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Off the Record features interviews with local and national musicians as aired on WKNC 88.1 FM HD-1/HD-2.
00:01
slacker
This is WKNC 88.1 FM HD-2 Raleigh. You are listening to WKNC's Off the Record. This is Slacker, and I am here with the delightful Dr. Diamond Forde, here with us today to discuss poetry and her experiences in creating her new collection, the Book of Alice.
00:25
Diamond Forde
Thank you so much for having me, Slacker.
00:27
slacker
Of course. I'm glad you could be here. How have you been lately?
00:32
Diamond Forde
So far so good. I've been keeping pretty busy, what with the semester, because I teach here at NC State, but also traveling for, like, the book tour, which is new. This is technically my second book, but my first time doing a book tour. Because my first book came out during the pandemic. So most of the readings I did were virtual at that time. So this is almost like a first book experience for me. And it's been pretty exciting, pretty exhausting, but definitely, like an interesting learning curve. I'm learning a lot through the process.
01:05
slacker
That's amazing. I guess it's pretty cool that you at least have the experience of having something out before you have your first book experience. You're not going in completely blind. I imagine it would be quite a lot tour without much basis.
01:17
Diamond Forde
Yeah, it makes a big difference because it's not my first book. I've also learned about the kind of value of the marathon that we put a lot of pressure, I think, on the success of the book in the first year. But a lot of the success of my first book didn't actually happen until that year had expired. And then I was able to kind of really travel and make deep connections, go to different universities. So really, truly, the book will outlast the year. And so there's. It's a marathon. Right?
01:50
slacker
Really pacing myself for that marathon, not a sprint. I really like that mindset. I really like that mindset. I feel like currently in this current kind of cultural milieu, we're kind of in one of those moments where if it's not currently on our feed and we're scrolling past it might as well not exist.
02:06
Diamond Forde
Yeah. One of the things that I have to tell, like, poets probably all the time, is that patience is a valuable skill. This is like a kind of question that comes up all of the time is like the process of, like, making a book or the process of, like, ending a poem. Like, what sort of things do I do to kind of allow that to happen? And to be perfectly honest, it's a boring answer. But it is a necessary answer to say, like, you do need to have patience and you do need to cultivate patience. Like, one of my favorite things to ask folks is, like, how long do you think it took me from the very first poem I wrote for the book to the very day, like, January 20th, when the book came out?
02:45
Diamond Forde
Like, how much time do you think went by? How much time do you think?
02:49
slacker
Oh, I feel like I cheated. Because. Full transparency with our listeners. I took a class with Dr. Ford last semester, a poetry workshop, and I have to say, we did read one of her poems. And you said, I think one of them you started while you were in college. So I'm guessing at least five years. At least five years.
03:15
Diamond Forde
Five years is a great guess. It took, like, nine years. Yeah. Nine years from that first poem. Because when I wrote that poem, I was in, like, my first grad, My master's program. Right. And that was the. The poem that made me realize I had some morning to do. And even then, it still took time after I wrote that poem to, like, conceptualize a project or conceptualize that, like, I had more elegies to write. And so really allowing space for life to creep in.
03:43
slacker
Yeah, right.
03:44
Diamond Forde
Because I think if I had tried to write this book while I was in my master's program, it wouldn't have worked.
03:49
slacker
Right.
03:49
Diamond Forde
I didn't have the life skills.
03:51
slacker
I'm really struck by saying you had more elegies to write. That is such a fascinating way of approaching this. And I think that's something that writing is really great for as a way of just is the kind of being able to see yourself on the page. In a sense, it's a kind of reflection. And I think that something I've at least learned from you and something that poetry teaches as a whole is that there's so much meaning that we don't even intend to code into what we write.
04:18
Diamond Forde
I think, as you were saying earlier, like, the ways that we engage with our phone, there's, like, so many distractions from ourselves. Right. And to be perfectly honest, I don't know who I am. And so poetry becomes the vehicle that I use to discover myself. Ooh, right. That I am writing as a way of understanding the truth. And to be perfectly honest, to get to that capital T, truth, there's a lot of, like, noise that I have to kind of climb through. There's a lot of conflicting ideas that I have to kind of climb through. There's a lot of lies that I've told myself that I have to kind of get past. And so in order to kind of really understand who I am, poetry gets me a Little bit closer each time I write.
05:04
slacker
That's inspiring. That's really fantastic. I want to go back a minute. I want to zoom out a minute. You said you had your first book. I believe it's called Mother Body. So what was the process for that, like, writing that in comparison to the Book of Alice? How would you compare those two processes?
05:23
Diamond Forde
That's a great question. To be perfectly honest with you. I think the biggest difference between the two of them is intention. So when I wrote Mother Body, I actually wrote it by accident. And so essentially, what I'm trying to say is, like, I was in my master's program, and we had to create a graduate thesis at the end. And my thesis was about interracial intimacies, especially within the 1960s. So I was writing a lot of Persona poems through Richard and Mildred Loving, Eartha Kitt, Sammy Davis Jr Dorothy Dandridge. I was, like, writing these series of, like, phenomenal poems, really exploring, like, why I have a white partner and why that's not illegal anymore. Right, right. And so that was the project that I was actively working on at the time.
06:11
Diamond Forde
But while I was working on that project, I was also navigating probably some pretty difficult and alienating circumstances that made it feel really hard to exist within my body. I was dealing with some medical issues that were making it really hard for me to get out of bed some days. And when I would tell doctors about it, he would, like, look at me and be like, what do you want me to do about that? And I'm like, help me. It's weird, right? I would have students who were not mine drive by me in an SUV on campus and hurl, like, racial slurs at me out of the window. And, you know, like, getting a lot of really volatile pushback.
06:52
Diamond Forde
In some of the papers I would assign, I had a student write in his paper that if all black people left the south wouldn't be fat anymore. Right? And he's, like, telling me this because I am the fat black woman grading his paper, right? So this is his sneaky way of saying, like, get lost. And so all of these things were, like, really heavy and really making it hard to survive in that space at the time. And so what I was doing was, like, while I was working on this project, I was also just writing poems on the side that were, like, giving me permission to live. So I was just, like, writing all of these poems, writing whatever I wanted to write, writing and exploring myself.
07:32
Diamond Forde
The circumstances that I was navigating, really thinking about, what does it mean to Mother the self right to be existing in a kind of, like, femme body and have the ideas of motherhood ascribed unto my body. Something I'm not interested in. So what are alternative ways of thinking about mothering? And so I'm writing all of these poems just trying to save myself. And then by accident, I just had, like, a book's worth of poems. And even then, I wasn't going to do anything with them. I had a friend text me the day that Saturnalia's contest was going to close, and they were like, hey, you should submit to this. I think your work would be great for it. I think they'd be really interested in it. Patricia Smith is the judge. She'll probably like your work. Like, you should do it.
08:16
Diamond Forde
And I was like, okay, you're right.
08:22
slacker
That's a good friend. Honestly, that's such a good friend.
08:25
Diamond Forde
None of my books would exist without my friends. None of them.
08:28
slacker
I feel that completely. I feel that completely.
08:31
Diamond Forde
Keep the right homies in your corner, for sure. Yes, yes. It will hold you down when you need it the most. So my homie was like, submit that work. And I was like, you know what? You're right. Right. Because I needed somebody in that moment who believed in the work that I was doing more than I could believe in it myself. And so they shipped me off. I sent the manuscript out, trusting in my friend, and then, like, July 18, 2019. And I know it exactly, because that is my birthday.
08:58
slacker
Wow.
08:58
Diamond Forde
I get a call from, like, the founder of Saturnalia Books, and they're like, we want to publish your book. Oh. And I was like, are you serious? And I started crying. And I was like, it's my birthday. He was like, are you serious? And I was like, yes. And he was like, happy birthday. Birthday. So again, like, great present. Great present. The best.
09:17
slacker
That is. Oh, my God. So.
09:20
Diamond Forde
Intention.
09:21
slacker
Yes, intention.
09:22
Diamond Forde
Because that was a complete accident. All of this is just kind of a series of circumstances, right? Where I was just writing for myself. That book was always for myself, first and foremost. And even having my friend in the end be like, do it right. All of that was unintentional.
09:38
slacker
Of course.
09:39
Diamond Forde
Book of Alice, far more intentional.
09:41
slacker
Both of these seem to be variations on a theme in some sense. But with Book of Alice, at least to my knowledge, seems to have, because of that intentionality, much more of a specific focus. Not message nor narrative, but a kind of point it's getting at relating to your grandmother and your family history. Would you be interested in expanding on.
10:06
Diamond Forde
Yeah. So I think the ways that they are similar is that it is kind of taking some of the larger conversations that I was opening up with Mother Body, thinking about what it means to exist in a racialized body, kind of feminized body, what it's like to exist within a body defined by, like, disability, and all of these ways in which we treat physical embodiment as excessive. Right. And then it wanted to build on that work, and so it wanted to think about the ways in which maybe, like, spirituality can be perceived as excessive and why. Or even, like, the idea of poem. Right? Yeah. Like, when I say, like, poem, most of us imagine some idea of a poem. So we have, like, a norm attached to poetry.
10:48
slacker
Right.
10:48
Diamond Forde
And one of the things that I wanted to do is, like, how do I reach outside of that norm? How do I kind of create poems that maybe don't look like poems or perform in ways that we don't expect poems to do?
10:58
slacker
Yeah.
10:58
Diamond Forde
And so this is really me trying to kind of, like, take off from the foundation that Mother Body started, but to, like, build it a little bit deeper. And I'm using my grandmother as a way of kind of, like a vehicle right into that kind of deeper work, because I lost her back in, I want to say, 2007. Wow. Right. And so I talk about the Book of Alice as my attempt to, like, mourn her, like, a decade too late is because I didn't have the safety that I needed to be vulnerable enough to mourn her until, like, a decade later.
11:31
slacker
Right.
11:32
Diamond Forde
When that found me. And so, like, allowing this book to really both build off of Mother Body, but stand on its own and its relationship to grief, to archive, to genre, to canon.
11:48
slacker
Right.
11:49
Diamond Forde
It is really, I think, a continuation of work that I couldn't have done when I was younger.
11:54
slacker
Absolutely. I think the maturity it shows to be able to recognize that growth relating to these kinds of common themes is how this kind of ostentatious, not overbearingness, but this perception is being seen as too much for merely existing, and how that plays into these kind of societally dictated roles that. That your grandmother, all kinds of people experience. How do you reckon with those kinds of ideas? This perception of being seen as too much, and how do you combine that with grief? I feel like being seen as this kind of ostentatious figure is, like, almost grandiose in many ways. It sounds like it could be seen as a celebration, although I hesitate to use that word too freely. And how do you reckon that with these themes of grief that are present in the Book of Alice?
12:54
Diamond Forde
I think that part of the way that I am contextualizing too much is by first giving voice to what is considered normal, right? Which I think is a far more difficult tension than we think, because normalcy requires invisibility to exist, right? It has to be a thing that we take for granted because the second that we try to define what is normal, it starts to all fall apart, right? And so in order to embrace too muchness, which is, I think, a kind of relegation that is almost like a kind of metonym for blackness to me, because blackness does, I think, define this sort of benchmarks of excess, defines the benchmarks of too much, right? And so what does it mean to exist as a fat black woman in the south, right? Who means I'm always occupying that too muchness?
13:46
Diamond Forde
What does it mean to have all of these ideas of too much define my existence, define my grandmother's existence, right? And so if we're too much, okay, so then what's normal, right? And by making that and articulating into that, it's only when I can articulate that benchmark of normal that I can explore other ways of embracing the too much. And I think that grief is the same way because we have ideas of what is acceptable displays of grief in all emotion, to be perfectly honest. Acceptable displays of anger, acceptable displays of joy. Even the elegy, right?
14:29
slacker
Yeah.
14:30
Diamond Forde
So one of the things that I was really fascinated about is this tension between private and public displays of grief and where the elegy falls in that, right? So the idea of public grief used to be considered a feminine attribute, right? Like, only women can cry in public, right? And men have this kind of expectation of, like, stoicism, right? And so that means that grief is private. And because, again, patriarchy kind of forms the foundation of what we consider normal. It is one of those attributes of what we consider normal. We think that how we are supposed to. To approach grief is through this relationship to stoicism, right? That pain is something that's supposed to be productive. We're supposed to learn something from this, right? There's a lot of supposed tos in our relationship to grief.
15:21
Diamond Forde
And so my first step is one, articulating what is that supposed to? And then two, figuring out how do I reach beyond that? Because if we're honest with ourselves, grief doesn't care what we're supposed to do.
15:35
slacker
No, it's incredibly disruptive.
15:38
Diamond Forde
It is famously so all consuming. It even disrupts the ideas of time.
15:43
slacker
Yes.
15:43
Diamond Forde
We create order out of time as a way of comforting ourselves. We say that this is the past. This is the present. And there's, like, a division in between. But what creates that division? And what happens when I am sitting in the now and. And this moment of past grief comes to me, and it comes to me like, fresh and raw and visceral, and I can feel it in my body, and it still impacts me the same way as if I was right there, right then. Right. There's this collapsing of time that happens with grief. Grief doesn't care about your weird markers and boundaries of what time is. Grief is immediate and now and overwhelming and big. It is too much. Right. And so if we allow for grief to be too much, what other discoveries open up in that possibility?
16:32
Diamond Forde
Does that make sense?
16:33
slacker
Oh, of course that makes sense. That's a fantastic answer. I think that allowing yourself to occupy those emotions, which can be seen as excessive or kind of, some could say indulgent, but I'm not saying that myself.
16:52
Diamond Forde
You know, it's sometimes indulgent. That's a little bit.
16:54
slacker
I mean, a little. But I don't want to say that because that almost makes it seem frivolous to call something indulgent. But I think that in saying that, to circle back to what I was saying earlier, calling it a celebration, I think allowing grief, among all of these other emotions to occupy this space of excess is a fantastic way of analyzing not just yourself, but I guess, limitations that are put on you. I think that, in essence, poetry is something which is an exercise in being too much. It is not directly or not solely emotional catharsis, but that's a part of it. It's a big part. And I think allowing yourself to reach those emotional states is such a fantastic aspect of writing poetry. What kind of things would you say are your favorite parts?
17:50
slacker
What are the perks that you particularly enjoy about being a poet?
17:53
Diamond Forde
Oh, the perks of writing poetry. Oh, poetry gives me a lot of permission. Yes, poetry gives me a lot of permission. Like, even thinking about, like, the kind of. The tensions of celebration in the kind of act of writing an elegy. One of the things that poetry has taught me is that when we experience one emotion, it is never just one right. To say that, like, I am grieving my grandmother is also an acknowledgement that I have. Have loved her. Right. And what a joy that is. And so the more that, like, I can make space in a poem to hold both of those emotions simultaneously, the more permission it gives me to be myself, because I am literally a being holding those conflicting emotions at once. Right. I'm also a Little angry at my grandmother.
18:35
Diamond Forde
Sometimes she really messed up in terms of, like, the ways that she raised my. My mother. And I can hold those things and also mourn her and also feel grateful that I knew her. It gives me a lot of permission to be. But also to be without being flawless.
18:52
slacker
Yes.
18:53
Diamond Forde
Because if there's one thing that I think poetry loves, it's Messiness.
18:58
slacker
Yep.
18:59
Diamond Forde
Right.
19:00
slacker
100%.
19:00
Diamond Forde
It loves messiness. And so I am a messy human being. Right. I am not perfect. I strive for perfection. I think we all do. But in those attempts to strive for perfection, we're leaving parts of ourself behind. And so if poetry can be a messy thing and still beautiful in its messiness, beautiful in its ugliness, why can't I? Right. Of course, poetry, I think that's probably my favorite part is the ways that it teaches me permission. And then also I get to give that gift out as like a professor. Right. And it gets to kind of pass on permission to other people. I like. There's this cheesy thing that I say to my homies, which is like. Like I'm just trying to pay poetry back.
19:45
slacker
Right.
19:45
Diamond Forde
Because every wonderful thing that I've ever experienced in my life is because poetry brought it to me. Right.
19:51
slacker
Yeah. That's amazing.
19:52
Diamond Forde
And so I'm just trying to like, pour my energy back into poetry the way it's poured into me.
19:57
slacker
Gratitude.
19:57
Diamond Forde
Yes.
19:58
slacker
Just the spirit of gratitude that possesses your writing. I absolutely love that.
20:02
Diamond Forde
Poetry is gratitude.
20:03
slacker
Yeah. Yes.
20:04
Diamond Forde
Yes.
20:05
slacker
I mean, I feel like people box a lot of poetry into like genre categories like elegy and ode, but I feel like that reduces exactly what you're talking about, which is this context creating and identity creating power of holding these multiple emotions and ideas in tension with each other, you know?
20:24
Diamond Forde
Yes. It's sense making and it's order making. It's how we're taught to navigate through the world. If I can assign something poem, that means I know how to categorize it. I. I know how to deal with it. Right. Poetry doesn't care about any of those things. It's what. It's the control we assert on poetry. Poetry just is. Right. And so are we. We just are, am, is, and then maybe eventually was. Right? Yeah. But just because we shift into was doesn't mean that is never existed.
20:57
slacker
Exactly.
20:57
Diamond Forde
Yeah.
20:59
slacker
That's an amazing point. That is an absolutely amazing point. So, on poetry existing, on poetry's existence, I am curious, in the poem that you brought to the studio with us, is this from your new book?
21:19
Diamond Forde
It Is. Yes, it's from the book of Alice.
21:22
slacker
Wonderful.
21:24
Diamond Forde
This poem is called Womaning Love. God say is obedience. So I obey the alarm of sung through my window, Climb down cold steps to him and hem to cook clatter and kid myself into believing these tasks don't hook familiar shackles. And when my man kiss me in the soft spot below my ear, I dream you really want me. But that's what's wrong with womanen. We stay spin and yarn from the colorful crochet of our minds, but few admire it. Dear Lord, why did you make me in your image? If you wanted me to kneel, let me break the rules one time. Lace the loafers by the front door on my large girlish feet. Then walk like I got somewhere everywhere to go. Thank you.
22:22
slacker
That was terrific. I think that really captures exactly what were discussing earlier with this poetry as gratitude, as celebration, as giving space to be too much. I think that there is such a strong statement in that poem about being a woman and rejecting the subservience that's associated with that entire gender identity. Just a great way of articulating that in there. And I just want to applaud that. I just want to applaud that.
22:50
Diamond Forde
Thank you. And one of the things that, like readers can't see this, obviously as they are like hearing the poem, but that poem is the way that it appears in the book, this is for the first edition run only, is that it appears all in red. So part of this is me having conversations with like the kind of red letter editions of the Bible. But also, whenever you see the red appear in the book, it's my grandmother speaking. Right. So that whole poem is supposed to be in the voice of my grandmother. Right.
23:20
Diamond Forde
And one of the things that I am really trying to think through and hold is that my grandmother's idea of womanhood was largely spoon fed to her, of course, that it was these kinds of ideas that she received from the Bible, from her mother, from different kind of life circumstances about who she was supposed to. Supposed to be. And there were a lot of times in her life where she brushed up against the discomfort of those ideas of womanhood, that it wasn't like she could always occupy those. And to be honest, I don't think she always wanted to, but she still defined herself by that.
23:49
Diamond Forde
And I think it created a lot of harms for her that are generational, that those discomforts and pains that she experienced because of these ideas carried forward through the family and become an inheritance that I hold to who. Right. And so One of the things that I am thinking about, again, is what is that norm of womanhood? Right. And how do I open that norm up to allow the too much in? The too much always existed. Right. It's just about allowing the too much to exist.
24:18
slacker
So something in that poem that really stuck out to me and in your discussion of your. It being in your grandmother's voice. Is the relationship between poetry as a voice of the present. But also as a voice to give agency to people in the past. You know, And I think there's the more literal sense of that. Where it's the writing it from this perspective. Or in the voice of your grandmother who brushed up against these norms of femininity. That were kind of forced down everyone's throats for generations. I am curious about how, as you say, time is a. Is a way in which order is constructed. I'm interested in how time figures into this poem. Because of these timeline collisions. How would you say this poem explores these moments where you feel connected to your grandmother? So in this.
25:19
slacker
When I'm saying is, how do you explore your grandmother who lived in the past? How do you explore her kind of expression and gender in a contemporary form that is embodied in yourself?
25:38
Diamond Forde
No, that's fantastic, because that's exactly, I think, the goal of the book. Which is basically not just to look at my grandmother. And a way to construct her past. Right. And her own story that she couldn't tell. That's only part of the goal of the work. Right. The goal of the work is still ultimately to ask myself, who am I?
26:01
slacker
Of course.
26:01
Diamond Forde
Right. Why do I exist? And in particular, what sort of things have I inherited. Right. Through my grandmother's own journey. That defines who I am and why I exist the way that I am now. Right.
26:14
slacker
Yeah.
26:14
Diamond Forde
And so, from the kind of outset of this project, I am trying to understand the present by dismantling the barriers of the past. Right. That those spaces are supposed to collapse. That part of the way that my grandmother's voice works in womaning. Right. Is because it is supposed to be a Persona poem that I put on the mask of my grandmother. Right. And perform my grandmother on the poetry page. But it doesn't matter how good the mask is. If I walked in here with a mask right now, you would still know it was me. Right. And I think that this is actually the point of Persona poetry. It's not about how good the mask is. It's about the points where the mask fails. Where do you see me peeking through those eye holes? Right. Where do you see Me.
27:07
Diamond Forde
And so when you're encountering these poems where we're grappling about the past, the question is still always supposed to be, where do you see me? Where do you see now? Right. Because I'm very interested in the kind of slippages between. Again, I think time is an illusion. I think that the concerns that I have as I navigate womanhood now are probably pretty similar to the concerns that my grandmother had when she was navigating womanhood in her 30s. It is, unfortunately, the kind of same story being told again. But it's only until we hear the story that we can recognize the similarities in the first place. There's so many structures of silence that I think my grandmother's story could be lost to. Right. That it could be lost to literally the fact that she'd passed away.
27:56
Diamond Forde
One of the things that was probably the biggest obstacle to my creating this book was that a lot of our memories, our photo albums and stuff, we lost that because we lost storage units over the years. Right. Because people were disabled and could no longer work, or people were fleeing from domestic abuse situations and could no longer go back to get their stuff. And so we lost things over the years. And so I'm literally thinking about these obstacles that have been created both systemically and also personal, and trying to reach through and find the story inside those silent.
28:28
slacker
I just really love how there's such an exploration of the past and your context as an aspect of your identity in this. It's exactly as you were saying, where it's the slippages in the mask that show you who you most truly are in a sense, or who you are. In exploring your grandmother's history, I think that there's something really powerful in saying that identity and performance and expression defined by the constraints or the ways in which the constraints fail rather than when they succeed.
29:02
Diamond Forde
Yeah, right. Again, that's the kind of beautiful invitation of poetry. Because poetry delights in messiness. Right. Failure is inevitable. But we spend so much time trying to cull the failure out of ourselves. Right. It really is like uprooting what makes us human. What makes my grandmother human is not that she raised me. It's that sometimes she failed in the raising. Right. That my grandmother tried to adhere to these ideas of womanhood and failed in her attempts to do it. My grandmother tried to be a good mother and at times sincerely failed in her attempts to do that. But being able to tell my grandmother's story with all those nuances, her successes and her failures, is inviting her humanity back in. In ways in which time tries to remove.
29:52
slacker
So much of this is. Involves so much empathy. It's really impressive because it's not just having to give a voice to yourself. It's not just having to give a voice to the present, but there's such like a just deep, empathetic heart to that kind of act of. Yes. Discussing your grandmother's experiences, but humanizing the context and the situation. Even when she wasn't able to succeed in the way she hoped to, she was trying, there was an effort, and by and large, she had her successes. And that's what's important.
30:28
Diamond Forde
Yeah. Right. To be the person who basically says that her success lives in me. Right. In a lot of ways, that is incredibly egotistical. And yet at the same time, it is the kind of power of controlling one's own narrative to say that there are certain circumstances that my family had to navigate that I would like to end with me, that cycle of harm and damage. I would like to be the person who ends that. How do I end that? Well, first off, I have to acknowledge that it existed in the first place, which is something that my family didn't want to try before, apparently. Right. But acknowledging that hurt and harm is there. Right. Is the first step in being able to say no, it stops now.
31:08
slacker
Yeah. Recognition is the first step towards healing.
31:11
Diamond Forde
Yes. Right. And so, like, thinking about this as a part of a larger legacy that gets to live in me and that my grandmother's survival is still here because that lives in me. Right. As long as I'm still here, too. And even still, now that it's in the book, my grandmother gets to survive in other people now. Right. That her story and her legacy no longer just exists in me. It exists in all of the people who've been reading this book and deeply resonating with the book and learning something about themselves and learning something about their own family and feeling encouraged to recover their own family story, all of that work becomes a part of my grandmother's legacy. And it gets to carry so much farther than I can do physically, even on a book tour.
31:56
slacker
Yeah. That's amazing. That's absolutely amazing. I just want to thank you so much for coming here and reading that poem. My joy discussing all of this relating to poetry, identity, and just this power in being. Too much.
32:10
Diamond Forde
Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
32:12
slacker
Of course. Thank you so much for coming. Once again, this is WKNC 88.1 FM. That was Dr. Diamond Ford, and this is Slacker. Interviewing thank you so much for listening and we appreciate all of you for tuning in. And this has been WKNC's Off the Record.