Monica Prince (00:00)
I'm more frightened of a fetus growing inside this womb for nine months or longer than public speaking, than death, than choosing the chance of eternal love, than the justified violence intended to remove a never child from this earth. I want to offer up all the promises of prudence in exchange for a childless future, one marked with adoption or fostering or even

In Three Poems (00:23)
Monica Prince is an associate professor of activist and performance writing who serves as director of Africana studies at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania. She's the author of multiple books including Roadmap, a choreo poem, How to Exterminate the Black Woman, a choreo poem, Instructions for Temporary Survival, Letters for the Other Woman, and most recently Force, a choreo poem. Her work appears in publications like Twisted Tongue, Wildness,

The Missouri Review, The Texas Review, The Rumpus, and American Poetry Journal.

David J Bauman (01:00)
I am with the wonderful Monica Prince professor at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove Pennsylvania, ⁓ right nearby the library where I work. So we've crossed paths in that way and I've gotten to hear you read in person, which is wonderful. So I'm just delighted we get a chance to talk today.

and you're speaking to me now from a public library, something that I highly support. So we'll deal with any background noise that comes because of that. Welcome, Monica. Thanks for being on the show.

Monica Prince (01:28)
It's

so awesome to be here. I'm so excited.

David J Bauman (01:32)
I loved when I was reading some things about you one of the foremost choreo poem scholars. I love that. That's that's awesome. And as I was learning about choreo poems, what did you say to me? Not too long ago, you said, well, they're just poems. And then I read this book. Anybody who's not on YouTube right now can't see me holding it up. That's OK. ⁓ But it's it's called Force. And this came out from Small Harbor Publishing in twenty twenty five.

Monica Prince (01:39)
Yeah.

you

David J Bauman (01:57)
and it just, 26, okay sorry. So it just came out, And I just devoured, I devoured this. And what I liked about it it's presented with stage instructions. Like a very modern our

Monica Prince (01:58)
26. It just came out.

out in January.

David J Bauman (02:15)
I just was so, so taken up. had to read through it and then go back and read again. and maybe this is a good place for me to ask you to define choreopoem for our listeners who might not be as familiar with it.

Monica Prince (02:28)
Absolutely. So a choreopoem is a choreographed series of poems that includes dance, music, live art, parkour, yoga, call and response, choirs, all kinds of performance media thrown together and put on stage like a play. yeah. One of my graduate thesis choreopoem, had one of my actors was a free runner. Right. And so he was just doing backflips and awesome, like crawling the sides of

David J Bauman (02:42)
Parkour really.

that's amazing.

Monica Prince (02:55)
the stage and doing wild stuff. It was incredible.

David J Bauman (02:57)
That's fantastic.

I love the fact that there are dancers and they have a voice as well. In some ways, it reminded me of, say, Greek tragedy ⁓ on stage where the dancers are sort of the chorus. They may or may not be sort of the conscience or I don't know if I'm making this phrase up, but an anti-conscience of consciousness of people.

Monica Prince (03:19)
feels like Sounds good

David J Bauman (03:21)
whether it's encouragement to the characters or background or even discouragement to the characters on stage. And the characters in Force you've got victim, survivor, whore, rape fantasy, rapists, lovers.

And then even characters like PTSD, depression, suicidal ideation. And I don't want to give too much away and take away from people reading the book, but it's so powerful. The title Force I think works on multiple levels, especially when we're talking about things like sexual assault, but also the Force maybe of a person's human spirit.

whether it's the survivor and I really wasn't going to jump right into that. I was going to jump right into us reading a poem, but the book really got to me. So normally the way this goes on this show is we read three poems and two of them are by you and then one by a poet of your choice who either inspired you, somebody that you've read recently or somebody once upon a time and you have chosen

a poem by Jessica Nirvana Ram that you're going to read for us who is a colleague of yours, Yeah. that's amazing. That's perfect.

Monica Prince (04:36)
She is, she's actually one of my former students too. And now she's a

colleague, which is wild.

David J Bauman (04:42)
And that's got to be really gratifying too.

Monica Prince (04:44)
I love that she's kind of... I showed up her senior year of college and I was only supposed to be there for a year and she found out that I was Guyanese and she's like, we have to do something together, we just must. so, because she's Guyanese.

Yeah, so we wrote poems together and I had her, she wrote two books under my tutelage and she published two of them on campus and then she reworked a bunch of them and then they, many of them, but only, not all of them, but many of them from those two chapbooks went into her first book, Earthly Gods, which was really cool. It really cool to see how those poems had changed.

David J Bauman (05:20)
Well, let me jump into a ⁓ from, this was... ⁓

a poem that really caught me because we've been talking a bit about a certain, there's a certain star in the news recently who talked about wanting to do more art that's apolitical. And I really don't know what that is or what that means. ⁓ One of the episodes that we had, I think it was maybe episode number six in this season, focused on a poem by Hannah Levy.

and it was called the day a poet is murdered by ice. I want to give some people the benefit of the doubt. And when they cringe at the idea of political poetry, they might be thinking of some poems that I've read where a well-meaning writer takes basically a bunch of

political jargon that you already are hearing tons of on the news and they're not creating anything new. They're just kind of vomiting it out the same anger that I feel. And so I might identify with it. But it's not something that really moves my soul. But we're talking about when you talk about poetry, making it new, finding words to say things that you haven't been able to say. It can't not be political.

enough of that.

Monica Prince (06:28)
mean, Nikki

Giovanni has a poem called For Sandra, and it's about how her neighbor is like, you never write happy poems. And she's like, OK, so I tried to write a big, big tree poem. I looked outside my window, tried to write a big tree poem. But then, you know, it made her think of all of the trees that have been cut down in favor of capitalism, right? So she tries to do a big sky poem, but like she can't see the sky for all the pollution. She has to something about a bird. But she thinks about how

David J Bauman (06:37)
Mmm.

Monica Prince (06:58)
fewer birds there are now because of climate change. she makes a whole point, the tree is not about capitalism, it's about like lynching.

and it ends with her sharpening her oyster knife and staying inside and saying, I guess these are not poetic times after all. And it's just the idea that poetry, if poetry's not supposed to be political, like how?

David J Bauman (07:17)
Yeah. And it's not that there isn't any joy in life. But,

Monica Prince (07:20)
No.

David J Bauman (07:22)
one of the poems for me from your work was published in Movable Type a while back and it's called

political poem as prayer. And I'll read that and then we can talk about it.

Political poem as prayer. I hate the rain. Always have. Petrichor doesn't excite me, just signals that today I must wear higher heels to keep puddles off my ankles. Say when a perscapacious lover asks why droplets from the sky spark vitriol instead of thrill. Something about water outside my control reminds me of graveyards.

of acres they call a wasteland, not because nothing grows in the ruined soil, but from all the potential wasted under romantic moonlight. When you began this poem, I doubt you expected the middle passage, the ivory bones of ebony people frozen in the sands gracing the Atlantic's floor. Enjoy the sonder of this poet making rain political, just like the farmer who won't grow orchids.

or the child who never learns to whistle. You think it's serendipity you landed here. Eyes on this page, scanning for references to slavery and racism. Imagine my trepidation to continue to find some levity among all this destruction. If I add sugar here,

Will you think sweet tea or cane fields? How about tire swings, childhood nostalgia, or the strength of a hickory branch strangled by a rope dangling strange fruit? I can do this all day. Political poetry mistaken as soliloquy, as eulogy, as prayer. Each stanza rendering guilt when what I really want is peace, no justice.

To confront the laxadaisical performance of allyship, beg for the lives of others, anywhere but from inside the dragon's belly. I know we're back where we started, fearful of things I can't control, and yet the poem demands sacrifice. To bear witness as matriarchs Fulton, Til Mabli, Reed Veal stand by the graves of their children, open caskets, daring justice to swing forth.

when none shall come.

I want it to end too. Cannot grieve like this every morning, expecting you to remember the murdered's names alongside those of their parents. But too often, I find myself exhausted, caught in the rain, waters rising too quickly, asking with every bubble of air that makes it to the surface, how much longer? How much longer?

and wow.

Monica Prince (10:28)
I how much I like that thought.

David J Bauman (10:29)
I love this. And then you told me this after I asked you about it, you told me this was from a challenge or from a writing exercise that I think that you gave and then came back to you. Is that what it was?

Monica Prince (10:35)
It was. ⁓

Yeah, it was.

I think it's really funny. Yeah, I actually had this, class, my performance poetry class, and we were writing a, we were writing a bunch of different poems, and the poem of the week that week was to do a word bank poem.

So every student in the class had to come up with a word and then we all had to use the words. All of us had to use all the words in one poem. It stressed a lot of them out. That's why there's words like lackadaisical and perspicacious and all these other vitriol, like all these words in there that I would never normally use.

David J Bauman (11:04)
Mm.

Vitriol perhaps.

You

Monica Prince (11:23)
Which just delights me, so that's there. But I have all that, and so I remember when I, the first version we said use all the words, the second version you had to make it rhyme, and then the third version you had to make it, you had to make it rhyme but in a different rhyme scheme. And they hated me through that whole series of revisions. It was a lot of fun. I got good poems at it, so I don't know. Yeah.

David J Bauman (11:39)
Okay.

And yet it reminds me of some of the talks that we've had about form. Like when you're

forced to write in a And I'm remembering a professor of mine saying, well, I'd like to think I didn't Force you when I wrote, turned in my notebook, forced to write in a form. But when you had to put it in that kind of container.

Monica Prince (12:04)
Yes.

Mm-hmm.

David J Bauman (12:09)
in some ways, yeah, there's challenges, but then there's also opportunities that you don't find otherwise, ⁓ And did I get...

Monica Prince (12:16)
I love a poetic form because constraints make me better at what

I do.

David J Bauman (12:19)
remember you saying that I think in a different interview not too long ago that you really enjoyed lipograms. That was one that I had looked at as well. Explain that form. Explain what that's like, a lipogram, because that's wild from what I remember you saying.

Monica Prince (12:23)
Mm-hmm.

Yes.

So the lipogram, yeah, the lipogram is wild.

It is a wild form. So the lipogram is a Eulipian constraint. And the Ulippos were this group of French speaking mathematicians and writers who wanted to make literature harder, I guess. And so the lipogram is one of those forms where you remove a specific letter from each stanza, but you have to use the rest of the alphabet. So the most famous one is removing

David J Bauman (12:35)
you

Okay.

That's it, yeah.

Monica Prince (12:58)
the letter E and some very well-meaning French person wrote an entire novel without using the letter E, which I do not understand how that was possible considering E is the most frequently used vowel in French. It's also the most frequently used vowel in English and that French book was translated into English also without the letter E and I do not know how they did this and I refuse to check it but I know it's called a void. I know it's called that and wild. Anyway, so lipograms one of my favorite types of poems.

David J Bauman (13:07)
You

Seriously, in French, yeah.

Amazing.

You

Monica Prince (13:25)
I love a lipogram.

So in this case, there are a bunch of lipograms in Force actually, and there's one in Roadmap, my last book. And so what you do is you choose a word and every letter of that word becomes like the letter that's missing from each particular stanza. one of the words in, so like in the, what's it called? The Table of Contents which lists all the names of the poems, there is a bunch of them called The Beautiful Outlaw Cries Asks.

David J Bauman (13:31)
That's amazing.

Okay.

Monica Prince (13:54)
begs something that affects. And each one of those and beautiful outlaws another word for a lipogram. And so each of those have the words that are missing from the piece in the title. And so the beautiful outlaw cries rape is four stanzas. And the first one doesn't have the letter R. The second one doesn't have the letter A and so on and so forth. And so it's it's a hard form, but it's fun. And it forces you to talk about something without naming it, which I think actually forced

David J Bauman (14:01)
Okay.

Gotcha.

Monica Prince (14:21)
you to embody the pieces better because abstractions are like really easy to just throw into poems like you know the word trauma, mental illness, assault, like you just put these words in there but they're just they're not feelings they're just placeholders, they're abstractions and you can use them to good in good ways but I think beautiful outlaw really forces you to dig deeper like you can't you can't just say the word rape and let that live the way it does and so

David J Bauman (14:26)
Mm-hmm.

right.

You can't

Monica Prince (14:47)
⁓ So, yeah, can't cheat,

David J Bauman (14:48)
cheat. Yeah.

Monica Prince (14:49)
basically, right? Like you have to actually talk about it without talking about it, which is important because we don't talk about it, right?

David J Bauman (14:57)
Right. And that was a topic that keeps coming up too is the importance of sometimes writing what scares you to write. And if you're frightened to write it or you're worried about should I even say this out loud or put this down, then that's an indication that's probably the poem you should be writing and you should be working on, Yeah, I admire that about your work that you do it and you do it so well. ⁓

Monica Prince (15:05)
Absolutely.

Absolutely. I agree.

David J Bauman (15:24)
one of the things that I circled right away was one of the characters in Force. I believe it was, I can't remember if it's Victim or Survivor, that says, am so tired of telling the truth.

Monica Prince (15:39)
survivor.

David J Bauman (15:40)
Yeah, and I've never heard that articulated in a poem before. in some ways, like, I know as a gay man, there have been times I was so tired of having to come out again, which is why I just basically say, my husband this, or, you know, and just make it part of normal conversation. And if they don't like it, then don't tell me about your wife either. You know what I mean?

Monica Prince (16:00)
Mm-hmm.

David J Bauman (16:07)
But it's like, is just it. I'm done doing this. ⁓ I'm done apologizing

Monica Prince (16:07)
Yes.

David J Bauman (16:14)
So what's the poem you want to share with us?

Monica Prince (16:13)
Yes.

So I actually do want to read a lipogram for y'all. Yeah, I'm going to read a lipogram. So this is actually from a coreopoem in progress called Hysteria.

David J Bauman (16:17)
that you would like to read.

awesome.

Monica Prince (16:25)
And it's about trying to figure out the relationship between yourself and your reproductive existence. it's a choose your own adventure, which is complicated and not working right now, so I have to fix that.

David J Bauman (16:41)
I don't

envy you. That sounds like quite a challenge. You like to set a challenge for yourself though.

Monica Prince (16:45)
It is,

why don't I make things easier? my gosh, okay. It would not be. Okay, so this poem is called The Pregnancy Lipogram for Disillusioned 30 Year Olds. Or 30-somethings rather. Okay.

David J Bauman (16:50)
That wouldn't be as much fun.

Monica Prince (17:04)
At age 10, before I knew about sex or consequences or that ovum is a synonym for eggs, I believed the natural trajectory of my life was high school, college, graduate school, career, marriage, children, retirement, death, zero room for deviation.

Childish assumptions can follow us into adolescence, adulthood, without question, without judgment, lacking all examination of logic. This habit, while obviously suspect, can yield bliss, but likely will induce pain. I thought happiness was following the guidelines set out by society and the women in my family who kept having babies, who made me possible, who injected love and jazz and success into my blood by conception, gestation,

labor and birth. Growing up, my body insists is growing out of scraps put forth by matriarchs with lost honorifics. Thank you, I want to say, for your blood, your lack, your blazing glory that allows this joy, my fix to satisfy on cold mornings using ink and quill on a vacant book to say, no, I will not follow your path.

Let me be clear, I'm not selfish, just scared. No one explains the unsavory emotions associated with the experience. They always note excitement, jubilance, humility, the heart abuzz with potential. My kid could be president, could cure cancer, could usher in world peace. No one says my child could be a quality control officer, could shoot up an elementary school, could die by their own hands while I make dinner in the kitchen.

is the chief impulse that arrives as I mull over my future as a mother. I back away from thrill, embrace sorrow as a substitute. My mom scheduled her surgery for the hours after my brother's delivery. The epidural still active. Her daughter quite assured she had completed her duties as a uterus possessed object. He actually told her, this is a real quote, well, it's a shame because you make such pretty babies. With her sight fuzzy,

My little brother asleep close by. Real words. I can't even believe that anyway. Is my purpose to simply exist, have a child or eight, die after they have families I'm proud of? I honestly couldn't tell you now. The sections of me coded to reject notions of oppression believe I keep the decisions to give birth or not, to wed or not, my own. The portion of my psyche committed to security implores my boyfriend. See how I didn't use lover or beli-

love it so you know I'm embodying my less rebellious self.

To propose, book the church, rent the tux, buy the dress. Questioning why these desires dizzy my independence proves I'm trying to be sure first. The doctor who approves my request to be sterilized asks, do the terrors recur for days after your cycle or throughout? What risks do you foresee if you receive the surgery post-haste? Have you ever believed you might have carried a child despite data that displays otherwise? Reproductive justice fails at this crossroads.

where I balk at the query of previous gravity. What do I say if my proof exists as a registered medic's guess, a belief verbalized but merely so? In the examination room, my OBGYN gives me permission to be selfish, to want nothing more than a life lived individually. I don't need him to do this for me, but still, I'm surprised by this kindness I didn't know I desired. So infrequently do I hope authority figures will say yes, honor my wishes, extend

dignity as a right and not a privilege. I enter the world's atmosphere hesitant, vibrating with fury before I even bolt the door behind me. My mother trusts I make this plan informed without reservation, but I still haven't signed the authorization, authorization forms, made the appointment, requested the time off. Fear maybe, or perhaps that the jokes about my foolhardy sexual lifestyle will stop being

Nevertheless, here's the truth. I'm more frightened of a fetus growing inside this womb for nine months or longer than public speaking, than death, than choosing the chance of eternal love, than the justified violence intended to remove a never child from this earth. I want to offer up all the promises of prudence in exchange for a childless future, one marked with adoption or fostering or even loneliness. If I can plant nothing else in that sacred bowl but an IUD blood,

and the desperate last breaths of unrelenting sperm. I'd rather scan poetic lines than risk exposure of depression upon a life brazen enough to be bold enough to quiet the noise inside me, swap it out for peace. We hold such high hopes for our children, never wondering if their disappointment has the power to kill us.

David J Bauman (22:14)
And you did that as a lipogram.

Monica Prince (22:17)
Yeah.

Because stuff is not hard enough.

David J Bauman (22:21)
But I like that. And I think it was Jehanne Dubrow who said that when you have a form that you're writing in, it can give you the illusion of having some control over things that are outside of your control. And do you see that in works like this that you've done?

Monica Prince (22:33)
Yes.

Absolutely. I feel like...

By being forced not to write about the thing, actually makes me have, like I can't think about anything else except for the word I'm not supposed to be talking about, right? And it really like forces me to think, like here's a very big idea, if I don't become a mom, like how does that change my existence? Like how does that change my worthiness as a woman? How does that change my worthiness as a person in society, right? Especially with this natalist, pronatalist movement going on. And I'm like, I can't.

David J Bauman (22:46)
Yeah.

Monica Prince (23:06)
control any of that, right? I can't control, the outside forces telling me, but, well, you are a person who owns a uterus, you should be producing babies, right? And I can't control any of that. so, but, like, I can talk about my anxiety of pregnancy and how stressful it feels and how I do not ever want to be pregnant. And, trying to separate pregnancy from motherhood and knowing that those two things are not the same. So, yeah, I use form to kind of navigate

David J Bauman (23:07)
Right.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's a good point.

Monica Prince (23:32)
⁓ really big things like that. I use form constantly. In Roadmap, my last book, there's one lipogram and it's called Black Boys Are Missing and it's a lipogram for the word suicide and it's about this, it's about like the main character talking about his own suicidal ideation at being like a black man in the world knowing that he's most likely going to be killed and it's ⁓ like why give society the satisfaction of them doing it to me if I could just

David J Bauman (23:53)
.

Monica Prince (24:01)
it myself kind of thing and it's super sad it's real sad and my husband Rob actually is the he's the voice for this character in my audiobook version of Roadmap and listening to him read it is just so it's so devastating listening to him read it and so I'm like I'm like I can't even read this poem to other people like he reads it for the for the book and I'm just like my god like it's so so intense

David J Bauman (24:02)
you

okay.

Yeah, I imagine.

Now I have to get, I do audiobooks a

lot, especially because I have family that's not close by. going to my father's 93rd birthday party today. So I'll be listening to audiobooks along the way. So I'm going to have to get my hands on the audiobook of that. Yes, it is exciting. awesome, awesome. And that's, is it going to be available in like some of the traditional audiobook places? We could probably get it on, I could probably order it on Libby for the library as well and make sure that we have it there.

Monica Prince (24:35)
That's exciting!

comes out at the end of this month. I'm excited, yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Hey,

it will be there. Awesome.

David J Bauman (24:55)
I will absolutely do that. ⁓

so I could do this all day, but you have another poem that you're going to read for us. This is the one by Jess that you mentioned.

Monica Prince (25:08)
This is on by Jess. So Jess Nirvana Ram, Jessica Nirvana Ram is a superstar and I adore her.

So she wrote this poem actually while she was in college and it's changed, which is super exciting. But yeah, so the poem I'm going to read by her is called I Am Unfit to Raise Daughters and this appears in her first debut collection, Earthly Gods. And so I'm excited about this. I've always wanted children. At first, sons. Sons are less likely to inherit my mouth, stuffed full of cotton balls, slicked with gasoline, tongue clipped and

David J Bauman (25:28)
Yay.

Monica Prince (25:41)
hung on a clothesline, waiting for a matchstick, a hose, a body to slip back into. I thought I could clad sons in an armor built of my bones, tie their wrists with nyangapapatim woven from veins, sew the Giyati mantra onto the roof of their mouths. Maybe, I believed, I could raise honeysuckle sons with sugarcane limbs. Their sweat would taste like

rosewater and jasmine. Their blood condensed milk and clove with sons I hoped I could rest easy because with daughters I will come undone.

Split at the spine, daughters will inherit the fire I've always swallowed, kept tamed in the pit of my belly. They will, like Kalima, emerge from my forehead as my wrath, bathed in blood, striped red and brown, crimson, glistening under moonlight, tiger skin, a mark of their mother. I know sculpting shields is a waste of time, so I will carve spears from clavicle, crown them with a wreath of cervical vertebrae.

My daughters will wear a garland of my lungs strung together with braided strands of dark hair. I cannot raise them to be like me, to be like a mother whose hands shake like hummingbird wings, a blur of body undeserving holding life like theirs. Let me offer them instead chambers of my heart sliced into thirds, laid atop red hibiscus and lentils. If they press into tender muscle, their fingers

will stain with me. I suppose I fear daughters because I am an unsteady stack of organs masquerading as lethal weapon unrelenting fury when really I am nothing but paper and ink flammable and temporary a vessel to bring them into this world who upon giving birth may very well shudder and shatter into ash.

David J Bauman (27:52)
You know?

That is an example of a poem that beautifully contradicts its title by the end. Don't you think? yeah, ⁓ fashioning spears from clavicles because shields will not be enough. And I'm thinking that sounds like a capable mother. and devastating in its

Monica Prince (28:00)
Right? Yeah. I love a home like that.

Right?

David J Bauman (28:17)
I guess that's part of it too about choosing the right words in a poem.

When Jessica talks about not fashioning shields, but spears.

that's very different than just saying, you know, not teaching her about just defense, but teaching her about offense. You know what I mean? That, like, as you said before, the,

So, do you want to talk about some of the other projects that you're doing? You were recently in

the production locally of for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is and I was killing me that I couldn't get there because I had other obligations. But that looked like it blast to do.

Monica Prince (28:51)
Okay. It's okay.

It was incredible. I got to direct it, which was super exciting. I did not plan to be in it. ⁓

David J Bauman (29:02)
okay.

Monica Prince (29:03)
And, but then we lost one of our actors. had like, she had to go on medical leave and I was like, this is so sad, but it's okay. So we, so instead I just had, I just took the role and I, and I did it. It was a lot of fun. had a really good time. I got to meet these incredible people who just wanted to talk about what it means to be a color girl. And like, they were so excited about it. And I like, what I really like is that it's, has its double meaning for color girl.

right? Like it's for them, right? But it's also, and it's for them in terms of like being a person of color, but it's also like them being depicted by colors of the rainbow is indicative of that larger thing of what it means to be a part of something bigger than yourself, right? And I just really loved that aspect of the show. It was so much fun. I had so much fun.

It was also really hard, like, and not just the memorization or the dancing or any of that. It was hard because I'm like asking these people to basically relive their traumas on stage, right? And I have a lot of questions about that. Like, desperately want to do this as a, like, a legitimate project of, the ethics of performance and talking specifically about, is it responsible to ask the people who

David J Bauman (30:06)
Yeah.

Mm.

Monica Prince (30:21)
either have experienced this or will likely experience this, perform those roles. And I think about this with shows that talk about like childhood molestation, right? Shows that talk about rape, shows that talk about domestic violence. is it...

David J Bauman (30:26)
Mm.

Monica Prince (30:34)
Like, is it okay to discuss that? And is it okay to ask those actors to then perform that night after night after night? Like, we were rehearsing nonstop for two straight months, and it's just like, is this responsible? how do I take care of these people while also asking them to memorize poems about their own abuse, one of the poems, like the sixth poem in the show, is called,

David J Bauman (30:46)
Yeah.

Hmm.

Yeah.

Monica Prince (30:57)
and red, lady in blue. And of course it's the three of us, right? Like it would be the three of us and we're on stage and we have to basically talk about how acquaintance rape is much more likely than stranger rape, right? And we have to do that over and over and over. one time, once through one of our performances, it wasn't even like a live show, but during one of the performances, ⁓ lady in red like dropped her line and we had this like

David J Bauman (31:09)
Yeah, right.

Monica Prince (31:24)
moment of silence and I just like stopped the production because I was like, hey, like, are you good? Because it was the first time it had really hit her. And of course that was also played by Jessica Nirvana-Ramm. And so it was an intense moment. She's like, oh my goodness. Oh wait, hold on. Like, give me a second. Give me a second. And we had to like reset and do it again because it was just one of those things where like it was very obvious that she was not okay in the moment and we had to kind of stop.

and pause and there's something to be said about really making that happen so yeah it was great.

David J Bauman (31:55)
Mm-hmm.

that's, I mean, that's taking care of your people. That's good. ⁓ You know, and both of those poems, well, with yours that you read, as well as Jessica's, you know, they fit that idea of what we were talking about. Writing the thing that is hardest to write. But it's not just,

Monica Prince (32:03)
Yeah, it is.

David J Bauman (32:19)
It's one thing to just sit and dump your trauma out. It's something else to turn it into a piece of art that grabs somebody under the rib cage, you know? I recommend anybody to pick up your poems. And where can people get the book Force, by the way, other than?

Monica Prince (32:23)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Force is available

in the places. It is on, you can get it out through my website, because my website has all of the links to everything. It's on Amazon, it's on Bookshop, it's at Barnes and Noble. My website is literally just my name. It's monicaprince.com. Super simple.

David J Bauman (32:48)
Okay. I. Yeah,

I sent something to you spelled Moinika, I think once. in case anybody has I'll put Thanks for not noticing that. But ⁓ I'll put that in the show notes as well and make sure there's a link to all of that.

Monica Prince (33:02)
Amazing.

Awesome.

David J Bauman (33:10)
So you're heading off to Baltimore for AWP with a lot of other friends this week, right? So you've got, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me. Any other projects going on that you want to share with people before you go?

Monica Prince (33:19)
Thanks

I am directing three coreopoems for my students. My students are writing and producing their own coreopoems in April, and so I'm really

excited about that. So y'all come and see them April 10th and 11th. It's gonna be awesome.

David J Bauman (33:31)
Fantastic.

Thanks again for joining us on In Three Poems and thanks for reading.

Monica Prince (33:34)
awesome.

David J Bauman (33:38)
Take care.

In Three Poems (33:40)
Our poems in this episode were as follows. Poem one was political poem as prayer written by Monica Prince and published first in movable type in 2023. And that's the poem that I read. And the second poem is a choreo poem in progress called hysteria written and read of course by Monica. The third poem was called I am unfit to raise daughters. And that was written by Jessica Nirvana Ram from her book earthly gods.

2024 variant lit and read by Monica and we appreciate Jessica's permission to use that poem on the podcast.

For information about upcoming episodes, can follow in three poems, all spelled out, no numbers, on Instagram, Facebook, or Blue Sky. Thanks for sharing the podcast, and thanks for listening. You might consider giving us a rating on Spotify, or if you use Apple Podcasts, think about maybe writing us a little review. That would help us get noticed. Down in the show notes, you can click on Text the Show and send us a message, or you can also click on Support the Show.

to get access to some upcoming bonus content that we're calling the fourth poem. I'm David J. Bauman and this has been a conversation in three poems.