THE POET LAUREATE PODCAST

Episode Transcript

Kyeren Regehr in conversation with Toussaint St. Negritude

Recorded at Haus of Owl Creation Lab, Victoria, BC

On Lekwungen homelands

Websites referenced in this episode

Toussaint St. Negritude: https://toussaintstnegritude.com/

Belfast Poetry Festival: https://www.belfastpoetryfestival.com/

BC Black History Awareness Society: https://bcblackhistory.ca/

Haus of Owl Creation Lab: https://www.hausofowl.com/

[Intro music: classical guitar by Chris Regehr]

[Poem 1: "All Green Lights" - Toussaint St. Negritude]

Kyeren:

Welcome to The Poet Laureate Podcast, a space for poetry and presence. The poem is listening.

I'm Kyeren Regehr, and we are recording at Haus of Owl Creation Lab in Victoria, BC, on Lekwungen homelands.

This episode of The Poet Laureate Podcast is supported by the Belfast Poetry Festival, a long-standing celebration of poetry, art, and community in Belfast, Maine.

For nearly two decades, the festival has brought poets, performers, and audiences together each autumn for a weekend of readings, exhibitions, and deeply rooted creative exchange, and this year celebrates its 21st annual festival. Entirely volunteer-run, the festival is dedicated to fostering connection through the literary arts and uplifting diverse voices across Maine and beyond.

Discover more about upcoming events and this year's festival at belfastpoetryfestival.com.

We just heard "All Green Lights" by Toussaint St. Negritude: poet, composer, bass clarinetist, and former Poet Laureate of Belfast, Maine.

Welcome, Toussaint, and thank you for being here. It's such an honour to have you.

Toussaint:

Thank you so much. It is absolutely an honour. Thank you dearly.

Kyeren:

Dear Toussaint, that poem just now arrived in our ears. Where did it first begin for you?

Toussaint:

I wrote this poem several years ago, I think when I first moved to Vermont. I was encountering some New England hatred, which for some reason really caught me by surprise. I guess I believed all the Hallmark cards of quaint New England, and I wrote this as just kind of an affirmation to myself: no matter what they threw at me, they couldn't stop me from being myself.

Kyeren:

Your award-winning collection Mountain Spells moves with a musicality that mirrors jazz, gospel, liberation. When these poems were coming into being, did they arrive first as rhythm, cadence, tone, breath before meaning? What were you listening for as they formed?

Toussaint:

You know, I so appreciate that question. I find that my poetry and my music come from the same muse and kind of share a similar sense of tone and rhythm and phrasing. People often say when they hear me play the bass clarinet that the horn sounds like the way I speak. And the poetry, the same.

I do find myself often thinking in musical terms: this line has a chorus - Duke Ellington's horns, a chorus of various percussion. But the poems really come to me. I know that sounds trite, but I really have less control than I could ever claim. They really come to me in whatever form they see fit.

Kyeren:

So reflecting back on the poem you just read, and how it came as a response to negative experience, did that come to you, or did you sit with the intention of using words to heal?

Toussaint:

Yes. Yes. The title, "All Green Lights," was definitely inspired by driving along and hitting a stretch of just all green lights, and really wanting to feel that freedom - imagining a life without the red lights of racism or the red lights of hatred, and wanting to be able to move freely.

That was my intention, but the poem really just kind of came out on its own. And just as a reminder to myself. I often feel, as a poet and as an artist, that these poems are just as healing to the poet as they are to anyone else that reads them. Me personally, I often feel that my poems come as a form of healing and a form of seeing - seeing beyond the hurt or indignity, but really seeing the humanity of every situation.

Throughout my life, I've really tried to practice not fighting hatred by internalizing it myself, because then it just becomes a poison that further eats from within. So the poems and the music have really helped me to stay centred in the universe.

Kyeren:

Yeah. I'm feeling the warmth of that. 

Toussaint:

I find that it's so important, especially in these times now - which feels easy to say, because I feel like it's been generations of times, for centuries - but I find that for our sanity and our spiritual health, it's really important to keep a focus. Martin Luther King would say, "Eyes on the prize," or "Eyes on the sparrow." It's a struggle - I don't mean to make it light at all - but not getting too mired down in the wrestling with oppression.

Kyeren:

I'm amazed at your resilience, and your ability to move from those places into your poetry and into your music.

Toussaint:

Thank you. Resilience is definitely the word. That is what has gotten me through. I feel hesitant to really claim the resilience myself. I think I've had a score of angels and ancestors around me - my mother and other living elders and friends who have helped me along the way build my resilience - but that is what it's about.

It's definitely a struggle. It's kind of like driving across the country to come here. Someone asked me early on in the tour how I was doing it, and I told them: I go to the gas station and fill up the tank and I keep my foot on the pedal as far as I can go. And now I'm on the other side of - it feels like the other side of the world - but now I'm on the Pacific Ocean.

I feel it's the same in life with resilience: just kind of keeping your foot on the gas, believing in yourself, truly loving yourself. My mother would often say to me, with things that I wanted to do: if you believe you deserve it - if you truly believe you deserve your freedom, you deserve to be regarded as a human being - if you truly believe you deserve that, then nothing can stop you.

Kyeren:

That's sage advice.

I'm just thinking about jazz and the risk, and the real-time choice, and the real-time consequences, and I'm wondering if there's an element of risk and improvisation in your writing, and where you feel that edge - in language, or subject, or performance.

Toussaint:

That's such a great question. Absolutely. Throughout this tour I've been writing a lot about risk, because it was such a huge risk for me to get in a van, and this is entirely being paid for by myself on an extremely limited budget. All practicality would tell me, don't do it. But it has been such a blessing and such an excursion to embrace risk - the risk of loving yourself, the risk of pursuing your passion and presenting yourself.

I think it's an extremely powerful thing. I'm reminded, in all of our historic struggles going back to the founding of both the US and Canada - and well before - our ancestors throughout the globe had to make incredible risks. Our lives continue. We still have goals we're striving for. I want to continue that.

Tying that back to the poetry and jazz: jazz is so much about improvisation and risk-taking. Going off the script. You might start with a little bit of a known melody - a refrain from "Summertime" or some classic song - but then taking the risk of saying, Let me see how I can interpret that melody on my own, on whatever instrument I'm playing or singing.

In writing, I approach poetry in the same way. It has taken time. It's definitely been an evolution - gaining enough trust in myself and in my poetry to be honest and be vulnerable in the writing. I'm sixty-six now. I've been writing since I was a teenager. I remember in my twenties and thirties being very cautious and worried about wanting to talk about heavy topics, but wondering: Can I say this? Will this get me in trouble? If I'm talking about racism, do I dare say the word racism? Is that too much? Should I sugar-coat or code things?

As I've evolved as a poet, as an artist, and just as a human being, I have wholeheartedly taken all of those risks - really embraced the honesty of anything I have to say, and the vulnerability - and always try to keep it so that my goal is never to hurt, but to tell the truth, in whatever form that is.

A lesson I embraced a long time ago is that, as an English speaker - English is my mother tongue - and as a poet, I therefore have access to the entire language. No word of the English language, or any other languages I choose to add, should be off limits. If I'm talking about a family member being molested, I should be able to say those words. If I'm describing the beauty of a magnificent mountain, I should be able to say those words. So I really try to stay true to the honesty of the language.

That does involve a lot of risk-taking, but also trusting in the universe - like when I got on the ferry to come to Victoria, crossing that huge body of water, and trusting that I would get across it smoothly. Or when I first arrived in Victoria on Friday, and I was a bit terrified of driving and hoping I could follow all the rules, and wondering what if there were rules I didn't know. But you do have to embrace the risk. I think that's the truth.

Kyeren:

Thank you. Can I ask you about your name? It's a name rich with lineage and resonance. Can you speak to what that name means in your life and your poetics? I believe you chose it - how it houses history, how it houses you.

Toussaint:

Thank you so much, and I love the way you phrase that - how it houses me. That's exactly what it does.

My given name is Orson Gregory Titus. My father's family, the Titus family, came out of Princeton, New Jersey. Going back generations, as far as I can tell, my ancestors arrived in America through New Jersey. On my father's side there have been a lot of artists and teachers and craftspeople. I had a great-grandfather who was a goldsmith - they called them a metallurgist back then - and he was a watchmaker. So a lot of creativity in the family.

But I was never comfortable with Orson. My father was a radio announcer his entire life. He was born, I think, in 1928, had been doing radio since at least the forties. He was also an aspiring actor, and his idols were Orson Welles and Gregory Peck.

As a kid growing up, kind of coming of age in the late sixties and seventies in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Black Panther movement was in the neighbourhood I grew up in. My mother was friends with and involved with the Panthers and a lot of activist movements at the time. "Orson" - I just could never identify with it. I knew nothing of this Orson Welles. He didn't resonate with me.

My mother, thankfully, has always been a Black history buff and deeply aware of African history throughout the diaspora. From my earliest memories, she taught me about Toussaint Louverture, who led the Haitian rebellion against the French and liberated Haitians from slavery. So growing up, Toussaint was a definite family hero.

As I got into high school and started studying French and learning more about Haiti, I liked that Toussaint means "all saints." In Haiti, and maybe in French a few hundred years ago, gods - the way in English we refer to spiritual gods, plural - in French they say saint or saints. It's a different distinction than the way we think of the word saint. And Haiti, with Vodou and the belief of a whole pantheon of spirits - it's really very beautiful. It's nothing like the Hollywood version of voodoo.

Kyeren:

Yes. It's the Vodun religion, right?

Toussaint:

Yes, exactly. It's very all-encompassing. If you're a tomato farmer, you pray to the god of tomatoes. It's a real sense of connecting with your environment, with nature, with everything. If you have a loved one in the hospital with heart trouble, you pray to the god of hearts. It's this notion that all life has spiritual representatives that can assist you.

When Toussaint Louverture led the rebellion, I think initially his name was Francois, but he changed his name - because it literally means "all saints." He had this democratic idea that after the revolution, the French could remain, but that we could all treat each other civilly - not be enslaved, but share. So he was trying to acknowledge all saints: you can practice Catholicism, we'll practice Vodou - all saints, all gods.

I think in the States, Toussaint just became synonymous with liberation, or a liberator. I decided I was going to dedicate myself to being a liberator through my poetry and my music, and so I think of it both as a name and kind of a title.

Negritude: there was a fantastic literary movement that began in Haiti around the same time as the Harlem Renaissance in North America. And the Negritude movement was, similar to the way the Harlem Renaissance was, kind of the first movement of Black North Americans writing about their own beauty and their own culture, rather than imitating British writing. Instead of writing about the beauty of alabaster skin - which is fine - writing about the beauty of Black and brown skin, and things from our own cultures. Negritude, in French, generally means blackness.

I added the saint because I noticed that I've always been very spiritually grounded in a lot of my work - and I say that in the broadest sense, not in any particularly religious sense - but all representations of spirituality that I had seen or grown up with, especially in the Western world, pretty much from a Christian perspective, are white: Saint Catherine, Saint whoever, Saint John. I wasn't familiar with any sort of sanctity of any other ethnicity, and so I just wanted to add the saint to kind of acknowledge the reverence of us all sharing in the spirituality.

Kyeren:

Wow. I think that's the first time I've heard that so thoroughly explained. Thank you for sharing that, and what powerful lineages you've given yourself - and you carry it.

Toussaint:

Thank you. You know, taking on that name, I realized that without me doing anything further, just having people utter the name - it was a very subtle revolutionary act, because it kind of subtly forces some acknowledgement of all saints. So that's kind of my subtle revolutionary act.

Kyeren:

I remember it landing in the Planet Earth Poetry inbox and I was like, Who is this man? What a name.

Toussaint, you also are the leader of the band Jaguar Stereo! so you blur poetry and improvisational jazz. What happens in that free-form space that doesn't happen on the page? And have there been moments in performance that have changed how you write when you go back into solitude?

Toussaint:

Yes. It has been so fantastic. I have always enjoyed what have often been rare opportunities to perform my poetry with other musicians. There's something - I perform a lot as a solo artist, playing my bass clarinet, and I do a kind of call-and-response thing where I'll play a few bars on bass clarinet and then recite a few lines, and then more of the horn, and kind of back and forth like that.

And that's wonderful. I thoroughly enjoy that. But having the opportunity to also play and recite with other musicians, in that musical collaboration, it just ignites and opens up such a broad opportunity to really get to the depth of the poem. You can sing a song by yourself and really enjoy it, but when you get to sing with another artist or other musicians, there's just something magic that happens when suddenly you kind of spontaneously hit a different note that's even better, that you would never have thought of before. It opens the door to really fleshing out the poem in much greater ways.

When I recite, I often use the word perform. I was telling someone recently in Washington that along this tour, as I've been doing so much poetry from place to place, I've really come to understand that what I'm actually doing is a ritual - and I think an ancient ritual that goes back throughout all humanity, on every corner of this planet. Probably it wouldn't be foreign to the Indigenous people of Australia, or the Indigenous people here, or the Indigenous people of Europe, like the Sami culture up near the Arctic - recitation and music being an act of summoning, and summoning magic.

Here's where the interview gets crazy, but I've really come to understand - and part of the reason why I called my book Mountain Spells - that as artists, and I really feel this for all artists of all genres, though we use words like perform or exhibit, very artistic words, it's often really more a form of ritual in the most ancient sense of the word, in the way it conjures feeling and emotions in the listener.

Kyeren:

It's amazing that you're saying this, Toussaint. It really excites me because I was having this conversation with Drew Lavigne, who's a Poet Laureate of New Brunswick, and he was talking about performance as a shamanic-type ritual. He was talking about the synergy between audience and poet, or audience and musician, and the magic that is born from that. It can't be repeated.

Toussaint:

Yes. It is so true. I've slowly, gingerly been adding the word shaman to my promo. I'm still very - I feel shy to claim it.

Kyeren:

Claim it.

Toussaint:

I am. I'm claiming it. I absolutely am. And I really hate that our society - so much of our modern Western society - has taught us to be afraid of words like shaman or magic. We should all claim it, because a lot of that magic continues to exist in our lives, but we just give it different terms - like intuition. Mm-hmm. That's it right there.

Kyeren:

Exactly. Or synchronicity.

Toussaint:

Exactly. Exactly. I hope that answers the question.

Kyeren:

Oh, it certainly does. Deliciously.

While we're on magic, would you please read us another poem, Toussaint? And listeners: after this poem, there'll be a brief guitar interlude for you to rest and reflect in the magic of this piece.

[Poem 2: "Brothers and Brothers" - Toussaint St. Negritude]

[Mid-show musical interlude: classical guitar by Chris Regehr]

Kyeren:

That felt like gospel or benediction.

In Mountain Spells and beyond, how do themes of queer identity and Black joy and survival and sweetness intersect on the page and in performance?

Toussaint:

Excellent question. Thank you so much for recognizing that intersection. They intersect throughout the book. As a Black queer man, poet, musician, hat-maker, mountain lover, I have definitely come to realize that not only do I have a lot of intersections, but we all do. It's the fact of life. The honest way - if we could somehow break our lives down to a map, if we could somehow map the human experience - it's a confluence of zillions and zillions and zillions of intersections.

I stress that because, growing up and coming of age - becoming an adult and living as an adult in San Francisco between the seventies and the early two-thousands, an environment that for a period was certainly, this is how we thought of ourselves, excuse me, as the gay mecca of the world - no offence to the rest of the planet, and I would love to share that with the entire planet - I resented that so many of us within the queer community kind of jokingly said we so narrowly defined ourselves somewhere between vodka and Madonna. That's it. As if that were our sole purpose on the planet.

It would be so disturbing because, as much as I enjoy the dance clubs and as much as I used to enjoy my vodka cranberry - I've been sober for several years now - I was also a poet. I couldn't turn to the same friends that I sat at the bars with and say, Hey, I just read a great poem by George Elliott Clarke. Let me share this with you. Or, I just wrote a great poem - would you want to hear it? There was no real capacity for hearing or experiencing anything outside that lane.

And in the same way that the larger society - racist, homophobic, whatever - had kind of led us all to that tiny peninsula of San Francisco as a place of safety, what we were told was: stay in your lane. If you insist on being gay or queer, that language - keep it over there. Stay in your lane. And what was over there was vodka and Madonna. I live very much outside that lane. Always have.

Kyeren:

I think that lane's way too narrow for you.

Toussaint:

Absolutely. So in this poem, "Brothers and Brothers," I really wanted to show and reflect the beauty and the joy of love between men, and that it be beyond all of the categories that we have even found for ourselves within the queer community - that we can even defy those categories.

You know, we don't have to fit in these narrow pigeonholes. A man can be a mother. A man who identifies as a man can be a loving sister. And in that cesspool of traditional male toxicity, men can actually be loving. We can be tender. We can be sensitive. We can shed tears publicly. We can say, I am scared. We can not only feel vulnerability, but express it too, and we can hold others who are reflecting their vulnerability.

So yeah, throughout the book I really try to express those intersections even if I don't explicitly say, I'm saying this as a gay man. Like in my enjoying what I've seen of Vancouver Island so far - and I am so thrilled to be here, I look so forward to spending more time here very soon. I just stayed with a friend, another poet, in Sooke last night, and enjoying the beauty of Sooke - technically, I am a Black gay man enjoying the beauty of Sooke, but I shouldn't have to necessarily say, It's a Black gay experience, right? It's an experience of beauty, which doesn't negate all intersections of myself.

Kyeren:

Mm-hmm. Your life has moved through a lot of landscapes - from San Francisco to Haiti to North Philadelphia to Maine to the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. How does place enter your poems? Is it a background, a collaborator, a spirit, a teacher?

Toussaint:

Yes - all those places have definitely informed not only my writing, but really informed me, really helped to broaden my perspective of the world.

Growing up in the Bay Area, San Francisco being right on the Pacific just like Victoria is - if you look to the west, you see open ocean; you look to the east, you see the coastal hills and coastal mountains. Growing up there, I was constantly asking my mother, What's on the other side of those hills? Because all I saw was ocean to the west and these ridges to the east. That was as far as I had gone as a child. I had never seen east of there. I heard about this massive stretch of North America going to the Atlantic, but it was kind of a mystery to me. So I always had this quest to see what was on the other side of those mountains, and that quest has led me as far as roads will take me, and airplanes, and I've really enjoyed the journey.

The time I spent in Haiti was, I think, the most transformative. When I was nineteen, I terrified my mother and my family by announcing that I was not only shamefully dropping out of college, but moving to Haiti. I was nineteen. I was as naive as any nineteen-year-old should be, naive in a million different ways. But I really felt it as a calling. I'm so grateful. I don't know where my ability to hear callings and to follow those callings comes from, but I'm so glad I have it because it's really led me to some great places and great experiences in my life.

I had known about how richly African Haiti is - possibly the most intact African culture this side of the Atlantic, maybe balanced with Brazil and Haiti. But because Haiti has been so cut off from the rest of the world for almost a few centuries now, it's really retained a lot of that West African heritage in the language, music, and the arts. I figured Haiti would be the closest African country I could reach, and so I went. Doors just opened up.

I immediately found a wonderful job teaching English to Haitian businesspeople who needed to brush up on their English as they were doing business in Miami - and, I'm sure, even Canada. I loved it. That was my first experience teaching, and now I've become more of an active poetry teacher, but I really love teaching.

That was in the late seventies - 1979 to 1982. There was a curriculum and guidebooks that we had, but to teach English I would sneak in lyrics of Stevie Wonder.

Kyeren:

Oh, I love that.

Toussaint:

Or speeches of Malcolm X. I was like, This is English. Let's. And they gave me full rein, which was wonderful. I would bring in lyrics of Bob Marley, who was hugely popular at the time. It was a great experience.

But Haiti really radicalized me in the most richly creative way - really radicalized my mind and my soul. It was in Haiti that I first learned the word surrealism, because so much of the visual art is very surrealistic. It's very image within an image within an image. Nothing is exactly what it seems - meaning behind meaning behind meaning. And again, this notion of intersectionality, which is kind of the way Haitians see themselves in the world - a constant sense of multiplicity. That helped me, as a nineteen- or twenty-year-old, better understand jazz and the sense of being surrealistic and polyrhythmic, and Vodou being polytheistic. And just that whole surreal mix of things. If I hadn't gotten to Haiti, I don't know if my mind would have been so expanded. Hopefully it would have. But yes, that has definitely been my most pivotal experience.

And then Philadelphia: I moved to Philadelphia in 2006, just as gentrification was becoming astronomical in San Francisco. Though I had promised myself, and sworn to everyone, that I would never leave San Francisco - for my peace of mind, for my safety, for my joy - it definitely became far more than I could financially afford.

I was noticing - as a huge fan of John Coltrane and so many great artists - that they all either came from or went through Philadelphia: Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, such an incredible corridor of artists and poets as well. So I thought, well, let me move to Philly. I was there for three years, and then I moved to Vermont.

Kyeren:

And that's where Mountain Spells was born.

Toussaint:

Yes.

Kyeren:

I do want to ask you about your laureateship, and what that civic role taught you about poetry as community practice.

Toussaint:

Yes. It was such a huge honour. For two years I was Poet Laureate of the city of Belfast, Maine. They've had their own poet-laureateship program for decades, long before the state of Maine had laureates, and they take it very seriously. It's a city position. I had to swear an oath to the Bible and the Constitution of Maine - which I've never read, I admit here on air - but it was a legitimate, unpaid, but real position.

I loved it because I felt like I had spent all of my adult career as a poet and an artist focusing on promoting myself, pushing my art up the hill, and finally this was an opportunity for me to help others, which I really enjoyed.

As Poet Laureate, all of the laureates get an office space in the local library, with weekly office hours. It was so funny the first time I arrived at my office with a sign out there: Poet Laureate. And I'm like, And now what? But gradually a line formed outside - local citizens showing up with poems and saying, Hi, I'm Robert so-and-so, and I wrote this poem about my uncle and just wanted to see what you think of it.

For two years it was this constant interaction with the public. And one of my main goals as laureate - each laureate seems to have their own things they want to contribute to the laureateship - and one of mine was really bringing out, really encouraging, the voices of the people. Really of the people. Noting that often most poetry people commonly are exposed to in school tends to be written by and about a certain class in society - a certain upper class.

Belfast, like much of coastal Maine, is very working class: a lot of people surviving off fishing, lobster fishing, hardworking working-class people. I wanted to hear more of the poetry of the working class and local people, not just the people with million-dollar homes. The door's open to everyone, but really trying to hear from everyone.

Kyeren:

Wow. Thank you, Toussaint. It's been amazing talking with you. I could talk with you all day.

Toussaint:

Thank you. It's been amazing to have this opportunity. And I have to say, following up on what we were talking about earlier, I have equally felt such a calling, since I was in high school, to this island. With no prior knowledge of anyone or anything about Vancouver Island, I always figured it was just my love of the mountains and the ocean. I'm so grateful to have finally arrived here, and so grateful to have connected with you and to have had this grand opportunity to read and be a little part of this community.

Kyeren:

It's just such a pleasure to have you here, and I look forward to your return. But meanwhile, would you be so kind as to leave us with a final poem?

Also, I should tell everyone that Toussaint St. Negritude's impressive biography can be found on the podcast website and in the show notes, along with ways to find his incredible book and recordings and music.

If this episode meant something to you, please do share it with someone who might need poetry today.

Thank you again to the Belfast Poetry Festival for supporting this episode. I'm adding a pilgrimage to this poetry festival to my own vacation list, and I hope you will too.

Additionally, I'd love to take a moment to acknowledge the work of the BC Black History Awareness Society. Based in Victoria, the Society works to preserve, honour, and amplify the rich history and ongoing contributions of Black communities in BC through education, cultural initiatives, and public engagement. I hope you'll discover more about their important work at bcblackhistory.ca.

Thank you, Toussaint. Take it away.

Toussaint:

Thank you. I just want to mention here that this poem is about the house that I built and live in - a nine-by-thirty-foot tiny house on a trailer, way out in the woods of Vermont. The name of my house is the Star House.

[Poem 3: "How I Built My Star House" - Toussaint St. Negritude]

[Outro music: classical guitar by Chris Regehr]