Black Sonic Poetics: A Conversation with Yolanda Wisher

Yolanda Wisher is a poet, musician, educator, and curator. She is the author of the poetry volume Monk Eats an Afro (Hanging Loose Press, 2014). Wisher holds an MA in Poetry from Temple University and a BA in English and Black Studies and honorary doctorate of letters from Lafayette College. Wisher was named the inaugural Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, in 1999 and the third Poet Laureate of Philadelphia for 2016 and 2017. A Pew and Cave Canem Fellow, Wisher received the Leeway Foundation’s Transformation Award in 2019 for her commitment to art for social change. In 2022, she was named a Philadelphia Cultural Treasures Artist Fellow. Wisher’s writing has been published in The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, and most recently the anthologies This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets and A Black Philadelphia Reader: African American Writings. Wisher performs a blend of poetry and song with her band Yolanda Wisher & The Afroeaters. She works as the senior curator at Monument Lab.In 2023, Wisher and I met on Zoom to discuss her views on Black poetry and topics related to aesthetics. Given Langston Hughes’s recordings and experimental writings, not to mention the legion of Black poets who embellished Hughes’s model during and after the Black Arts Movement, I was curious about Wisher’s fusion of poetry and music making. How does one learn the nuances and intricacies that embody requisite principles that facilitate achievement in both mediums? What sorts of challenges arise when poets and musicians collaborate? And does working with a band affect a poet’s approach to writing? Of course, Wisher’s background in creative writing accounts for her knowledge of conventional notions of literature. But what about her singing? Wisher’s unmistakably soulful timbre compounds the conundrum. How did she develop her sound? Interviews with Black musicians who played blues-oriented forms—namely blues, gospel, rhythm and blues, and jazz—reveal a noticeable theme. Evidently, the peculiar human quality that Black folk call soul is only learnable and thus only attainable through participatory learning processes, which differ markedly from those in conventional academic curricula. Consequently, Wisher’s comments offer new, exciting ways to think about aesthetics and the sorts of challenges and complexities that arise when Black artists present poetry with a band. LHR: Greetings, Yolanda! Congratulations on your new album Doublehanded Suite. I think it’s a very important achievement in the history of poetry. While listening, I thought about a number of albums by twentieth-century Black poets: Langston Hughes’s The Weary Blues (1958), Nikki Giovanni’s Truth Is on Its Way (1971), Amiri Baraka’s It’s Nation Time (1972), Sarah Webster Fabio’s Boss Soul (1972), Gil Scott-Heron’s and Brian Jackson’s Winter in America (1974), Jayne Cortez’s There It Is (1982), and Sonia Sanchez’s Full Moon of Sonia (2004) are few that come to mind. Likewise, the previous decade witnessed several notable recordings: Jessica Care Moore’s Black Tea: The Legend of Jesse James (2015), Heroes Are Gang Leaders’s The Amiri Baraka Sessions (2018), Avery R. Young’s Tubman (2019), Janice Lowe’s Leaving Cle: Songs of Nomadic Dispersal (2021), and Aja Monét’s when the poems do what they do (2023), to name a few. So there is clearly something happening in African American poetry. How did Doublehanded Suite come about? WISHER: Hmm . . . It’s hard for me not to talk about that list you just dropped!LHR: [Chuckles] You can! WISHER: I have some of those albums, and I’ve studied a lot of them, so it’s nice to hear a bibliography of my predecessors and contemporaries. Janice Lowe is someone that I know well, and I’ve performed with Heroes Are Gang Leaders for one show celebrating Amiri Baraka in Newark. So these are all folks that I’m close to or think about quite a bit.Doublehanded Suite is definitely indebted to a lot of them. The album came out of a partnership I had with the Rosenbach Museum and Library, which is an old house museum in Philadelphia with a rare collection of books and artifacts. In 2016, my first year as Poet Laureate of Philadelphia, they invited me to collaborate with them on creating an event, something new that they could host at the museum. And as I looked at what they offered, at what they had in their collection, and thought about the physical space of the building—two connected Philly row homes—I decided to organize a rent party called “Yolanda Wisher’s Rent Party at the Rosenbach.” And we did one event just to try things out, and it eventually ended up being seven rent parties from 2017 to 2022.These rent parties were in the style of the Harlem Renaissance rent parties that Langston Hughes wrote about—or at least the way we imagined them. I was delighted and inspired by his little rent party invitation cards. Our rent party was modeled after that twenties aesthetic, even down to the drinks that we served. We recreated “The Hard Daddy,” a whiskey drink with lemon and maple syrup, named after a Langston Hughes blues, which he drank at parties, according to his letters to Carl Van Vechten. I’ve always loved the Harlem Renaissance, always loved all the writers—Langston, Zora . . . all of them, really. Those were some of the folks that I dreamt about as a young writer. And so, being able to create our own rent party, to be the house band, and to respond to the work of the few Black writers in that collection—folks like Paul Laurence Dunbar and Phillis Wheatley—it was an exciting creative endeavor. LHR: Wow! WISHER: Yeah, that collection has some amazing classics, and then in some of its little corners and niches, you would find Black folks. And so, when they asked me to do a program, I was like, “Well, we’re gonna do a program about the Black folks in this collection.” And for them, it brought an entirely different audience to the Rosenbach. And for us, it was an opportunity to be open to whatever the topic of each rent party was and to grow. LHR: I see. WISHER: For each event, the band would create a set in response to one Black writer in the collection. For instance, for Paul Laurence Dunbar’s collection “Oak and Ivy”, we rearranged a few of his poems with musical accompaniment. We invited other poets to read at the event and to reinterpret the ancestor poet’s work. But when the pandemic hit in 2020, we couldn’t do that in person anymore. So I said to the folks at the Rosenbach, “This would be a great opportunity to do something on wax. Because I’ve always wanted to make a vinyl record. [Chuckles]. LHR: [Laughs]. WISHER: It was also an opportunity to say, “Let’s look over what we’ve done with these seven rent parties, and make a greatest hits album out of that, you know. Put that on wax.” And so, that’s what we did. We went back over some of the tunes that we did in all of those sets. We had sets like, “Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz” by Langston Hughes. LHR: Oh wow! WISHER: We also had a Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Dunbar-Nelson set, because, as I was researching Paul Laurence Dunbar, I found out about Alice. I didn’t even know about her. So, that event, Oak and Ivy, ended up being about both of them. The Batouala set came from a whole event we did on the novel Batouala. They have a copy of that book in the Rosenbach, and I didn’t know anything about René Maran, the author. And as I did my research on him and the book, it led me to think, “Oh, well, we’ll combine a reading of Batouala in French by a local Haitian guest poet along with an instrumental background,” and we’ll also bring in some Miriam Makeba songs like “A Piece Of Ground” to complement Maran’s storytelling. So the rent party was really a fantastic way to curate an event for people poetically and musically. And ultimately, we were thinking, “How do we channel the energy of those events into a record?” LHR: Ah! WISHER: Doublehanded Suite is a combination of some of the greatest hits from the rent parties at the Rosenbach and tunes of my own that felt at home alongside those ancestral works. For instance, the tune “Longings” originates from a poem by Nellie Rathbone-Bright, a Philly educator and poet from the 1920s, who was part of the Black Opals Collective. And the tune “Amid the Roses/Lonely Woman,” is based on the poem “Amid the Roses” by Alice Dunbar-Nelson, a rendition of which is paired with one of my poems inspired by a Horace Silver track. The track “The Haunted Oak” is an excerpt from the longer Paul Laurence Dunbar poem. And, of course, you have “Batouala/Africa SOS” which includes a multivocal reading of an excerpt from the novel paired with my poem “Africa SOS.” So the album is really a conversation between me and these ancestors. LHR: What strikes me while I’m to you is the of of what we think or about art is by the of our and when we talk about in a to on that on the the is to you know. to So that’s what I was when you the different that the of Doublehanded Suite. It is really But in to the on the are also by your I’m of the ways you combine poetry with soulful For of us, these learning and aesthetics that are as different as the and with them. very different of I’m of the Langston Hughes about a in the Hughes had the of to one of his poems and an him and the Are you WISHER: is not for LHR: with his knowledge of Black couldn’t the Gil to or Baraka who has during How did you develop your as a poet and a you call a WISHER: I do call a I call a I do . . . I when I was And then in third I the And I played both of those in I from I would just and in the when I was the different So I up with this really musical But it was really about I always wanted to be in the band, there was space for a in the band, and I didn’t even know there were who were at the of was very to the music that I was learning in the of And was something I only did in at And it was a lot of music that just a in my So I didn’t find my as a I to Philadelphia in my twenties for LHR: I see. WISHER: But I was always writing poetry. I have been a poet I was and I was to writing through and that I as a And I had published by the that to And I had in But which I always to do was something I did I to And it had something to do with the that my at the who my was in at of Philadelphia for WISHER: This me in with a of musicians in our local is like an of musical history and in like and and were I had a with that she after for for at She had with for his LHR: Oh wow! WISHER: and she was a lot of came from their I was in there learning to my open and to make my a And she had a to the so we would learn these She would through And she was so to me as a and me that I could when I with my band. They were in my that they were learning in come down the and a for me learn to WISHER: I and by So I could read I didn’t know music I was on the band to that for And then I my and my reading to those I be my poems to this LHR: WISHER: And we did. in a we would work one of my poems into the set, and that’s when the at least for would when we really the that we were something new, and we felt of my band, The LHR: is on so of the things about Doublehanded Suite is the music with the which always the as you know all It a poetry not to mention those who and not the of to blend poetry and music in a way that both What are some of the working with a For instance, do you which or to And do you which approach to the WISHER: We talk about that as a band a that just like background for the How do we How do we that we’re something it’s for the album or for its I would definitely in my with the band. You all of the in the band are close to The is my The was in our very first band, And the other and Paul are close who I a lot of about music and So when we always a very conversation to it’s not always We through the and to we all has always been to find musicians who think like poets or who the quality of have and they have and with they create a conversation a the poem. to make of the on with the poet’s and a way in there are of poem is that energy of the poem is the of the It’s a a of or a of energy that I the poem it’s or And I’m my as the of the English of those me are to when I’m we’re gonna approach this poem. But at the I’m really open I didn’t to I that for and some of these did. So, I’m really open to bring to that How do we it into musical really a lot of The How do we what I know about very into what you know about very And that of that we create something And in that we also while we’re For this is about LHR: back up a little I’m curious about your of the you as a you said that, I what does that Of course, I the or of with a of in music that when someone an or or something like But what does to you in that What does that look WISHER: It we’re gonna do the tune the gonna be I’m not gonna the poem the It be a different or I the you LHR: WISHER: I even some of the we have in the and I LHR: [Laughs]. WISHER: I to So the poem is this that we’re all a and in some or But is also about I to bring a different energy into the and it be a very of poem. the other to be to be and the poem is to be in some way that it LHR: a lot of when I writing my which a book, Afro in African American Poetry and I had a to Amiri And I him that with a band was the most for I asked the But about that new to I think of an on Baraka’s that in the way you do So I he with it like that, you WISHER: A poem like LHR: The first few even in the of a But in the I’ve he with a band. WISHER: by But what he does in that an energy I’m to bring to poem. I’m to bring that of energy that he through that whole poem. I’m to bring the of that into that I’m as a LHR: Wow! WISHER: and I’m to that that’s what I’m the of poetry. to bring that of energy to the work. LHR: “The of a great WISHER: LHR: You it there the music the WISHER: I think of in this Doublehanded Suite is a very not always I approach A lot of the songs I’ve that are not on this that we’ve done as a band, didn’t as They as I think a lot in as a And so, have a and then some from that’s we’ve been The band is like, we have have that into his it’s on or and from there we just we back to the that we this album is very led by the And in I and I them to band I you to be for the musical conversation with this a lot of them LHR: You the a Doublehanded Suite an is the with recordings of Black the album includes it also includes Your rendition of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “The Haunted is a in The track with a and the of James which is a And the of your with the band is a of It as his poem. it the that is with the Likewise, is an to the of the an to the Alice for her The which to in Of course, Black and But is that the into a which is not The being by her who and on in the poem or with of or Black WISHER: I wrote in I was in an program at Temple and it was a program in which you talk about But I was about her. the I thought a lot about folk when I to Temple and out Sonia who was the poet to learn from she really me back to the Black And, for that always with the we could even back But it’s something about the that a for so, I think about the song as the of all It’s the of all the ways that we think about & The is a that has all these different It’s like a between the and the a that holds the very of at the that it holds the very of what it to be So is an to there are so different ways that the and in be or something about holds a of It sets one And not just in the or the of also in the It me of something said about It you and you a of in the of and In that the song is a for not you you are that the of your LHR: What an amazing on the I your that that holds I just there were about the or of the that and like to you about track on the While to you in a “Batouala/Africa and of course, the I imagined to you with the Afroeaters. you the of I’m about the of for of a so that people who studied and the art But I’m respond to poems when you present them with WISHER: We do the we performed a lot of these poems in for parties or I think we’re as a very local band. a way that people what we’re as part of a in The poetry the in the and in the And it’s in a way that all is Of course, there be an about and it a lot to But I think something really about our and I’m always in to you How of a poem we read we the and people up and to the What is the to the of to make it about we tune our work to the I think the audience is in tune into that we’re between and which is a for all of as human I So we’re we that band with I have been by working with the band work is different the way I think about a set when I read is And I’m and in reading with my How I my band is something I think about a So it’s exciting for me to not be with my band, it me think about I the poems to have to hit as as they when I’m with the And I also in the of just the reading poetry. I in that LHR: your on Baraka’s in and of there are accounts of his clearly that were WISHER: you The poet be a LHR: I’m of a you in a 2017 asked about the between poetry and you a I think about it that And about your is that in Black there a hard and between poetry and There was a that these were different of they different not that they were Hughes and as folk the Black Arts James a great poet, and in the New Black Black and Black as which came out in So from this Doublehanded Suite and of Black aesthetics. you have about WISHER: Yeah, this is I named the album what I named I’ve always thought of as being only when also both poetry and song as my of And so, I think about the a poem I wrote as an to the songs that I The Black I up with would make up these you folk songs that like the poems that I loved to make up in my to So, for the poem has been to the only one it also the way in which poetry and for are on a and the back and in the in You it me think of when I would Sonia read poetry. I would she up to the she her first to the and her the way that she the She would about the poem. the poem just by to them know the And then she would into reading the poem in the way that she would from reading the poem into which was this And then she would come back out to talk to like we were just to each other on the just think something about that of between poetry and very close in it’s not a not a of you And I do think about people like James and and as poets just in the way they approach the way they approach as they into I we’re all to be in some you So we’re just LHR: a great In a I think “Longings” is a poem. I a soul to your along with the and background You “Longings” a few you about How did you do the background WISHER: “Longings” is a poem by a poet and educator, Nellie She was an of the Black Opals The Black Opals were a of young Black writers in the twenties and in Philadelphia, who were writing at the that folks like Langston Zora and were writing in So it our of the Harlem Renaissance to like Nellie being part of her own in Philadelphia the There were you and this poem is part of is an to I like I a lot about her through this poem. It me to think about who she the that she She She was a educator, a and she at a when Black didn’t that She was also a of So the poem clearly has a lot of her in I’ve thought about what she thought about writing and the band and I had several we this poem. The music was by our who is also a background on the So, I him this and I asked him to create the music for And he brought so soul to in that poem I a poetry and the of these Black LHR: Oh WISHER: We were about the this poem a lot like a on the it has some very on what you it And I think we really background to create space and in the This each to on its own of its own of We just performed this poem I did the background with and she and I the background We had a little to for this that his LHR: this is just so very What are you working on WISHER: I’m working on album with of the band. But we’re a different approach to an We Doublehanded Suite at in Philadelphia, we’re this new album in my home in my we to work on some of the A lot of out with the work that I’m with my own it to my and different of And then I that to the other musicians in these we develop them a little The is and my with in person and in is a so I up a lot of in a very And it to me to all the poems that I’ve the that I say, not an So that’s what I’m working LHR: I think what is just very You talk about poetry and in new and I’m that Langston Hughes is on your