In the midst of excitedly preparing for AWP 2017, we record this episode in which we discuss two poems by Rita Banerjee, “The Suicide Rag” and “Georgia Brown”

This week’s discussion both took us back and made sure that none of us would see the world the same way again. With images of breakdancing, gospel choir, and the not-so-innocent Georgia Brown, we were in it. Whether we’re distinguishing jazz from jazz or figuring out what a clapper is, this episode is filled with risky moves.

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At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Jason Schneiderman, Tim Fitts, and Sara Aykit

Rita Banerjee is the author of Echo in Four Beats, CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing, the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps, and Cracklers at Night. She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard and her MFA from the University of Washington, and her work appears in Hunger Mountain, PANK, Tupelo Quarterly, Isele Magazine, Nat. Brut., Poets & Writers, Academy of American Poets, Los Angeles Review of Books, Vermont Public Radio, and elsewhere. She is the co-writer of Burning Down the Louvre, a forthcoming documentary film about race, intimacy, and tribalism in the United States and in France, and serves as Senior Editor of the South Asian Avant-Garde and Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop. She received a 2021-2022 Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council for her new memoir and manifesto on female cool, and one of the opening chapters of this memoir, “Birth of Cool” was a Notable Essay in the 2020 Best American Essays. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. 

The Suicide Rag

Billy played ragtime

on the church

organ but we

lunch hour kids,

kept time by another

name.  Behind St. Augustine’s

we learned to hit

the pavement, sound

like an anvil

crack

hammers hitting

steel, Billy playing

skeletons

on the fifth,

we arpeggioed

haloed, froze

on the black

top.  Learning

to cakewalk

This was our

battle—

tar-mat babies

doing handsprung

suicides

for the girls

standing ’round

with knife-like eyes

That’s all

we needed—

a rolling

beat, a firing squad

and schoolyard

skirts

scouring the lot

as we fell

face forward

hands locked

& stiff, the only

thing

that could’ve

come between

us was a kiss.

Georgia Brown

Harlem had yet to be born,

the globe had not been spun,

but we knew how to whistle,

how to call clappers and skirts on cue:

That summer, we first met Georgia,

she was an echo in four beats,

we learned to hum her story.

Mike played her with a licked reed

but she was all brass, sharp

like an abandoned railroad cutting through

wild wood, and when she took stage,

she made those trombone boys whisper,

“Sweet Georgia, Sweet.”