put on a strong face, and especially when you have really small children, ⁓ kind of be their anchor to the world. ⁓

David J. Bauman (11:09)
Yeah.

Hannah Levy (11:10)
And so I really kind of had this private moment of devastation while I had to then get through the rest of the evening with my daughter and kind of contain myself. And then when finally I put her to sleep, I sat down and opened up my laptop and was like, I just had to get the word, I had to find the language for it. And I kind of wrote this

It almost felt like I was about to write a diary entry. Like I kind of just wrote the poem, which I don't typically, you know, sometimes you get those lightning bolt moments as a poet where you just spill everything over and it, you don't really touch the poem, you don't edit it. And you're kind of like, I think this is just the accurate, honest representation of the raw feeling. And that's kind of what happened here. I sent it to...

David J. Bauman (11:57)
Yeah.

Hannah Levy (12:03)
my best friend, I texted it to her. I was just like, I'm processing, this is my processing. And she was like, you should share that. It wasn't my first instinct to share it on social media, but it was my first instinct to share it with a friend who's also a writer and an artist. And so I kind of felt like it ended up being a little bit like a lighthouse where it was like, try to find.

David J. Bauman (12:18)
Yeah.

Hannah Levy (12:31)
other people to connect with around this. I think sometimes, especially in these moments of just such obvious, such blatant violence, such blatant, that sense of wrongness, unjust, an unjust world, poetry and art is sometimes more helpful than like watching the political commentary unfold.

David J. Bauman (12:43)
Mm-hmm.

Hannah Levy (12:56)
and reading more news articles. And I did not wanna consume any more news that day, but I did want, I did love to read other people's more emotional reactions to it. I felt like it was, it made me feel less lonely over here in California, know, thinking about like the people in Minneapolis and all over the world, frankly, who are victims like this. So yeah, that's kind of, that was kind of the story.

David J. Bauman (12:56)
yeah.

Yeah, yeah,

it's I mean, and that's exactly I think what happens. I read it and I needed to share it with people ⁓ and I needed to share it with my best friend, who's I'm in Pennsylvania. He's in Ohio. You know, you're all the way out in California. And so ⁓ it made a connection that I think was helpful. I want to ask you about this. I've seen it before where people say,

Writing or art is not therapy, you know, and yet, and even a quote, thank God, I can't remember who said it, but it was something like, that's the last thing it is. And I don't necessarily agree with that. Obviously, like you said earlier today, when you sat down and just kind of were doing an emotional dump and then decided, yeah, none of this is worth keeping and tossed it away.

Hannah Levy (13:57)
Mm.

David J. Bauman (14:18)
But often, I mean, the whole thing about art and writing poetry is there's this exploring and searching for the truth. You you feel like there needs to be the right word to express this. And it sounds like I've talked to others about my own method of I don't know where a poem is going to end when I start it. It's not like writing a novel or even a short story where I have this whole outline. I have an image, a line, a feeling.

Hannah Levy (14:38)
Hmm.

David J. Bauman (14:46)
and I want to see where it goes. And I feel like if I don't learn something from it, there's another famous person who I am, I am wronging now by not remembering their name, who has said, you know, that if there's no learning in the writer, there's, you know, there's, none in the reader. On the other hand, there's also people who say, well, you know, I liked your, I liked your art until you brought politics into it, which

Hannah Levy (15:16)
⁓ well. Yeah, that's not a thing for me.

David J. Bauman (15:17)
drives me insane.

No, and what ⁓

even I have three sons. My middle boy, Jon is a guitar player and, you know, is immediately like quoting Adrianne Rich when he hears somebody, you know, the personal is political. And I think of poems that I've read that, yeah, maybe were bad political poems because all they took was the buzzwords.

and a hate for the president and all the same words that you're seeing on the news. And that doesn't do much for me or for my soul. But when when someone's able to be feeling the kind of things I'm feeling or even something a different way of looking at it that I wasn't expecting.

Hannah Levy (15:47)
tour.

David J. Bauman (16:05)
but I find helpful,

That's something that you value.

Hannah Levy (16:12)
Yeah, I think that for me, the kind of political poetry that really rings a deep bell is the kind that holds multiple truths and has more than just anger at the heart of it. I like to think that I love this world, you know, and I can find beauty in this world, and that I think that there's so much worth being alive for, and I feel gratitude for...

David J. Bauman (16:24)
Mm-hmm.

Hannah Levy (16:40)
being in this world even at this time, which is hard to say on any given day, but there is purpose. And I think trying to delicately thread through love and beauty and awe and terror and anger, if a political poem can kind of weave those qualities together, that's going to feel really resonant to me, especially as someone who has to...

David J. Bauman (16:46)
Mm-hmm.

Hannah Levy (17:10)
help a child navigate the world. And I want to stay open. I don't know if I want to say the word positive or optimistic, but I think at least open to, open to this world with a heart that's open to what the world has to offer. And I try not to let like the cynicism and the outrage and the anger be the only emotion at the front.

David J. Bauman (17:12)
Yeah.

Hannah Levy (17:36)
⁓ of my mind or my body on any given day.

David J. Bauman (17:37)
Mm-hmm.

The other thing when it comes to political poetry or political art is, especially when you're in a situation where you've got, I mean, basically an oppressive regime happening here. ⁓

we've turned some kind of corner. We go off and kidnap, know, whether or not we agree with what that president of this other country was doing and not we decide on our own to go off and kidnap him and his wife. We decide for some crazy reason that we need to maybe invade an ally and possibly risk war with of all places, Denmark. And when you see all these things happening,

just writing a poem at all, even if it's about, you know, a weed with a flower growing up in the sidewalk in front of your house, even doing that is a political act, it feels like, you know, especially when there's an administration that has completely canceled funds, you know, for National Endowment of the Arts, for instance.

Hannah Levy (18:46)
yeah, mean, anytime you can try to tap into a place of creativity, I do think it can function as a form of processing and especially, and if you're writing protest poetry or making protest art, it can be resistance. But I do want to emphasize that I don't think it's enough to just make art. ⁓ I do see a lot of kind of people.

David J. Bauman (19:10)
yeah.

Hannah Levy (19:13)
in the camp of like, well, my joy is an act of resistance or rest is an act of resistance or art is an act of resistance. And I don't disagree with any of that. It's also just like not enough. the, what we can do, I just sat in an activist training this week that was kind of like, what can we do as artists? Like what is the role of the artist? And not just to make the revolution irresistible as the quote goes, but to, ⁓

David J. Bauman (19:23)
Not enough.

Hannah Levy (19:40)
really help with community building, with morale boosting, and then of course just things that every citizen, if we care about our democracy, if we can call it that, our country, that we should be doing, which is calling our senators, demanding justice, showing up to protests, if art is the one thing that you can be doing as part of that, as an extension of that.

David J. Bauman (20:06)
Mm-hmm.

Hannah Levy (20:06)
⁓

then I think it's a way of reaching a lot of people. But I try to think about how do I ground into both the art itself as well as like on the emotional side for me because it's helpful for me, but then also actions that I can be taking ⁓ in my day-to-day life while holding the reality of there's only so many hours in the day and...

I do think there's something to unplugging from the news. I do think there's something to regulating our nervous system. in service of being able to show up more fully when the time comes to take action. And so it's always gonna be this balancing act. ⁓ But I got a lot of like, I did a lot of like, I don't know, protest burnout when I was younger.

David J. Bauman (20:45)
Mm-hmm.

Hannah Levy (20:58)
where it just doesn't become sustainable to stay in one emotional state of anger and rage for so long. You do need to step back and do things to fill you up, whether that's making art, whether that's just resting or whatever. yeah, is kind of a... The time is now to show up and take action and not just speak out, but back up your words with real work.

David J. Bauman (21:05)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

And it's one thing where we're concerned. I've got two representatives I can contact who are both Republicans and one who might as well be ⁓ who I voted for and am tremendously disappointed in at this point because he's might as well be a Republican. At the same time, after doing what feels like a useless task and hoping that they get enough other calls that they think maybe better do something here.

just very simple things like my husband and I've been talking a little bit about what do we do if something happens here? We have neighbors nearby. You know, what's our plan? What are we going to do? And so those things, you know, we've talked about, started to, you know, to work out some plans like that. There's a there's a lot to there's a lot to think about. So yeah, you're right. Not just the art, but why not the art as well?

you know, and

Hannah Levy (22:17)
It's absolutely

necessary. also it's one of those things that, I mean, I read, let's talk about not being able to remember a quote, but I read something about the idea of poetry outlasting so much, know, writing outlasting. I think, sometimes I think continued ⁓ posting, writing poems, putting them into the digital archive, ⁓ publishing books, self-publishing.

It is a way of creating a trail of evidence and record keeping and storytelling. And as a human, you know, like that is ingrained in us to be able to say, this is my experience. I am here. This is what I saw. This is what I felt. And so I really believe, especially given that we are in a time of insane censorship, ⁓ I think that that's really important too.

David J. Bauman (22:50)
A record? Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I appreciate you taking the time to bear witness and share it. And I'm so glad you did because I got the chance to meet you. We'll get to see you again in the fall, probably. So I appreciate that. I wanted to mention one or two more things about the poem.

itself there's there's a line in Renee Good's poem that i'm going to be reading at the end of the podcast that she talks about the strands of hair behind her ear and was that on purpose putting that in the middle of the poem or did that just happen

Hannah Levy (23:42)
Hmm.

I had not read any of her work ⁓ when I wrote this. I wrote this like, this was, read the news article. I had a couple people in my life texting me and letting me know like, did you see she was a poet? But at the time, don't think her, I don't think that poem had kind of started getting shared as much. So that, I had actually not made that connection. I'd read her poem, but I did not make that connection myself between my poem and hers until you just said it.

David J. Bauman (24:07)
Yeah.

Hannah Levy (24:18)
So we are, you know, I think all writers are in dialogue with each other in some way, conscious or subconscious, just because of the collective. ⁓

David J. Bauman (24:18)
Yeah.

which is part of what the whole idea of trying to do this kind of podcast where you've got three different poems, and I picture Pete Seeger in his little TV show back in the day where, you know, hey, I like this song of yours and he plays a little bit of it on the banjo and then the guest plays a little bit and they chit chat about it. And I love that we can do this about poetry, especially, at a time like this when people need

some support, some encouragement, some plans of what do I do next, as well as just, you know, just other days when you're just enjoying the poetry. So we will talk again and you'll get the chance to share some other work that's meaningful to you as well. Anything else ⁓ you want to talk to us about the poem before I let you go?

Hannah Levy (25:17)
No, I just, feel, ⁓ I feel really honored to have been invited over here for this conversation. So thank you so much. And to anyone who read and shared the poem, thank you. I really appreciate it. I feel both like seen and held. And I think it just, I said this ⁓ last week, but it felt like holding hands, like across a dark, vast space with people and that feeling. ⁓

David J. Bauman (25:26)
Thank you.

Yeah.

Hannah Levy (25:45)
It was just so necessary. It's just so necessary. So I'm just really grateful to the poetry community for existing right now and for being so supportive.

David J. Bauman (25:54)
Well, it's right there at the end of the poem too, when you talk about when a person who is murdered becomes people, Obviously this happened to her, but also to her son, to her widow and the rest of us who witnessed it. And

just as if not more horrifying, immediately seeing our leaders outright lie about what we know we saw from multiple angles and what we have to stand up against. So thank you again, Hanna, for being here. Thank you so much.

Hannah Levy (26:24)
Thank you. Thanks, David.

David J. Bauman (26:27)
On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs by Renee Good. I want back my rocking chairs, solipsist sunsets, and coastal jungle sounds that are tersets from cicadas and pantameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches. I've donated Bibles to thrift stores, mashed them in plastic trash bags with an acidic Himalayan salt lamp. The post-baptism Bibles, the ones

plucked from street corners from the meaty hands of zealots, the dumbed down, easy to read parasitic kind. Remember more the slick rubber smell of high gloss biology textbook pictures. They burned the hairs inside my nostrils and salt and ink that rubbed off on my palms. Under clippings of the moon at 2.45 a.m. I study and repeat

ribosome, endoplasmic, lactic acid, stamen. At the IHOP on the corner of Powers and Stetson Hills, I repeated and scribbled until it picked its way and stagnated somewhere I can't point to anymore. Maybe my gut, maybe there in between my pancreas and large intestine is the piddly brook of my soul. It's

the ruler by which I reduce all things now, hard-edged and splintering from knowledge that used to sit, a cloth against fevered forehead. Can I let them both be? This fickle faith and this college science that heckles from the back of the classroom.

Now I can't believe that the Bible and Quran and Bhagavad Gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom used to and exhaling from their mouths make room for wonder. All my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest and is summarized as life is merely to ovum and sperm and where those two meet and how often.

and how well and what dies there.

David J. Bauman (28:51)
Again, that was the poem by Renee Good that won her a university prize from the American Academy of Poets back in 2020. There is a young musician named Andre Henry, whose Instagram account I stumbled onto this weekend, and he pointed out a very important truth that's oddly encouraging,

we make comparisons to Hitler in politics a lot. But our imaginations don't have to cross the Atlantic to imagine what this is. In Langston Hughes poem,

Beaumont to Detroit 1943. He said, tell me that Hitler is a mighty bad man. I guess he took lessons from the Ku Klux Klan. we need to consider how the Native Americans were treated how we treated Japanese Americans during the Second World War. Maybe we need to take a closer look inside.

our own system I'll put a link to Andre Henry's clip in the podcast notes as well as to Hannah Levy's substack. Thank you so much for listening I hope you remember as perhaps we learned from Renee's poem that you're not alone.

Regular episodes of In Three Poems will resume this Thursday. So please follow us on Instagram, Facebook or Blue Sky and listen on your favorite podcast app, at inthreepoes.com or on the In Three Poems YouTube channel. And if you like what you hear, please share it. I'm David J. Bauman and this has been a conversation in three poems.