Rapturously Audacious: Remembering Aziza Barnes

Essays in the “Remembrances” series pay tribute to poets who have died in the past year.

This remembrance is written collaboratively by us, José Olivarez and Jon Sands. We wrote it as a way to remember and celebrate our friend Aziza Barnes. Perhaps toggling back and forth between two speakers is not the most conventional way to write a remembrance, but nearly every part of our creative lives with Z was characterized by the breaking of convention in the name of collaboration. We thank the Poetry Foundation for their flexibility.

José: In the spring of 2015, Aziza Barnes, aka Z, and I met up at the High Line in New York City. It was a beautiful day and we had plans: Terrance Hayes’s newest book of poems, How to Be Drawn, had just been released. Up on the High Line, somewhere north of 14th Street, in the bleachers where people sit and take selfies, or catch up, or rest, Z and I took turns reading poems from How to Be Drawn out loud to each other. Every so often we would stop and talk about the poems or reread a particular poem to try and catch up to what Hayes was doing.

I loved reading poems out loud with Z. Z was my kin in reading poems. We did not react demurely to a poem we loved. We both yelped and laughed and rocked back and forth. Reading poetry was physical for both of us. Z was unmatched as a reader. I mean it in every possible way. The way they read poems aloud was captivating. Z was, in addition to a poet, a playwright and a dancer, and all their training showed itself when they read poems out loud.

One of the greatest joys of my life was teaming with Z and Jon to co-teach a youth poetry workshop for Lincoln Center called Poet-Linc. Jon and Z are poetry soulmates of mine. I remember the first time we met to lesson plan, Z was so excited about a T-Pain Tiny Desk performance of Buy U A Drank. They had to share it with us. After watching it, all of us were touched by how T-Pain was so vulnerable during that performance. In it, he appears without autotune, without much jewelry, accompanied only by a pianist. While he welcomes everyone to the show, his voice cracks at times, he stutters, and fidgets with his hat. He looks scared. With other writers, T-Pain’s performance might have been a mere distraction, but we decided that we needed to use this in our curriculum. We planned a contrapuntal workshop for our students. We asked them to write one column with all their armor and one without. We presented T-Pain’s Tiny Desk performance alongside the official music video of “Buy U A Drank,” where T-Pain is wearing sunglasses in a dark room, his voice coming through in technicolor autotune. We paired those performances with Jamaal May’s poem, “I Do Have A Seam.” The workshop worked. Our students (and, here, let me say thank you to our brilliant students for trusting us) wrote contrapuntals.

Jon: Echo echo echoing José: Talking poetry with Z—their rapid excitability, their constantly searching brain—was a life highlight. They always found a way to make the poem personal, to take the content seriously. And they did this in a way that probed the craft, the infinitesimal decisions each author made, and why they were distinct from other writers. They could—in one sentence—have grand pronouncements on an author’s use of caesura, followed by passionate inferences about that same author’s spiritual practice. And with Z, you had to make the poem personal too, which is, to me, what we want to do with art.

Z had unmatched dexterity in that liminal space between writer and reader, and they held sacred the truths that could erupt from interpretation. What José wrote above made me think about texting with Z after they had just bought a different Terrance Hayes book, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. While they were reading, they texted me a photo of the short poem that starts, “It was discovered the best way to combat / Sadness was to make your sadness a door.” (It’s the last poem in this link, I strongly recommend reading it before the next paragraph.) Here’s an excerpt from our text exchange about the poem, beginning with its closing line: “I asked myself if I was going to weep today.”

Jon: What do you think that last line means?

Jon: I wonder if it’s, I’ve been up all night writing this poem.

Jon: And it’s just morning.

Z: That’s a lovely read of it

Z: I dig the him making himself into poem and reintroducing the reader to himself as poem, what he’s able to ask himself as poem that he may not have access to as human

Jon: So then maybe the morning is like. Okay, I know this now. And what? You thought I thought I could change it?

Z: Yes yes— the acceptance of an understanding

Jon: The only question now that I know I’m a poem is is this poem going to cry today?

Z: He might’ve needed to cry real bad as human.

Jon: But he only knows how to cry as a poem!

Jon: That makes this a really sad poem.

Z: WHICH IS SO MANY OF US

Z: Whoa yea

Z: I get the most sad when he’s like I made myself a poem and the ideal versions of myself are in me as poem, the man I want to be always

Z: We some fools

Z: Just tryna say a thing right

Z: And live a way good

And that’s how conversations would go (usually for a much longer time). That’s how The Poetry Gods podcast (which I hosted with Z and José) would go. Z always pushed us to use the poem as a catalyst to help articulate something about life, but also to never stop loving the poem for itself, on its own terms.

José: Jon mentioned The Poetry Gods podcast. This is the story of how we started that podcast: after Poet-Linc, Jon invited Z and me to join him as poets in residence at Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. On our ride up to Massachusetts, we listened to the Charlie Murphy episode of The Champs. We were delighted by the way Charlie told stories about comedy and gave insights into the craft of writing comedy. It was soulful, funny, and smart. It made us pause the podcast to discuss Charlie’s point about “poison in ice cream.” Why, we wondered, wasn’t there a podcast that discussed poetry and the craft of poetry with this same amount of heart? Why wasn’t there a podcast that talked about poetry like it was cool?

During that festival, tipsy from drinking the free drinks in the greenroom, I pressed record on my iPhone and asked Z, “How do you avoid being corny?” That was the first question of what wound up being The Poetry Gods podcast. Listening back, I can see us on a couch in the middle of Western Massachusetts just playing and being entirely serious at the same time. In that episode, I ask Z, “How does one write well about sex?” to which they reply, “Write about sex the way Groucho Marx would write about sex.”

We chose the name The Poetry Gods because starting a podcast felt like an audacious act. At the time, the only poetry podcasts I could find were run by The New Yorker and the Poetry Foundation, two literary institutions. Why not lean into the audacity of starting a poetry podcast and give ourselves an equally audacious name. Besides, I thought, it doesn’t matter what we call ourselves because no one will listen.

I was wrong. The Poetry Gods was recorded in Jon’s apartment in Brooklyn on a single Blue Yeti microphone shared between the three hosts and our guest. The sound is awful. It spikes when we laugh, which is all the time. We talk over each other. We shout out nonexistent sponsors. Almost every episode runs near or over two hours. It is antithetical to the way professional shows are made and produced. I love our show. There’s no other poetry podcast that feels like ours. To this day listeners grab me at book festivals to tell me how much the show means to them.

Jon: When I listen to the podcast now, I hear three friends who are constantly building each other up and egging each other on. It really can’t be overstated how supportive we were, and how much of an engine Z was for creating that environment. Z was happy for us, and not, like, happy for our accomplishments (they were), but happy for our selves. They were excitable, and if you made a discovery about a line in a poem, or about a love in your life, or about which stop was the best to either board or disembark from the Q train, they would exclaim for you—with their whole being—they would “yes, and” you. They were ready to collaborate with you. In life. And I think they made real space for José and me to become both the writers and people we were becoming in those deeply formative years. Making space is almost a misnomer because it sounds like clearing other things out of the way. Z created space, energetic space, on all sides, and that space said: “Grow here, think here, write here, love here, live here.”

José: Audacity is the word I return to the most when I think about Z and Z’s writing. Z was a brilliant writer. They were uniquely themselves. Even today, I can pick up a poem by Z and know it’s theirs without looking for a byline. No one else sounds like them.

Z’s poem “HOW TO KILL A HOUSE CENTIPEDE BY SQUISHING IT BEHIND A PHOTO OF MIRIAM MAKEBA WHILE CONTEMPLATING VARIOUS ITERATIONS OF RIGOR MORTIS IN MY GENTRIFIED APARTMENT COMPLEX ON 750 MACDONOUGH STREET BROOKLYN, NY 11233,” is one of my favorites because who else could pull off a title like that. It is an audacious choice to give a poem such a title because it sets the stakes so high that there is almost no way for the writer to meet those stakes in the poem. A title like that sets a poet up for failure. Not Z.

In the poem, Z writes:

I suppose I am that interested in             the body defeated

or the body striving     to say something new about itself like the position saints die

in neck craned arms crossed legs     crossed how they don't decompose & yes,

part of me is ugly enough to want     to be a saint which means I will never be

a saint never die

Look at the way the poem turns again and again toward surprise. Look at how twisted and uncomfortable the phrase “in neck craned arms crossed legs” is. Then, I come back to the title and see all of this was inspired by the killing of a house centipede. It is unimaginable to mere mortals like me. It is only possible for true geniuses like Z and Lucille Clifton.

Z published two collections of poetry, me Aunt Jemima and the nailgun (Button Poetry, 2013) and i be, but i ain’t (Yes Yes Books, 2016), and a novel, the blind pig (Not a Cult, 2019). They wrote plays, including the award winning BLKS, and wrote on television shows like Snowfall and Rap Sh!t. Together with Nabila Lovelace, they founded The Conversation Literary Festival. They were part of The Dance Cartel in New York City. Z was a marvelous performer. Their performance was physical: even when they stood still, you could see the movement of the language reflected in their body. Z could read a grocery list and make it rapturous.

Jon: Z’s poem “a good deed is done for no reason” is, in some ways, a persona poem about a slab of wood and an unused nail that are selected to be part of a house, to keep people warm. It’s also a breeding ground for truly quintessential Z lines like, “If I move I would be beautiful / but I would be moved.” But at its core, it speaks to a purpose in life beyond permanence, about what it means to be yourself but also to be transformed by experience and, it must be said, service. It’s also about how (and this is me making the poem personal again), when the body that carries us through our lives becomes, once again, individual parts, those parts—whether we see it or not—still have us in them. And in that sense, we get to have Z everywhere.

They write:

but you were the difference an empty lot then a house    then an empty lot as before     & you know this part that you     won’t last that you will be torn back down

to your simple     self you may in the process      forget what you were until      you are again     what you were a slab of wood

a nail & no intention     only you are different now you are

touched you have been moved     made & unmade     swiftly     you have been lived in

José: They taught me the word petrichor—now I can’t walk through the rain without thinking of Z. That’s how their writing was. They could turn an observation of a couple frozen and posing for a selfie into a meditation on the fragility of love. They could write about a garbage bag stuck in a tree in New York City. Anything, in their hands, could be shaped into art.

Z’s writing was a map for me. I am smarter and sharper now because of my friendship with them. And yes, I am more audacious. Being in conversation with them helped me learn to trust my own instincts: to lean into my various vernaculars. I loved Z and will continue to love Z. When I read a poem I love, I’ll read it out loud for them to share with me.