Tennessee Reed is the author of seven poetry collections, a memoir and a novel. She has read her work around the continental United States, Alaska, Hawaii, England, the Netherlands, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Israel and Japan. She is the chairperson of PEN Oakland and the managing editor of Konch Magazine. Her seventh poetry collection, Califia Burning, was published on November 3, 2020.

This interview took place on February 26, 2021

Justina Mejias
Well, thank you so much for doing this interview today. I really appreciate you giving me your time.  I see that you've been writing and performing since you were very young, basically since you were a child.  What do you feel that you are most proud of in your life so far?

Tennessee Reed
I think writing all these books and getting to travel the world to read.

Justina Mejias
What are some of the more interesting traveling experiences you've had?

Tennessee Reed
Israel. That was eight and a half years ago already when I did that.I worked with Palestinian students in Jerusalem. It was through the United States arts program, it was the United States government who sent us over there, and I've done trips with them before, to Germany and Japan as well. I was supposed to go to the West Bank, but there was a lot of stuff happening there, so I wasn't able to get to the West Bank at that time.

But I worked in East Jerusalem with students, high school and college, Palestinian. Both Muslims and Christians, so you get a better sense of what Palestine is when you're there, because the news isn't so great about giving it to you...you know the names like West Bank, Gaza, and Israel, but you don't really learn about what they are until you're over there.

Justina Mejias
What was one of the more interesting things that experience taught you?

Tennessee Reed
It taught me how people in the United States, I'm not trying to be rude here, but how ignorant about other cultures they can be. I think partly it's because a lot of Americans don't have the advantage of travel and also because of what they're taught in school. These Palestinian students knew more about American history and about the American government than American students do.

Justina Mejias
What was their (the Palastenian students’) work like? What kind of work did they create?

Tennessee Reed
A lot of journal writing and about how the American government treats Palestine. They talked a lot about that. 

Justina Mejias
What were some of your favorite things that you saw while you were there or anywhere in the world?

Tennessee Reed
I've gotten to see places that some people don't get to see, like one of the Palestinian hostesses who worked at the State Department took us under the Old City in Jerusalem. There's a tunnel where they've been excavating for two hundred years, starting with the British, and they're trying to find remnants of the temples of David. 

They have mainly Israeli tour guides, but I was one of the lucky ones who had a Palestinian tour guide, and so, there are like, a bunch of people from all over the world. We were all touring the tunnel. So it's like right where the wailing wall is, in the area underneath is the entire old city.

I also got to go to Versailles, when I went to France. It was very different than what I imagined it to be. I saw a picture of the outside of it when I was in high school on the wall, and I said, I like the look of the chateau, and I said I really want to go here someday, so we all took a train from Paris, my parents and I got to go explore Versailles. And also our friend who is Swiss took us, at the end of that trip, on a three day vacation to the Swiss Alps, near St. Moritz. That was like a really great three day vacation. They took us into this town from the Middle Ages that's in between the Alps and the Dolomites in the Valley. So that was an amazing experience. Also Vatican City and Florence.  It was great. It was very crowded when we were there. Who knows what it's like now because of the pandemic. And I finally got to see the Louvre. I've wanted to go there for many years.

Justina Mejias
So I was looking at your resume and I saw that you worked with Meredith Monk, she is one of my favorites...

Tennessee Reed
Yeah, my mom and her are friends from college.

Justina Mejias
Oh, is that how that came to work with her?

Tennessee Reed
Yes. She put my poem to music.  There was a children's theater company and my mom and her friend were directing at the time. They did a piece to it with a shadowplay.

It was a fun experience.  I went to New York and she did it there, and then she did it in San Francisco in the late nineties again, and at Mills when I was going to graduate school there. She's been going back and forth to Mills quite a bit, doing different projects.

It’s the first time I really collaborated with somebody else.  Collaboration can sometimes be a little tricky. Like sometimes you don't click with the person you're collaborating with, but I haven't really had a terrible experience collaborating with other people. My dad (Ishmael Reed) ran a workshop at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, this was wow, already 19 years ago, I can't believe it. I worked with a dancer, a master dancer and he did a piece to one of my animal poems.  That was a great experience too. In Switzerland, I did my poetry with a band. Same in Italy. And also, at SFJAZZ and at Yoshi's as well.

Justina Mejias
Can you tell me, what do you like about working with music? What is that experience like for you?

Tennessee Reed
It's very different. It's you know, it takes a while to get used to if you don't, never done it before. You know, the people I work with, the band members, I didn't have any problems with them. 

Justina Mejias
That's the stuff I find really exciting. Because there's so many new places that people have gone with collaboration. And poetry is music, and it is theater, and it is dance. So it's just so amazing to see words  have these incarnations that are so rich, you know. And multidisciplinary art is just really interesting.

I actually wanted to ask you a little bit about this pandemic. What has this period of time been like for you?

Tennessee Reed
I was traveling a lot. I'll keep having dreams about traveling. Yes, that's the one thing I really miss in the pandemic.  That's something I've done for almost forty four years of my life is traveling. So, you know, you get used to it, then you don't have it. And it's kind of, yeah, very different.

Justina Mejias
Is there anything that you feel you've learned from this time period?

Tennessee Reed
I have learned to be more accepting of change I think.  But also, you know, just like there are some personal struggles I've been dealing with as well during the pandemic as well as general struggles.

Justina Mejias
I think we all can relate to that right now. Can you talk about your photography? Do you feel that there's a big difference between creating visual images and words?

Tennessee Reed
Yes I do. I'm dating myself, but I remember taking photographs when I was like eight and using one of those disposable Kodak cameras. And I don't remember why, at the time I wasn't really thinking about doing it on a full time basis. I just would buy Kodak cameras and take them to take pictures on trips and stuff. But I didn't really get into it ‘till I turned 30. Because I wanted to try a  digital camera.

Sometimes I look at my photos over and over again. There's things in the photo that I didn't realize were there. And the more you look at it, the more things in the photo you realize are there. 

Justina Mejias
And what is your process and in writing, are you somebody that edits a lot or do you just spit them out whole?

Tennessee Reed
We edit a lot. Sometimes it takes a full year to get a poem. I can publish it somewhere and then I revise it after and after I first publish it, especially because with my new poetry collection, the one that was published in November between 2015 and 2019, I had sent it out to various places and it got turned down and I would have to wait eight months before the publisher would get back to me, so in between  I'd write and revise them again. 

Justina Mejias
What do you feel inspires a lot of your work?

Tennessee Reed
Everyday life. I'm writing a journal right now about lower back pain, which I've been dealing with. I have to have it treated big time soon, so I'm writing between the diagnosis and then the operation. So I basically just write about the everyday experiences...and stuff I watch on television, animals, you know.

Justina Mejias
I was hoping that you would share a couple of pieces and maybe talk about them a little bit.

Tennessee Reed
It's kind of funny how my mom says there's no accounting for taste. So I wrote this poem. It's kind of a journal, but I read it somewhere recently and it was a big hit. So I've been reading it more. It's called Life Lessons from the Peanut Gallery.

Starting when I was a child, I've been told to be assertive when people push me around and also counsel that I need you to be more self aware, since if everyone was the same, the world would be a boring place and not everyone is going to like you. Lessons I didn't start understanding until my mid thirties. In my teens, I was confronted with the ugly charges, diarrhea of the mouth and chatterbox, yet I could argue the same for people who would ask me in my 20s, do you have a boyfriend or what are you or pronounce if you marry a black man, a Jewish man, a white man or an Indian man, your child will be more black, Jewish, white or Indian than anything else. Or if you marry a man who doesn't have learning disabilities, one child will have learning disabilities and the other won’t.  I was informed that when people asked these questions or made these comments, they were usually talking to themselves as 90 percent of people's behaviors had nothing to do with me. Or were they offering lessons on a probability theory. These kinds of questions stopped once I reached my late 20s. Instead, throughout my 30s, people would ask me, Who do you think is a better writer, you or your dad? My stock answer. We write differently. That question stopped in my late 30s. Now, I am in my early forties and the question about having kids has come up again as I begin to transition into menopause, when I tell them I don't think I will be having kids. People say, well, my friend has had kids in their 40s and there are all sorts of tests to lessen the risk. When I complain about grocery store clerks at Berkeley Bowl and Safeway, you tell me when I ask for assistance, I look young and strong enough to lift my own bags from the counter to the cart. Even though I've had low back pain for 12 years now, I'm advised, why worry about those people? They don't have the power to do anything to you or you will hardly cross paths ever again. Or if you expect less from people, you'll be a happier person. Or in order to have extraordinary you have to have ordinary. Some people tell me I stopped caring what others thought of me when I turned 50. Hopefully I will internalize that lesson before reaching 50, comforted by one person's observation that humans have only been on two legs for fifty thousand years, or accepting of the consequences that humans may prove to be an evolutionary error. I don't suffer fools gladly.

So I guess a lot of people relate to these things, it's interesting how in this culture how having kids, like people think it's their business about women having kids. A lot of women, you know, and men both ask, like it's their business, I'm not sure why our culture is, like, really into that kind of thing. Having kids. 

Justina Mejias
Would you mind reading one more piece?

Tennessee Reed
Do you know of an artist called Anish Kapoor?

Justina Mejias
No I'm not familiar.

Tennessee Reed
He's a British East Indian artist who does installation pieces, mainly black holes. He does them like in the ground, and he does it in the wall. And they don't have a lot of his exhibits in the United States. But it's mainly like in Europe they have it. I didn't know about his work until somebody on Facebook talked about it, so I was glad. I like to learn about new artists as well. It's called Look Before You Leap.

I first heard of this story via Facebook

on August 20, 2018

Monday, August 13, 2018

A sixty something year old man from Italy

visits Anish Kapoor’s Descent Into Limbo

an outdoor installation of an oval shaped hole

inside the form of a freestanding concrete and stucco cube

about twenty square feet

at the Fundação de Serralves

Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal

Before entering the cube

everyone is asked to sign a disclaimer

alerting them to the risk involved

Signs warn people not to come too close

to the jet black oval shaped hole in the center of the room

that is so opaque it appears to have no depth

One visitor describes looking inside the circle

as a “dizzying experience”

Guards surround the site watching for visitors

who might wish to test if it is no more

than a trick of the eye

The mystery is achieved through

Vantablack, a material, not a paint

described as “the blackest black on the planet”

because it absorbs light and radiation

Warfare ignites on social media about who can use the tool

as Kapoor has secured an exclusive license

from Surrey NanoSystems

a British aerospace, engineering and optics research facility

who says, “It is often described as the closest thing

to a black hole we’ll ever see”

Kapoor’s followers on Instagram write,

“My first encounter, stays in my memory forever”

“Don’t get yourself sucked,”

“Spooky,”

“Looney Tunes,”

“Amazing,”

while the warring party maintains “#sharetheblack”

The sixty-year-old man

is evidently so compelled to stare into the abyss

to discover if the pit has a bottom

he falls eight feet down

ripping the sides off of the installation

Making a hole within a hole

he definitively destroys the illusion of infinity

for everyone

The man injures his back, requiring a hospital stay

Luckily, he didn’t die

The exhibit is temporarily closed for repairs

The work becomes an international art world cause celeb

digitally crossing into fame through popular culture and print

media

which is when I found out about it

And also if you know of Michael Heizer, at the Dia Beacon, he has pieces that are holes, not that do a circular shape like there, you know it's a hole because it's very transparent. So, you know, better not get too close. But this one, you know, the illusion of it creating an illusion. 

I've been into black holes and outer space since I was a kid. So it was interesting to see somebody wanting to do artwork like that. I know that exhibit has been around since 1992, it started in Germany, it's also been in Brooklyn, and Havana Cuba. In Italy there is a town in Tuscany, San Giovanni, that has a lot of his artwork, a lot of his void pieces. 

Justina Mejias
Well we're just about out of time so I wanted to thank you so much for speaking with me today and sharing your work and I wish you all the best with your new publication.

Justina Mejias is a vocalist, poet, and educator native to New York City. She has been performing professionally since she was a teenager, appearing at Lincoln Center, the Knitting factory with Savion Glover and Reg E. Gaines, and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe with her twenty piece big band. She was also part of the creation of the StoryCorps Project, and has had many pieces aired on National Public Radio. A certified Kripalu yoga teacher, amateur mycologist, and chipmunk enthusiast, Justina has no concept of boredom.