speaker-0: Hello and welcome to Writing Forward, a conversation featuring some of the best and brightest voices from across Wisconsin. I'm Jeff Aloisia, I'm a former editor at the New York Times, a Milwaukee suburbs native, and now I'm a freelance writer based in Madison. Each week I sit down with writers from and connected to my home state for candid, sometimes messy conversations about craft, identity, and what it means to build a writing life rooted at home and away from the traditional centers of the literary world.

speaker-1: Show

speaker-0: From fiction to nonfiction, poetry to journalism, we dig into what keeps Wisconsin writers moving forward, one word at a time. My guest today is Nate Marshall. Born and raised on the south side of Chicago, Nate is a writer, editor, rapper, and educator. He's the author of the acclaimed poetry collections Wild Hundreds, winner of the Agnes Lynch Sterrett Prize, and Finna. Roxanne Gay has praised Finna as elegantly and precisely crafted. And full of realness about blackness, masculinity, family, and Chicago. Nate is also a co-editor of The Break Beat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop, and he's a founding member of the poetry collective Dark Noise. While his writing remains deeply rooted in Chicago, Nate has spent the last several years helping shape the next generation of writers here in Wisconsin as an assistant professor in the creative writing department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Hey Marshall, welcome to Writing Forward. Good to have you. It's good to meet you. Nate, as I mentioned before we started, you're our first poet. Yeah. Though I suspect you won't be the last. I find that when times get strange, it's often the poets I want to hear from. And these are strange times. Yeah. So I have so much I want to ask you. But first, we begin each episode of the show by asking our guests to share a brief passage from someone else's writing, be it a novel, poem, essay, or article, that for them.

speaker-1: What's up? Thank you.

speaker-0: evokes Wisconsin in some memorable way. Tell us what you chose and can you read it for us, please?

speaker-1: Yes, so I chose a poem, not too long. It's called a Last Black American poem by Denez Smith. Voted for the Negro twice. Twice my captor, wore my face. Admit it, Denez, you loved your master in your shade. Yes, I loved knowing the color at the end of my chain matched mine. Wrong river. It wasn't chains, it was water. when one of us helmed the boat. Water for our eyes, water raised to the lips of cargo, still cargo. In summer, we turned down that jeezy, learning a new one's slain name, the Helm and Still. The boat still, headed to Carolina shores. My president was black. When mothers got millions in exchange for sons, Michelle's perm was perfect as bombs dropped in the middle of childhoods. We buried my grandpa with an Obama button pinned to his lapel, finally free. We sent him to heaven, American. When he won, we sprinted Baskum Hill and danced like happy slaves at Lincoln's feet. We were happy ass slaves, happy to vote, happy to vote. To be able to protest the killing we couldn't end, happy for health care that killed us slower, happy the gays could marry in the country where trans women vanished like snow in warm winters. Happy our wars were only of the mind, only elsewhere. Forgive me. I wrote odes to presidents. Cool.

speaker-0: Let's talk about it. Yeah. what stands out to you about that other than it's a great poem?

speaker-1: So Denez is a dear friend of mine, and in some ways I kind of know them in the way that I know Wisconsin, right? we we first met in this place when we were teenagers. they went to sch to the University of Wisconsin here. And so, you know, of course there's that like gesture to Baskom Hill and the Lincoln statue and all this. And I think about this poem every time I'm like walking to lecture like over Bascom Hill. Mm-hmm.

speaker-0: Well.

speaker-1: Yeah. And it just if to me, it feels like such an endemic poem, especially again in such a in a weird moment, right? This poem comes from like the I think the book comes out in like 2024. So, you know, very much in the sort of like extended Trump era. And and and I for me, like so much of the what how can I say, I guess the function of living in Wisconsin, right? To say nothing of the experience, but the function, at least at this particular point in American history, is this what it means to like live in a purple state, right? Yeah, like you get this sort of, you know, again, I'm I'm from Chicago, right? And so this is kind of novel for me. I'm like, wow, this is I'm I feel like the popular girl every four years. And I don't like it. I'm like, wow, I don't, I don't want to be popular at all. This is this is trash, actually. Like, stop emailing me.

speaker-0: Well, it's a great poem. You know, I want to talk about attention. Yeah. In Dinez's poem, there's so much attention paid. You know, one of the things that struck me about reading Finna is how closely observed all the poems are. The book feels animated by attention. And I think about this a lot with poets. Was that always natural to you, or is attention something you've had to learn how to practice?

speaker-1: Wow, I love this question. I think, was that always you know, in certain ways, I think it was. Or if not natural, it was it was like a skill that I learned early, right? So in my family, right, I'm the only I have three sisters. I was sort of raised, you know, kind of primarily in the house by my mom and my grandma. And so the thing about being the only boy in this way, and this comes up. you know, in some of the poems in the book too, but is that often you are inside of your home and outside of what is going on. You know, I think there are many ways to like meet that. For me, I think one of the ways that I'm met that as a kid, and I don't you know, you could ask my therapist where it comes from or whatever, but I think that a fair amount of it is about about that looking, right? About that, that sort of like, okay Everyone's getting their hair done and doing this thing right now. And I'm not really a part of it. So I'm just watching it, right? I'm I'm l sort of like casing the scene. I'm seeing like who's irritated, who's happy, who where things are placed, what what have you, right? And I I feel like in certain ways, like that is a thing that I have like carried with me. Just yeah, like observing the details, right? So much so that this is a funny story, but you know, we're sort of talking about Wisconsin. So I'm thinking I remember when I first moved here, I was like tired all the time. And I was talking to my now wife, or I guess she was my wife at that point too. Yeah. But we were, we, we were living at distance, right? She was finishing graduate school in Rhode Island and I was here that first year. And so we'd be like talking on the phone. And be like, babe, I'm I'm exhausted. Like I'm tired all the time. Like I don't really know what this is. And I think Part of what I realized it was was the that like energetic thing of learning a new place. And again, I think because I do approach place with this sort of obsession for the detail of it, for the materiality of it, like it takes a lot of energy to sort of like write that code. Like the exhaustion was just that. It was like, snap, I need to know like how the sidewalk bends on my walk to work.

speaker-0: How did poetry first come into your life?

speaker-1: I think I was I was always a big reader. my grandma was a librarian and a and a teacher. And so she was from a pretty early age, like, you know, I think books were placed in my hand and I gravitated towards books. But not poetry exactly. Like in some ways, what my first love was and still really is was like biography. But I think poetry came, you know, kind of in like that middle school time. And it was a confluence of a couple of things. I think one, just wanting to rap, like becoming sort of interested in music and being like, right, wait, people come up with this stuff. I guess I could do that too. And then at school we had this gosh, it was like this sort of competition. I think it was a statewide competition called Young Authors. And you know, I think in my seventh grade year, I had to do Young Authors and I didn't really want to write a book. Book. I didn't really want to have to like come up with a story. Yeah. And so I was like, well, if I write poems, they don't have to like create a sort of single narrative. And they also don't have to take up the whole page. And that was really it. And I I did that thing. And then I had a teacher, Mrs. Cap, my English teacher, and she was like, This is great. and also our school's gonna do this youth poetry slam thing.

speaker-0: Yeah.

speaker-1: You should be a part of it and I didn't want to do it. But she sort of forced my hand and really going to that thing, I was like, wow, actually no, actually I'm super into this. Like I'm trying to do this for as long as I can do this.

speaker-0: I wanna talk about Chicago. Yeah. Your city is ever present in your work. Yeah. How does it keep revealing itself to you in different ways? Or is it the same Chicago that you're writing about sort of now as opposed to maybe a decade ago?

speaker-1: Absolutely. yeah, it's not the same at all. No, not at all. Yeah, we were back home for like Memorial Day. And I was not grieving, but I I remember thinking a little bit like, wow, I'm a little shook because I don't like really know the cool places to go anymore. And some of that, you know, that is not living there. It's also age. It's also having a kid. You know, it's all of these th even if I were there, I wouldn't, you know, probably be like, outside in the way that I was when I was 25 or whatever. Yeah. But yeah, it's you know, the place is always shifting, right? that's sort of the nature of maybe everywhere, but I think especially big cities, right? Like they are such like organisms of constant development, constant motion, right? That's the thing that makes them exciting, but also the thing that makes them kind of exhausting. I I don't think that I'm documenting the same thing, but I do think that there are through lines, right? Like I read you know, Sandberg, Chicago from the early 20th century. And I still see corollaries, I still see threads that pull through to my time growing up and that I think pull through to present day. But I think part of the the writing, part of like the creative impulse is to document, is to like create those almost like time stamps, right? To say, okay, this is Chicago at you know, a street in Bronzeville by Gwendolyn Brooks, or this is Chicago at, you know, Forty Seventh Street by Frank Marshall Davis, or this is Chicago at a house on Mango Street by Sandra Cisnetos or or whatever, right?

speaker-0: For a single city, Chicago has such an incredible literary lineage. yeah. Absolutely. And cool to think that you're adding to that and you're part of that tradition.

speaker-1: Absolutely. And I think like, I mean, these borders are all made up anywhere, right? Like it's it's a straight line randomly, like, you know, 60 miles, 50 miles from where we sit. But like I didn't move here from Chicago. I moved here from Colorado. Yeah. And I remember even like coming here, I was like, yo, this is like feeling very good. And part of that good feeling was the flora and fauna make sense to me here. Like this is You know, it's certainly not Chicago and there are differences, you know, at every level, right? But there are all these connective tissues. I think about one of my sort of like literary heroes, the poet Gwendolyn Brooks, right, who famously is such a Chicagoan. Like she taught here, right? She taught at the University of Wisconsin. Yeah, I think had her little, you know, her little studio apartment up here and teach her a little class, you know, have office hours, you know, spend them going back. You know, so there is I mean also not for nothing. Like, you know, University of Wisconsin is as close to Chicago as the University of Illinois is, minus the discount. Like this is in the extended universe.

speaker-0: Yeah. You know, you mentioned now that you moved actually moved here from Colorado. Yeah. So you've been away from Chicago for some time. I'm curious about as you mentioned the city changed, if your definition or idea of home has changed with it. Has that definition become more slippery or has time away brought Chicago even greater relief for you?

speaker-1: That's a good question. I think yes, like both and, right? In the sense that what do I mean? You know, I s I certainly refer to myself as a Chicagoan and I think people refer to me as such, but you know, I probably have a different perspective than someone who has like spent their entire adult lives in the city, right? You know, I was there basically zero to eighteen and then I left and I have lived there for some years in my adulthood, but you know, far more than than not like I've been elsewhere. Th there's a difference in perspective there. You know, I think there's also like a fair bit of humility for me in just being like, yeah, I d again, I don't know it as well in certain ways. And in some ways I actually know it better because I have like that the perspective of distance, right? Like the my first book, Wild Hunter, is like that book is really written when I was an undergrad in grad school. I I went to Vanderbilt and then I went to the University of Michigan. If I had gone, say to UIC and Northwestern, I don't think I would have written that book. Because the dislocation was part of the thing that allowed me to be like, these are the things that were particular. These are the things that like stand in relief, that helped define this place, right? And only in the in the not in in the absence could I understand some of that definition. And maybe this is just again an agent thing too, is like, you know, home is where the childcare is really. Like

speaker-0: Yeah.

speaker-1: actually like my day to like really I am like rooted here in this particular way because my family is here, you know, like my my immediate family, my my my wife and my daughter. But also like our rituals, our like day to day is here, like her, you know, her daycare and these sorts of things that that really do populate the materiality of our life. And the things like going to visit grandparents are vi are visits, right? And they feel more and more like visits.

speaker-0: Yeah. I had your colleague Dante Moniz on last week, or will be last week when by the time it's there. I wanna ask you the same question I asked her. Okay. As someone who teaches here and reads a lot of student writing, is there such a thing as Wisconsin writing, you think? And if so, you know, what is an outsider turn insider notice about that?

speaker-1: is there a such thing as Wisconsin writing? Yeah, I think in some ways, right? A thing that I I have found about Wisconsin is that like all states, I think, on some level have this sort of like big city versus rural versus suburban like the these various like connection point and tension points. But they they define Wisconsin in a pretty profound way that I think is a little less that is singular. Right. And so I do find that students, you know, some a lot of times without really realizing it, are often like writing towards those tension points or those connection points. And like I'll say again, right, like as, you know, a Chicago and a Chicago writer, whatever, respectfully, we're not thinking about anyone else. Yeah. In in the state of Illinois when when we are like coming to the page. And I don't think even like you know, Chicago is sort of like a place obsessed with itself and the writers are are that too. And and if anything, we like look at the coast to like flip some birds real quick.

speaker-0: I wanna let the listeners know that Nate just threw up double birds while he said that.

speaker-1: Hey, or you know, or we're perhaps looking at like the broader Midwest as a sort of like, you know, we are your king kind of thing. But Wisconsin does have this sense, like if like you meet a kid in inner city Milwaukee or comes out of that in their writing, and they without even meaning to ha do have this sense of like themselves as a sort of oppositional figure to to a lot of how Wisconsin defines itself and or you know, you have a kid who is from Green Bay and does not care about the Packers, but they understand the Packers are a thing that for them to not care about and that it means something to them. And again, like that's a thing where like I if you did not care about football and you just wouldn't, you know what I mean? Like in I I don't think in other places you have to like the naming of the opposition means something. Like w Wisconsin is this kind of like this kind of geographic triptych in a way that I think is like actually pretty rare.

speaker-0: You know, Wisconsin feels like a place that has a some somewhat of a unified state identity. And we you know, we do have certain things that we hold on to. you wanna talk about masculinity?

speaker-1: Sure, I mean yeah, sure always. Yes.

speaker-0: I just I feel like this might be a good way into talking about your latest book. I came across an interview where you said that when you're thinking about oppression, you have to ask not only where you're marginalized, but also where you're complicit. Yeah. And you specifically pointed to gender as one of those places. Yeah. That comes through throughout Finna, but I'm curious also, what does that self interrogation practice look like?

speaker-1: Good Lord. Yes. Well every morning I wake up and I you know, pray to Audrey Lord. No, no. No, no. though I mean, you know, it's good. But no, I think so it's interesting you asked this question. I really think that masculinity is perhaps like the poem I am writing over and over again. Perhaps it is like. actually sort of my great subject. And I say great subject not to mean that it's like the thing that I'm very good at, but it's the thing that like that I obsess over. Yeah. I for me, I think so much of this comes from just having a background of one being raised in a house entirely of women. And certainly like I, you know, have men, had men in my family, like my dad was around, my grandfather was around, I had several uncles and other sort of men in the community. But like But the only people I ever got to sort of see up close in that intimate day-to-day way, especially as a kid, when you're when you're living with someone and you're really getting to like learn them, I only ever had that experience with women. I I didn't live with another man until graduate school, college, I guess, kind of. But like, you know, even in college, it's, you know, your kind of ships passing. And so in some ways, I I feel like it's perhaps a subject because it's like it's a thing that fascinates me because it's always been the thing that marked me. Yeah. Like you ever, gosh, what's that movie? Will Farrell when he the the NAS Karma, Talladega Nash, right? When he wins his first race and he's like, I don't know what to do with my hands. That is sort of how I feel about like being a dude, not in the sense of like sort of gender dysphoria or whatever, but Just in the sense of like, I understand that there are all these expectations and these performances applied to this thing, but like I am actually somewhat unconvinced of all of them. Yeah, I don't know. Being a man and having to play man in the the school play of life is like it is such a a place of tremendous. whiplash emotionally that I not to be like nobody understands, but I do think that sometimes it is a thing that that folks who were not sort of socialized as men and boys don't ever fully grasp, like just that. Yeah, all the sort of complication emotional messiness out of that. And for me, like that has been a tremendously productive place creatively, in in part because it doesn't make any sense, right? So like if a poem or

speaker-0: Yeah.

speaker-1: any piece of writing piece of art is an attempt to understand a thing, you can keep writing these poems forever because like it d they're it it's sort of impossible to understand 'cause it's not actually coherent. Which is kind of beautiful. It's kind of a wonderful, you know, gift, I guess. Hopefully.

speaker-0: Yeah. In that same interview where you talked about addressing complicity in in systems of o oppression, you said that love isn't telling people what they want to hear. I'm paraphrasing again. Yeah. Said sometimes love is having the difficult conversation that helps someone move toward accountability. Yeah. That's I think a much larger definition of love than most of us carry. Where did you learn that from?

speaker-1: So you know, in some ways I think part of that was Like that vision of love comes from in part like, you know, being in these sort of artistic and activist communities, that I really came of age in as a teenager and in my twenties. One of the things that was unfortunately like quite common in them is like there would invariably be some usually, though not always, usually a man who would, you know, have some instance of, you know, sexual assault or some kind of misconduct often around sort of like intimate partner things or something like that, right? And I think imp one of the things that I thought a lot about in those contexts were like one, I hate this and I don't want this to keep happening and I feel not just like grief that this is that that these things have happened and that people have experienced these harms, these transgressions, but also that they continue that that there is this sort of like this terrifyingly predictable habituality of this. And it seemed to me that part of the way the groundwork for that was set was folks believing that love, that the highest form of consideration for that person, right? For the person who who had done the harm was to sort of brush it under the table or to find some way for them to continue to be in the community. And that just seemed like deeply wrongheaded to me. I'm like, no, like one, that shit is just too convenient. But I was also like, it's clear that when when something like this happens, right? One, it's like creating a lot of harm, but also it it often comes from a place of harm, from a place of pain. And so the thing that you do when you like, When you decline to have that difficult conversation with your homie and be like, what, first off, you can't come to the open mic anymore. Second off, what conversations do we need to have? Like, are there ways to like move forward from this? When you're not willing to have that conversation, yeah, it is, it is a kind of like fundamental like misapplication of love to me.

speaker-0: I wanna ask you one more sort of deep, serious question that we can get back into sort of your next book. One of the reasons I want to talk to you, I saw you in conversation with Jasmine Ward earlier this year. Yeah. And I heard you say something along the lines of that experiences with Alzheimer's in your family had shaped your relationship to art and ambition. Can you talk a little bit about that?

speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. So my great grandfather, who I knew, he died when I was like nine or ten. He had Alzheimer's print for pretty much my whole life, like at least like my sort of the life that I remember. And so there was always this kind of presence in my family. And then some years later, his son, my my grandfather, developed Alzheimer's as well. And I remember when I was in graduate school, right? This was sort of when we kind of realized. I think granddaddy's like memory is starting to go. His mom had died, you know, maybe within the year or two before. And it was just clear that my mom was gonna have to start taking, you know, taking more control and and doing these sorts of things. and so one of the things that I did in that summer, sort of in between my first and second year of the MFA, is I would go to his house every Sunday and I would just talk to him. I would just talk to him. And one of the things in particular I'd do is I'd He'd had all this like old pictures and all this sort of stuff. And I would just ask him, who like who's that, who's that, who's that? And I'd try to write it down. If masculinity is my great subject, then what does it mean for the sort of in-game of that, that I the only in-game that I've really been able to observe is one of like forgetting. One just thinking about like what does that mean? If perhaps like, you know, these folks that that I love that have loved me and whose sort of DNA I carry, whatever that means. they have this sort of slippery or disappearing sense of themselves, sense of the world. You know, almost it's it's almost like I feel like the poems or the books or whatever are kind of like breadcrumbs for myself. Cause in some ways I sort of expect now, bear in mind, like I'm trying to sort of live a healthier and more proactive life than I think any of these men did, by a lot of metrics. But I'm kind of like, I don't know, I I just sort of expect like that eventually I'll get there and God willing, you know, like in some ways be so alternatives. But like so I think I've just been thinking about that and it's been a thing that in some ways like continues to reappear in the poems and in the books. Cause ultimately like books, especially a book of poems and, you know, I write in probably what is like a particularly kind of confessional style or confessional mode. And so the books are sort of like documents in memory. They, you know, they they are sort of testaments to my own memory, set of memories, whatever. And that's like a funny medium. It's funny to be working in a medium that is primarily memory when when you have this relationship to the losing of

speaker-0: Yeah. My dad had Alzheimer's. And I think like seeing him go through that really gave me a sense of urgency for the for much the same reason. Yeah. Because you don't know

speaker-1: It's also a poetic ass disease in the sense that it's like one you often get sort of boiled down to these kind of like nubs of emotion that are not always like fun or always good or positive or whatever, but there is the that of it. And there's also this like constant repetition and what in and a kind of rhythm, right? Both in the ways that you try to like stave off the disease or or work with it, and in the ways the disease does its work, right? So like.

speaker-0: Yeah.

speaker-1: For someone to tell the same story again is like a deeply poetic impulse, or to be like, no, we do this every single day in this order. We make sure we take them to try to like hold that person sort of with you or here or whatever, right?

speaker-0: Sometimes with my dad, and I think this is common too, where he would when he was starting to lose his language, yeah, and he couldn't recall what he wanted to say, it would end up coming out in this really like kind of cool original way, you know. And I would take notes because like it is interesting to see what happens when we's when we aren't able to retrieve our usual patterns. Yeah. How has becoming a father changed the way you think about legacy and and work?

speaker-1: Absolutely. It's probably this is this is I don't know if this is a good answer. In some ways it's made me feel, which maybe is a sense I always have, but it has like really empowered me to have this sense that like literature is like far less important than I think of it as being. Or maybe then I want it to be it in certain ways, right? Like in some ways I'm like, You know, I don't know, man. Like, who's the most famous poet in the American canon? Like maybe, you know, maybe Walt Whitman, maybe Lengson Hughes, maybe Robert Frost, whatever, right? You don't know 10 poems from these people. Right. I I do because I study it. But like the average person, like a reasonable, like pretty well-read person who's not like a poetry fanatic, right? Like that person. might know like three frost poems kind of by name or they can sort of describe, you know, there's the one with the two roads, or there's something about the, you know, fences and neighbors or whatever. Right. And that's about it. But like that is a tremendous legacy, right? Like to have a poem that is like carried over like a hundred years is like a tremendous achievement, actually, right? To say nothing of like things that can last even longer. So like you write, Poems and you hope that they endure in whatever form, right? That the books stay in print and that the poems are anthologized and that people carry them with them and that they pass them to people and what have you. But ultimately, right? Like your absolute best endgame is people can reference a couple of things that they haven't read and aren't going to. Like that is your absolute best end game. Yeah, but like my daughter, if I like tell her I'ma pick her up and don't. that's gonna sit with her forever. She's in like be in therapy 30 years from now, like reaming me about that. There's a legacy of presence that I aspire to that has deeply outstripped like what I care to do on the page. Right. And so I think about like the a poet like Lucille Clifton. You know, she talks about like not writing very long poems in part because she had sever she had a lot of kids. and she was like, I was preoccupy raising my children, I wrote when I could. And I'm like, yeah, girl, that makes a lot of sense. And again, I think it perhaps this is I this is generational. It it's also probably about me too, but but also like wanting to be a father who is like really present and really in it and like not just like, I'm I'm in my study. Good to see you. Pat, pat pat. And I will take you to the baseball game for, you know, two times every summer and Yeah. We will have our requisite memories. Like not trying to be that sort of like old school vision of a father, but trying to be a very active, a very engaged parent. That's the legacy piece. I've always been sort of uninterested in like what sort of reviewers and the and the sort of field says. Like I want to be able to write my books and have them find homes and hopefully find audiences. But like I will always kind of feel like if you don't like a poem or you don't like a book, that's kind of your business. It doesn't really have anything. I liked it when I put it in the world or whatever. And now I'm I feel like even more justified in that kind of aloofness.

speaker-0: We sometimes talk on this podcast about how writers get started. So how they find an agent, how they get a publisher. We talk less about how someone accumulates a body of work. There are sixty-four poems in Finna. That's a lot. I went through, I counted. Nice. Each one seems at least, you know, painstakingly considered. Yeah. What does it take to build something like that over the years? I I know I've heard you say that you don't write every day, but

speaker-1: Yeah. You count it, damn. Okay. Yeah. I don't I don't write every day. Hmm. You gotta read.

speaker-0: You're producing a lot.

speaker-1: Mm my work is very elusive, capital A, right? And that for me really comes out of like out of like a hip hop context, right? Which is, you know, ultimately a sample-based musical form, a a sample-based cultural form, where you're always referencing things and you're like you're calling back your in conversation. It it is based around the the notion of the cipher. And so the first thing for me is like you just gotta read like I re I do read every day. And I r I read a lot and I listen to a lot and all sorts of stuff. Not all like higher and I watch a lot, right? Whatever. I'll say like for the way I tend to write books is I tend to overwrite and then cut down and then write back. So in like a working in like a Word document, I might get to like a hundred and fifteen, a hundred and twenty pages and then cut down like sixty and then get back to eighty in the sort of revising and adding and refining. So yeah, it is meticulous. It is, it is meticulous. I I I would say like I have always found that the work happens best in community. So one of the things that I've often done to like like I did this a lot to finish the most recent book or the book that's coming, I guess. Yeah. Is I have like a group of friends who are writers or artists or whatever and we try to start the year writing. so we'll do like a thirty for thirty where you're trying to write a poem a day or do a thing a day kind of thing and just send it to each other. And w often we're not even really like giving notes or anything like that. It's just like, you know, it might be like dope. You know, if someone really goes off that day, you might be like, dog, you snap. But like that's it. It's just that. My sense of it is always like, I tell this to students, I'm like, look, man, my daddy's a truck driver. He drives a truck for the city of Chicago for the water department. He shows up every day, right? Unless he can't, unless he calls off or whatever, right? Some days I'm sure that that work is easy and sort of joyful and, you know, Abundant. And some days it it probably sucks more, right? Like he's tired, he's sore, right? His knees bad, whatever. But like if it's your work, you go to work, right?

speaker-0: You mentioned a forthcoming book. I wanna talk about that. I know we're getting long here, but I definitely want to hear about it. I heard you on another podcast before Finna came out talking about how publishing books can feel a lot like releasing rap albums. Yeah. You know, there are plenty of great debuts, but not every artist sort of sticks the landing on the follow up. Sure. You were feeling some anxiety about that at the time. Yes. Now that Finna's been out and it's been so well received, I'm curious if we're sticking with the album analogy.

speaker-1: I heard

speaker-0: What's the third album you'd want in your next book to emulate?

speaker-1: Aquimini. what is it? So Aquimini, Outcast, a rap group. They're I think it's their third album because they're Southern Playlistic, then ATL ENT's and Aquimini. Equimini is, to me, do I I think it's might be the best rap album. it might be like the greatest album that the genre has produced. To me, like the third album is like an interesting spot because I a lot of the S tier Practitioners, that is actually where you sort of like come into your own because the first few, you do have to kind of like play by rules. You have to like basically establish sort of proof of concept, right? But once you get to like three, four, especially every everything kind of after three, people aren't trying to say you're not in the thing or that you're not doing the thing. And that actually frees you up in a different kind of way, right? Yeah. There's a thing. You just in poetry, right, where we talk about like the first book. And, you know, they're just common tropes, especially in the last several decades, what we'll call like the the sort of program era, right? Where where a lot of your poets are coming out of these MFA programs, and even those that aren't understand that there are that these programs do sort of shape the landscape for better or worse. Often in first books, you'll see a lot of form. You'll see a lot of formal poems, right? And some of that might be like, well. in my MFA program. They gave me prompts for this or that, this or that. but some of it is also just like establishing like, I know what I'm doing. I have a sense of the history. I, you know, I'm I'm like a serious person, right? I'm not just here like prattling on. And I think once you get to like book three or four, that's when you can kind of be like, I don't I don't care. Like I'm not worried about if you think I'm a poet or not. Yeah. So you see people drive and like really really disparate directions. You know, some people become like, I'm a deep formalist, like I'm only writing sonnets. What's up? Or, you know, someone's like, never again will I write anything with a regular line or a meter or like f all that.

speaker-0: Yeah. We'd all be so much better off as writers if we could just skip the phase where we have to prove to everybody how smart we are. Sure. And I think that is where the good work gets produced. Well

speaker-1: It's a funny project too, because like nobody reads. Maybe we feel that pressure because we do in certain ways understand that the audience is relatively small. Like we all, I think, h harbor secret ambitions for like, I'm a beat that whatever, you know, like I'm just gonna somehow become a literary star. Someone's gonna buy my book of poems and make it into a movie, and then I'll never have to work again. Whatever. I don't know. Maybe this is why poets in particular are like some of the meanest literary artists, is because our audience is often the smallest. And so there's a lot of sense of like we have to protect the borders.

speaker-0: What else can you tell us about the book? title, yeah, themes.

speaker-1: So the title of the book is something blue. That was not the original title. We sort of went back and forth, which is funny because this is the first book where that has really been the case. At least the first of my like full collections. Often, if not the first thing, a very early thing that I come to is the title. Like Finna, I knew that title probably before I had damn near any of the poems, maybe like one. This one, it was originally called, and for for a lot of time I was calling it Married or Buried. But it's something blue. it is it's a lot of love poems, a lot of dad poems, and then a lot of elegies. A lot of poems sort of in honor of folks that have passed, so a more kind of traditional straight ahead sort of elegy, but then also kind of elegies to things, like sort of what I would call like a slant elegy. So there's a poem thinking about like parties and a sp and a particular kind of like partying of my youth that was like gross and skin to skin and sweaty and visceral. And I'm like, yeah, I'm probably never gonna do that again. And some of that is like a function of like pandemic. Some of it is also a function of like age, like, but I don't know if my knees can do the the things required to do that. One last thing, I'll shut up. It's the book kind of started in initially I was I what I really wanted to do was I got engaged in 2020. And my initial plan for that engagement was to write my Now wife, a chat book. so a sort of short collection of poems, really just like about our relationship, about sort of like the story of our of our relationship. And then the pandemic happened, and I was kind of like too sad and like worried and like nervous to really do that. Though I I think probably there is now that like that chat book does theoretically exist, emerged in this. But that was a part of the the sort of genesis of the thing and now it is like grown in a much broader way.

speaker-0: Yeah. Is there a pub date or a season?

speaker-1: Yeah, March March twenty seven.

speaker-0: Right on. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. I just have a a couple more questions for you. We began this conversation talking about attention. Yeah. These days, there are so many things competing for attention. yeah. How do you safeguard that? And and specifically I'm thinking about your role as a teacher. How do you encourage your students to do the same thing when they arguably are are even more inundated than you and I? Yeah.

speaker-1: I'm bad at it, man. I mean, I'm, you know, I'm constantly like, I got the brick for my phone. I like I j I deleted Instagram and threads today, being like, yeah, I you know, I probably should lock in. Like this is a lot of good time I have to read and write. Like, let me just get make this thing a little more boring. And and sh at some point they will end up back on my phone. But you know, it's it's just this thing. Like all these things are engineered by, you know, some of the most well trained people in the world. to do what they do to us to hold us captive in these ways. Yeah. I've I increasingly I'm like trying to make classes like more low tech, I think. I think students struggle with it and I and I think they s they often struggle with it not because they want to be inattentive or because they want to because they don't think what you're doing is important. Though though some do, sure. But like I but I think it's yeah, we're just we're all like deeply addicted to machines in a way that that's just tough.

speaker-0: Yeah. When you saw all those graduating classes booing the tech speakers, you know, I think that wasn't just about like AI taking people's jobs and coming to a job market. I think there is a real fatigue even among young people. They're like, This can't be it. And and there's a clamoring for for more real experiences. Yeah.

speaker-1: And I think the clamoring sometimes it doesn't even have the vocabulary for it may not even fully be there, right? Like the young people may not even really understand, my my phone is a problem or Instagram is a problem. But like they do have a sense that there was this like broader set of experience that they don't fully have access to or that they're not fully able to like step towards and they're pissed off about it. And they should be, right? I I am. You know, I mean think we all should be. My hope is that the sort of rejection of these sort of AI tech overlords is followed then by like a rejection of the widespread use of the technology and then hopefully like a broader reevaluation of just how we're deploying sort of network-based tech in our lives so that it can be additive and not not replacing, right? Like I think about like It was such a beautiful thing to grow up at the kind of dawn of the internet age in certain ways, the dawn of a certain kind of digital movement, because it gave me a lot of access to information, but like that access kind of had a limit. It had like stopping points, right? So like I could go and find, okay, this is like a list of open mics that are in the city. Yeah. And then I can like get offline and call those places and be like, okay, is this actually happening? Or go out and check them out or whatever. Right. Yeah.

speaker-0: To close this out, we've been talking about these poems. Yeah. I'm hoping you'll you'll read a poem for us. I will then lavish you with praise. We'll do a quick speed round and and send you on your way. Okay. Sure.

speaker-1: Do you want old poem or new poem? Sure. let's see. Boom, boom, boom. So this is elegy for funerals. How many of our ways to say goodbye have we been denied? How many Shiva stools sat empty because beloved couldn't come or were already gone? How many caskets were left unfussed with no wailers to drape themselves over the departed like a pile of dirt? How many of us had to zoom into a forever farewell? How many made the final bath before the final shroud for a beloved more alone than they would be? How many prayers were said as solos by a chorus of mourners made to stay apart? How many came together to grieve, but the coming together passed the grief maker to its next work? How many spirits had Have splashed to the ground in honor of a new ancestor. How many corner born promises have been made stronger and stronger? I put that on my dead homies. So, so, so many dead homies.

speaker-0: That's fucking great, man. All right, let's do a quick speed round. You mentioned an album, but greatest rap song of all time. First answer, no hedging.

speaker-1: Thank you. All let's get it. Fuck, made you look nice.

speaker-0: All right. What is the most underrated Midwestern city?

speaker-1: Damn, underrated Midwestern city. Milwaukee. Yeah, Milwaukee. Yeah.

speaker-0: No. Who's the lesser known poet that you think everyone should read?

speaker-1: Frank Marshall Davis, yeah.

speaker-0: What's a poem that you've taught a hundred times but still love?

speaker-1: Beverly Hills, Chicago, Gwendolyn Brooks.

speaker-0: Here's the real meat and potatoes. Who is your favorite professional wrestler?

speaker-1: Ooh wait, all time or current.

speaker-0: let's go both.

speaker-1: Yeah. Man, it might be the rock. It might be the rock. Might Duane. Yeah, despite himself. He's he's just so good. And currently, Trick Williams.

speaker-0: Yeah, just Love it. Good pull. Along those same lines, you know, we say when something is sort of the best at the moment it has the belt. Which living poet has the belt right now? Ooh, Patricia. Last one. Deep dish or tavern style? Yeah. Yeah. A man after my art.

speaker-1: Yes. Smith. Yeah. Deep dishes like once a year. Otherwise you'll die. Yeah. You can't it's not sustainable.

speaker-0: I think Tavern Style is the best period. No. Just like give me the cracker thin crust. Yes. Yeah.

speaker-1: Sure. But but once a year you gotta be like I wanna be like cardiovascularly worried. Yeah. Like once a year. And that's that's the deep dish day.

speaker-0: Yeah, that's a good place to end it. Nate, thanks so much for doing this.

speaker-1: Thank you. Appreciate it.

speaker-0: Another big thanks to my guest, Nate Marshall, and thank you for tuning in. We'll put links to purchase Nate's books in the show notes. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a rating or share with a friend. It really helps. And don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss new episodes. They come out every Wednesday. You can reach me anytime at Jeffaloisia.com/slash writing forward. That's J-E-F-F-O-L-O-I-Z-I-A.com slash writing forward. I'd love to hear from you. This episode of Writing Forward was recorded at the Madison Public Library with support from Dane Arts. It's produced, edited, and mixed by Anya Van Wagtenog. The theme music is by the Lola Ombre. Logos and episode art are by Tim Burton. Thanks again for listening. In the words of Quick Trip Employees Everywhere. See you next time.