Darius Simpson: Deep fried in sunlight. Rainbow plastic barrettes practicing against the slick shine of blue magic grease inside the spinning nucleus of blur. Jump ropes, tiny, relentless stomps, beating a familiar song into the asphalt. Chalk tender rib meat pressed against every other mouth, a protective mask cigarillo smoke dribbling thick off the bottom lip.
Maria Esquinca: This is Maria Esquinca in for Ericka Cruz Guevarra and Welcome to the Bay. Today we’re celebrating National Poetry Month, which has kind of become an annual tradition on the show. And that’s something I’m really excited about because poetry is so special to me.
Maria Esquinca: And I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of poetry and what it means to be a poet when you care about the world and the people in it. I recently saw a video of the poet Lucille Clifton, where she says poetry is a way of being in the world. And when I first met Darius Simpson, that couldn’t be clearer.
Darius Simpson: The poem is as committed a person, as potent a person as revolutionary or radical as you are.
Maria Esquinca: For Darius, poetry is a way to talk about liberation. To name the systems that are oppressing us and to offer a solution. As an organizer with People’s Programs in Oakland. Darius puts his politics into practice. In other words, his poetry is an extension of himself.
Darius Simpson: Really, the most important thing for you is your daily political practice. And you have to ask yourself, what is it that I’m doing? And then how can a poem be in service of that?
Maria Esquinca: For today’s episode, Darius talks about his poetry collection Never Catch Me and what he hopes his poetry can do. All that after the break.
Darius Simpson: My name is Darius Simpson. I am a poet, writer, performer and skilled living room dancer from Akron, Ohio. Growing up in Akron, there was a a really close knit relationship between the black folks that I really appreciate now, especially looking back and having lived in different places. The way that our neighbors related to each other, there was a big community effort of like mowing folks lawns, shoveling driveways.
Darius Simpson: When I was a teenager. It was a lot of outside things and sort of sports, riding bikes, playing outside, you know, pick up football games, tag, hide and seek. I first came across poetry in fourth grade during a poetry unit with Mrs. Croft. My mother, she got called in for a teacher’s meeting, and Mrs. Croft was like, yeah, this thing that he did, it was like a poetry packet where we had to do haikus and limericks and all that stuff. And she pointed to them was like, he got an A-plus plus on this. He’s really good at this.
Darius Simpson: You should have him keep doing this. And so from there, my mom just kept reiterating that I was a poet, even when I didn’t really know what that meant. And so she would tell me, you’re a poet, you know, you can write. Write a poem for grandma, write a poem for, you know, Mother’s Day. From there, I remember writing like a motion poem. So like having really big feelings and not knowing how to describe them.
Darius Simpson: So I would like, put them into poetry. Or I like you poems for folks in like fifth and sixth grade. It meant a lot to have my mom tell me or like affirm or celebrate something that I was doing because like I said at the time, I didn’t really know what it was. And so I knew that this person who I loved really appreciated this thing that I did. And so while I couldn’t really see the full value of poetry at the time, I could see it as a like a service to the people that I love and that it was received that way.
Darius Simpson: We don’t die. We second line trumpet groove through gridlocked streets. We home? Go in charcoal black Cadillacs stretching around corners. We wake up sharp in Sunday. Best stiff but beaming. We move the sky. We escape route Starshine we crescent moon conspiracy. We come alive in the closed palms of midnight. We electrify. We pass do bill. But full belly we fridge empty. We pocket lint payments. We make ends into extensions. We multiply. We claim cousins as protection.
Darius Simpson: We so-and-so plus and them. We extend family to belong to someone. We siblings because we got to be. We chicken fry. We grease kitchen. We hog neck greens. We recipe scrape together from scraps. We prophesy. We told you so. Even if we never told you nothing. We are omniscient except in our own business. We swallow nations anthems and spit them out sweet. Make them sound like red velvet.
Darius Simpson: Ain’t just chocolate with a little dye in it. We bend lies, we amplify. We laugh so hard it hurts. We hurt so quiet. We dance. We stay flat. We float on tracks. We glide across linoleum. We make it look like butter. We melt like candle wax. In the warmth of Saturday night liquor. Sweat. We don’t die. We dust. That colony’s couldn’t settle. We salt water city built from runaway skeletons. We organized we Oakland in 66. We add a cut in 71.
Darius Simpson: We? Ferguson before and after the camera crews. We bow, but don’t break. We break but don’t crumble. We won’t die, we won’t die. We won’t die. We won’t die. We won’t die. We won’t die. We won’t. I start the poem. We don’t die with we in the book with a we. Because right now, to me, poetry is attempting to be in service to a collective we we being colonized people, especially Africans in the US. Assata Shakur and a number of folks that participated in the new African independence movement, or have made contributions to the new African independence movement, have come to lowercase.
Darius Simpson: The I have focus on. We, and in an attempt to move away from individualism, to move away from the ways that capitalism has kind of isolated us and have us really considering the we. I ended up in the Bay by way of being in a documentary when I was in high school. The filmmaker lives in the Bay, and as a part of the filming process, she brought out some of the protagonist from the film. And we did filming in Berkeley, in downtown Oakland. But she made it a point to like, take us through the Bay.
Darius Simpson: Out here, there was just a gravitational pull to people that I can’t really put words to. There was an energy and I was in college at this time, so I’m like, oh yeah, I want to live here after. I would say that mostly all the connections that I’ve found out here have been in Oakland. To be honest, most of everywhere else that I’ve gone has been like, this is nice. But, you know, our people have always been found in Oakland, you know, walking down the street attending open mic slams, events. There’s iconography all over.
Darius Simpson: I think that scene in Panther symbols. Seeing streets named after former Panthers. Even the things in people’s windows have a political tinge to them that don’t don’t really happen in other cities. Like, when I started off, I was working in middle schools and the, like sixth to eighth graders understanding of gentrification as like, wow, like, you know, what is it? What’s going on here? You know, it’s I think that there is at various points, there’s a political focus and undertone.
Darius Simpson: My poetry shifted when I came to the Bay. I think initially because I was trying to see what I could do with poetry as a tool. So in 2017, I was separated from the political home that I had in Michigan. And all the things that I was saying that I was against and all the things I was saying I was for were playing out in the world still. But I didn’t have any sort of community. So I had the question, okay, well, what can I do? How can I contribute? And so my poetry really took a more explicitly political aim during that time because I had nothing else.
Darius Simpson: And I was like, okay, well, I have these poems, I have these words. How can it be used? I was typing in Black Boy killed by police, and that naturally brought up a host of other stories unintentionally. One of them being Victor Steen in the poems that I write and in my life. My mother is very special to me, and she’s a central figure in the way that the Victor Steen’s story played out following his murder. Pigs waited two days, almost two days, to tell his mother about it. I feel related to the way the story played out. Riding your bike at night.
Darius Simpson: We play it outside all day. You know, we didn’t always have street lights. Depending on where you were, whose house you were over. And so that meant to sometimes you were out till dark and like riding home. And that’s really all he was doing in the the ludicrous accusations of what he was actually doing. You know, where they said this? The 17 year old black boy riding a bike was stealing 2,000 pound construction equipment from a from a lot. And that’s that’s the reason they had to stop him. Definitely saw some of myself in him.
Darius Simpson: And that’s a question that I had to sit with two of like, you know, why am I going to include these these poems? What is the the purpose and intention? Impact a run on question. I want to tell you about the first time I watched pigs trample him. But I’ve already written that funeral. And yes, my cheeks were flooded stairwells when black and white dashcam footage crushed me because I could have swore his bike was cherry red and so was mine, before the paint chipped off before the right foot pedal split off in the speeding mouth of a Toyota Camry.
Darius Simpson: And I want to tell you about the fourth time I watched pigs flatten him. But I got hit by a car when I was nine. So talking about accidents makes my foot itch, and maybe there’s no accidental way to run through a person like an inconvenient red light or a shortcut. And maybe I’m making up excuses because I’d never been to Pensacola, Florida, and the video was still too close to home, and I was six houses down from mine when a green sedan bent the fragile spine of my bike backwards into dead curbside grass, and I was five minute walk from my apartment when I saw the video, or when I watched pigs deflate him for the eighth time and the day I got hit.
Darius Simpson: My mother told my siblings to wait for me. But I’m the youngest, so they left anyway. And my loyalty is hard headed. So I need explicit rejection, often chasing behind people that don’t want me around. So I dusted off after them and he was riding his bike alone that night too. And in the video it looked like he had lost someone. And the first thing I thought was how much trouble awaited me for the dents in my twisted handlebars. And the second thought was if I would be allowed to ride my bike alone again.
Darius Simpson: And a black neighbor sprinted outside and wound her arms around my head like I was hers. And I just know that no one hugged him or said he was going to be okay. And what’s a black boy alone on a bike in the near night anyway, And what good would it do? Telling you about how there was no blood, but still enough questions to fill a casket. And where was I going with that bike? Or his name, or this grief, or an almost elegy in what is an obituary from a stranger, anyway?
Darius Simpson: I would say 2020, where my politics really started to develop. There was this building on a question of what does it mean to write poems for a particular purpose? People’s programs was having a community learning for the for the public to come through, and there’s going to be some kind of discussion or presentation. I was like that, you know, I’m trying to be wherever folks like this are at. And so I pulled up. They had somewhere to sign up to volunteer. So there was a book list that dropped immediately after it had established a course autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide, by Huey Newton and a couple other books by it, by Black Revolutionaries.
Darius Simpson: And I went to the bookstore immediately after. I think when I’ve been in those spaces before, the charge is always really vague. Where I’ve seen people that inspired me are like who I admired, but they didn’t have a tangible next step for my own development, and that was something that stood out well, people’s programs initially, you know, the rest is pretty much history. Been been rocking with them ever since. I would say my poetry through volunteering with people’s programs has shifted. Toward naming phenomena more explicitly.
Darius Simpson: We’re writing about state violence. We write as the victims. You know, where the victims, either in the case of detailing the brutality or victims in the sense of moving towards a utopia where none of this happens. What’s missing from both of those points of view are ways of approaching a situation. Is the reality that there’s another option, one that names the enemies, one that names an explicit alternative and goal, and one that again empowers a people to to move to action in their right now, or troubles the way that our actions are actually limiting what we have available to us.
Darius Simpson: But my my point is that it doesn’t. It doesn’t matter what you say on a page, how well you say it, how beautiful it sounds. If you are contributing to colonialism, capitalism, and not disrupting those things on a daily basis, then what you say is actually a betrayal. It’s a posturing. The poem is as committed a person and as potent a person, as revolutionary or radical as you are. And being something as like a calling card for the audience. Really, the most important thing for you is your daily political practice.
Darius Simpson: And you have to ask yourself, what is it that I’m doing? And then how can a poem be in service of that? You know, because a poem is just a tool, and it is as useful and as useless as the person wielding the tool. What were we doing here? I wanted to be a good poet once. Tossed a handful of haikus at a cop and he laughed. My MFA adviser says that ain’t what poems are for. But these days, I don’t want to make art that can’t also be a weapon against oppressors that can’t double as an invitation to organize.
Darius Simpson: This is not me making excuses for bad poems. This is a critique of how we become experts, a question of how that expertise can be used by the people who will die tomorrow with little food in the stomach or fridge or family. These days, all my dreams involve comrades. Last night I had a wild one about liberation. There was people outside everywhere. Then when it got cold, we all went inside. Every single one of us had an inside. The end. I had a wacky idea about education yesterday.
Darius Simpson: That we should all know the best things for free. I had a nightmare about my kin last week. They were writing in prisons and boardrooms and coffins and courtrooms and all equally lifeless. Revolution is the process of organized reanimation. To admit that somebody killed you centuries ago and everything since has been apocalyptic reiteration. Call me American if you want to hear God choke. Call me New African if you want to petrify colonialism.
Darius Simpson: I’m not looking for, you know, millions of views on YouTube or, book awards. My intention is to reach a certain group of people, namely, and firstly, who I’m writing from, which is new Africans, which is colonized people, which is people that are looking to, do something about our condition. So I hope my poetry speaks to, inspires those folks to do something about our condition.
