For the 20th anniversary of Design Matters, Debbie Millman revisits conversations with renowned poets Eileen Myles, Elizabeth Alexander, Sarah Kay, and Amber Tamblyn. These excerpts reflect on language, identity, memory, and the lived experience that fuels their work. Together, they reveal poetry as an intimate practice that resonates beyond the page.
Eileen Myles, Elizabeth Alexander, Sarah Kay, and Amber Tamblyn
Elizabeth Alexander:
Sometimes I almost remember it like I wrote it rather than as it happened.
Eileen Myles:
In the DNA of everything you write is everything else you’re ever going to write.
Curtis Fox:
From the Chat Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman.
On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on.
On this episode, in celebration of the 20th anniversary of Design Matters, we’ll hear from some of the poets that Debbie has interviewed over the years.
Amber Tamblyn:
There was an entire part of myself that was dying.
Sarah Kay:
It felt like the whole room was communicating, “There is room for you.”
Debbie Millman:
When I interview designers, painters, photographers, movie makers, illustrators, and other visual artists, I talk to them about their lives, their creative processes, and their work. But because it’s an audio podcast, listeners can’t see what we’re talking about. When I interview musicians, some have agreed to perform a song or two in our little podcast booth, which is an extraordinary gift.
But not every musician I speak with is a singer/songwriter who can show up in person with a guitar. But when I interview poets, I always get them to read some of their work, and poets are wonderful readers of their poems. On this episode, celebrating the 20th anniversary year of Design Matters, I’d like to play excerpts from some of the poets I’ve had the pleasure of talking with and listening to.
Eileen Myles
Eileen Myles has been publishing poetry for 50 years, and is a literary institution in New York City’s East Village. They’re also a novelist, an art journalist, and a writer of Opera Libretti. If you look up the words hip or cool in my imaginary illustrated dictionary, you will find a headshot of Eileen Myles. I spoke with them in 2017.
You moved to New York City in 1974 to be a poet. And you said that all of your life people have asked you what you do and you say that you’re a poet, and they just kind of look at you like you’ve said you’re a stripper, still?
Eileen Myles:
No, they look at you like you said you were a mime. It would be cool if they looked at you if they thought you were a stripper. They just thought why? I mean, I was just like, what does that person do? I mean, even earlier today I had a conversation with somebody, and there was somebody taking pictures and then he was like, “Well, what do you do all day?” And I just thought, that’s so strange. Well, what do you do all day?
Part of what’s interesting about being a poet is that nobody knows that it’s sort of like what people don’t get is that it’s almost like you’re like a professional human.
Debbie Millman:
In what way? What do you mean?
Eileen Myles:
In the same way that there are epic poems, right? And there would be a hero, but really, the hero of the epic poem was the poet, the one who wrote the story, who gave mind to the saga kind of. And I think that you’re still that person, except that the saga is kind of a day, is kind of a postmodern day, and you’re sort of in it telling the story of it, and it doesn’t have to be a linear story. I’m making a mime gesture. You’re kind of saying, “What’s here?”
Debbie Millman:
You are.
Eileen Myles:
Yeah, yeah. And I think that’s like a very ordinary, but very necessary and sort of completely surreal and phenomenal job. And yet I think that is the job of the poet.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve written about how you walked into the Veselka Cafe in October of 1975, and met the late New York poet, Paul Violi, who invited you to a workshop at St. Mark’s Church. And you went and wrote this about the experience. “Suddenly, the rest of my history came out of that accidental moment. I met Alan Ginsburg and I thought I must be in the right place. Every situation spawns another one, and those were the ones that I had the lives I had.” What do you think your life would’ve been like if you hadn’t met Paul?
Eileen Myles:
I mean, I so much wrote my novel inferno to say what it was like to be a female coming into New York as a poet in the ’70s, because every dude had some book you should read. I mean, to quote the art critic, Peter Schjeldahl, I think he was talking about art in the ’80s, and he said, “There was no top of the heap. There were just a lot of little heaps on the top.”
And that’s how the poetry world sort of always was and was then. So it was a question of what other pile I could have wound up in. But Paul was my guide into all the quote “other” schools of poetry at the time. And we didn’t consider other. It was like Black Mountain. It was beat. It was New York school. It was everything that was sort of not the mainstream American canon of literature.
So that was the right place. And hopefully, I would’ve found it some other way, but Paul was the guide.
Debbie Millman:
You have said that you feel funny about being in the New York school, and you prefer, I believe you said, the folk poet school.
Eileen Myles:
Right. I mean, I think I’m just sort of wanting to be a little more, maybe even more vernacular. I mean, even the New York school is kind of precious and like, “We’re about art,” and I want that to be less true.
Debbie Millman:
In an interview in the Paris Review, you stated, “I’ve made myself homeless. I’ve cut myself off from anything I knew prior to living in New York. I did this to myself so I know exactly how it happened.” Do you think this was a necessary component to you becoming the writer you are now?
Eileen Myles:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that we’re always translating, right? And I think, again, I think any of us who come from another class on any level can’t stay home and do or make. You have to take what you have someplace else. I mean, in the poetry world, I’ve done that. I mean, basically, importing male avant-garde styles into kind of a queer or a lesbian world.
So that I feel like I’ve operated a lot like a translator of styles and realities, or even bringing a lesbian reality into the poetry world. I think between me and Jill Soloway, we’ve brought more lesbian content into the mainstream than there’s been in a while.
Debbie Millman:
Jill Soloway, of course, the creator of the television show, Transparent.
Eileen Myles:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
Let’s talk for a few minutes about Allen Ginsberg. You’ve written quite a bit about his epic poem, Howell, and have stated that these are some of your favorite lines, who lit cigarettes in boxcars, boxcars, boxcars, racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in Grandfather Knight. What is it about those lines that move you so much?
Eileen Myles:
Well, it’s really the boxcars, boxcars, boxcars.
Debbie Millman:
I love the way you say that boxcars.
Eileen Myles:
Awesome. I thank you. I mean, it’s just the autonomy of poetry. And I mean, he was a poet very influenced by film, by TV, by the media, and he used the kind of ancient and cantatory way of poetry. And, of course, it does the movement of the train across America. The part that people don’t talk about, I think with Howell, as far as I know, is they don’t talk about its relationship to the Holocaust. Those boxcars are carrying lots of Jews to the camps. I can’t imagine being a Jew in America in the ’50s and not thinking about that.
Debbie Millman:
You stated that Ginsberg was the first poet to send out press releases, and that he knew all about marketing and media. Did that influence you in any way?
Eileen Myles:
Yeah, absolutely. Because I think he believed that if you have an important message, you’ve got to get it out. Walt Whitman believed that too. Patty Smith believed. I mean, that’s part of what I loved and felt and sorrow about Patty, that trembling thing where I’m full of this thing and I’ve got to get it out.
Debbie Millman:
You published your first book of poetry on a mimeograph machine in 1978. Where did you make it? How did you distribute it? Where is it now? Where can we find it?
Eileen Myles:
Let’s see some college libraries have it. I don’t know which ones. They all have special collections. And I’m kind of in the archival moment, so I probably will be sending all of my craft to some college library soon. But it was the memeo machine at St. Mark’s Church. A poet named Jim Brodey, who was second, third generation New York school had a press, I think it was called Jim Brodey Books.
He was like, “Why don’t you have a book?” And, “I don’t know. Why you should have a book?” And he ran, and there was supposed to be 200 copies, but somehow we ran out of paper at 160 and then he just kind of handed them to me. And then I just mailed them out and had a book party and did everything you knew to do at that time.
Debbie Millman:
Did you design the cover?
Eileen Myles:
No. And I mean, my first couple of books were designed by other people, and I was very unhappy with the results and I’ve been like a pit bull of a sense about that.
Debbie Millman:
I saw you did the lettering on both of your new releases, your re-releases, but we’ll talk about that in a little while. You gave your first reading at CBGBs on the Barry in New York City. What was that like? What did you read?
Eileen Myles:
I mean, I can sort of remember-ish what poems I wrote. It was whatever little pile of poems I regarded as my poems at that time. And it was just this thing that was the language of poetry. There were open mics, and then if you’re any good, they were like, “Would you like to do a feature?” And then you get to read 10 minutes or a half hour or whatever the thing is.
I just remember this very intense spotlight and sitting alone on stage and feeling like there was nothing outside of that light and being so scared. And then afterwards feeling like that was one of the greatest feelings in the world.
Debbie Millman:
What do you think of your early work? Do you look back on it and feel nostalgic, proud, horrified?
Eileen Myles:
Nostalgic and proud. Not ever horrified. I feel like I know what I meant. I’ll read a poem now or a little piece from Chelsea Girls and I’ll just notice how there’s a whole novel in that short piece. I mean, I think it’s in the DNA of everything you write is everything else you’re ever going to write.
Debbie Millman:
Really?
Eileen Myles:
I think so.
Debbie Millman:
I always have a hard time looking back on things that I’ve done and maybe it’s because they’re just not finished.
Eileen Myles:
Yeah. I mean, I think when you’re younger, you don’t know what editing means, right?
Debbie Millman:
That’s true. In 1994, you published your first collection of short stories, Chelsea Girls. And last year, Harper Collins reprinted it. Paris Review described Chelsea Girls as a nonfiction novel or fictional nonfiction. You’ve described it as a series of short autobiographical films. Is the book fully autobiographical?
Eileen Myles:
Well, I don’t know what fully means, you know what I mean? I mean, I just feel like once you put pen to paper or start typing in whatever format on some level, you’re lying, you know what I mean? I think-
Debbie Millman:
In what way?
Eileen Myles:
Well, I just think that it isn’t the thing. It’s a symbol of the thing. The way language is simply symbolic. So you’re reducing and expanding and distorting and translating right away, the act of writing is a translation and even a form of blindness.
Debbie Millman:
Would you consider reading one of your poems from I Must Be Living Twice?
Eileen Myles:
Yes, I would consider that. Rampant Muse, is that?
Debbie Millman:
Yes.
Eileen Myles:
Okay, cool.
Debbie Millman:
I love that poem.
Eileen Myles:
It’s like a little bit about Robert Creeley, do you know that?
Debbie Millman:
I did not know that.
Eileen Myles:
He’s got a very famous book of poems called For Love, and it’s really good. It’s really great. And so we’re friends or we were friends. Also, somebody someplace around that time said, “Da, da, da, da, da, unless you’re a rampant lesbian.” And I said, “And I am.”
Debbie Millman:
How do you become a rampant lesbian?
Eileen Myles:
I know. I know. I was like, “Of course I’m a rampant. What are the kind of… ” And so my rampant muse for her. Tuesday night, reading for love on my bed or writing for love poem was wishing when I stopped waiting. 1,000 times I’ve read and wrote for love, we’re my sneakers, drink my bourbon, be 28 in spite of me and mirrors Christ. I look fucking old. What does the evening mean? I could fall for lamp light radio song, the oval-shaped frame of which he was particularly fond. For love I would dream when my streams fall through.
Man, could that little girl dance. For love, I will read it 10,000 times for my tomboy cousin, Jean Marie, for radio song. For love I would not pity me. My 28 sneakers, bourbon, the unseen future of my communications and the lamplight her. She holds me here so rampantly in her evening beauty.
Debbie Millman:
That was Eileen Myles in 2017, reading the poem from My Rampant Muse for Her. From the book, I must be Living Twice New and Selected Poems.
Elizabeth Alexander
Elizabeth Alexander is a celebrated poet as well as an essayist, memoirist, playwright, philanthropist, and academic. In 2009, she read a poem she wrote for President Barack Obama at his first inauguration. I spoke with her in 2017.
Now I understand you also studied ballet?
Elizabeth Alexander:
I did. So we must speak now of Adele, my mother, Adele Logan Alexander, who insisted that I take ballet and every time I wanted to quit, she had this amazing way, which I’ve not been able to master with my children who squandered all their talents, kind of keep me going to whatever the thing was that she thought that I should be doing.
And there was a moment where it clicked in and I’m so glad that she did because once I got good enough to be able to really dance, you repeat and you repeat and you repeat and you practice and you do the same things over and over and over again, but eventually, you can put it together and make something beautiful and understand it as an expressive art.
Debbie Millman:
Sort of like life.
Elizabeth Alexander:
Sort of like life. Exactly. So it was my serious thing, ballet and then modern dance that I did outside of school. It was what I loved very, very much. And I was very good at it, but being very good at it did not mean being good enough at it to do it. So to see that you can devote yourself so thoroughly to something and love something so thoroughly, but what does it mean to really be an artist? It’s serious business.
So just because it’s fun and just because you go six days a week, that is both separate from the true talent factor and also the X factor that makes you insanely want to keep doing it above all other things.
Debbie Millman:
Do you think that discipline that you were able to cultivate as a ballet dancer is something that has impacted how you approach your writing?
Elizabeth Alexander:
It has impacted how I approach every single thing I do. Finding a discipline, discipline is discipline is discipline and understanding that you don’t get the immediate payback necessarily. And also that just because you’ve got a little flair with a certain shape of poem or turn of phrase or effect, you have to resist defaulting to that. You have to become well-rounded in your discipline. You can be a kicker and not a good jumper, but you’ve got to learn to be a better jumper.
Debbie Millman:
You were educated at Sidwell Friends School, the same school that Barack Obama’s daughters are now attending in Washington DC. Did it surprise you that Sasha Obama missed her father’s farewell speech because she was studying for a test?
Elizabeth Alexander:
Well, I mean, let me tell you, that is a very serious family. And I mean, if we really think for a minute about what it means to come with grace and integrity as young girls through those eight years and to parent with grace and integrity under those circumstances, it is really something to behold.
Debbie Millman:
In your 2005 book of poetry, American Sublime, you wrote a poem titled Tina Green, and I’m wondering if you could read that for us.
Elizabeth Alexander:
I would be happy to read it.
Debbie Millman:
If you can tell us a little bit about the poem, I was wondering if it was autobiographical.
Elizabeth Alexander:
Yes, well, it is. And, of course, when a poem is autobiographical, I think sometimes I get a little hackles up because I want to say like, “And it’s crafted too.” And there are always moments of poetic license and sometimes I almost remember it like I wrote it rather than as it happened, which is sort of an interesting thing.
Debbie Millman:
Well, memory is so fluid.
Elizabeth Alexander:
Yeah. And I believe poems more than anything actually really. Or once I’ve made something, I believe it more than what happened, because it’s fixed perhaps maybe. But I was at a different school at the time. The story behind here, the speaker attended the Georgetown Day School. That was my happy school. That was a very kind of free, wonderful, hippie school. It was a beautiful place, and this is a story about the only Black teacher I had. So it’s called Tina Green.
“Small story, hair story, Afro-American story. Only Black girl in my class story, pre-adolescent story Black teacher story. Take your hair out, they beg on the playground. The cool girls, the straight and shiny hair girls, the girls who can run. Take your hair out they say. It is Washington hot. We are running. I do. And it swells, snatches up at the nape, levitates. Wooly universe nodding, Fleece Zeppelin run.
So I do into school to the only Black teacher I’ll have until college, the only Black teacher I’ve had to that point, the only Black teacher to teach at that school full of white people who tell the truth I love, the teacher I love whose name I love, whose hair I love, takes me in the teacher’s bathroom and wordlessly fixes my hair perfectly, wordlessly fixes my hair into three tight plats.”
Debbie Millman:
Stunning.
Elizabeth Alexander:
Thank you. The emotion in that poem is so universal, and yet so personal. How do you create that kind of connectivity between the personal and the universal?
Debbie Millman:
In general, I mean, my quick answer is that art that speaks to any of us always comes from a very particular place, and then we find ourselves in it in some kind of way. You know, this is fifth grade when we’re 10 years old, we do and don’t experience ourselves as people with races, enraced bodies to use the theoretical language.
I always knew I was a Black person, but I did not think about it 24 hours a day. I don’t think any of us thinks of our race 24 hours a day. Zora Neale Hurston famously and beautifully said, “I feel most Black when I’m thrown against a stark white background.” So sometimes understanding us as people with races is a relative thing.
So I think that everybody, not just people of color, have in them a lot of really interesting, perhaps unplumbed experiences of understanding yourself in an identity and in a racial identity.
Elizabeth Alexander:
You went to Boston University to get your master’s degree at the urging of Adele Alexander, your mother.
Debbie Millman:
Can you tell us why?
Elizabeth Alexander:
So I was working as a journalist beforehand. I was a newspaper gal.
Debbie Millman:
Washington Post, is that correct?
Elizabeth Alexander:
Washington Post, yep. Both the summer before I graduated from college and then the year afterwards. And it was a very, very interesting job. It was fast-paced. People were smart, interesting. I liked being sent out into my own city to explore. I liked being sent to corners and people who I wouldn’t have found on my own and having a reason to ask them about their lives.
But I was aware that I really did want to do a different kind of writing. I learned how to master the form of what a news story looks like and how to have paragraphs towards the end that could be lopped off. But I wanted to surrender to that alchemical process that happens when you make something and don’t just record something. And I could feel myself, literally, it was like a shoreline.
I could feel myself wanting to step over into embellishment, into something else. And I knew that that was not sustainable, and I feared I would make a mistake and I wouldn’t know I’d made a mistake. I mean, again, this is like believing the things that I write more than how they happened. So I was talking about this, that, and the other, and it was my mother who, and it’s fitting that we should speak of it now because the great poet, Derek Walcott, has just passed away and he was my teacher and my mentor.
My mother said, “I saw that that poet whose work you love teaches at Boston University. Why don’t you just apply to that program?” And I had sworn when I graduated from college that I was done with school. I wasn’t going to go to school anymore, done, done, done, done, done. And she, knowing me very well, she said, “Oh, you won’t get in.” He’s wicked.
Debbie Millman:
He’s a gauntlet.
Elizabeth Alexander:
I know. If you don’t get in, then you can just stay at that job. Fine. So I applied and I applied. I had short stories, which I’d written in college. I applied to the fiction program, but I went to study with Walcott, and that changed everything.
Debbie Millman:
You went to Yale University for your undergraduate degree, and I understand that you studied with John Hershey in your senior year, who you’ve credited with helping you find your fictive voice. But when you got to Boston University, I understand that Derek Walcott looked at your diary and saw your potential as a poet. How did he see your diary?
Elizabeth Alexander:
Because I showed it to him.
Debbie Millman:
That’s pretty brave.
Elizabeth Alexander:
Well, I mean, they had tracks, so I was admitted into the fiction track, but I knew that this great poet whose work I read, not in school, but just on my own, was why I was there. So I went to his office and all I knew I couldn’t show him stories, and it was a diary and in it I had what I called at the time. It’s a phrase that Garrett Hongo uses word clouds.
They were just word stuff, and it was what I had to show. I had to show him something. And so he had a legal pad, and he thumbed through and he said, “Okay, well, here’s this.” And then he wrote it out with line breaks and he said, “See, you’re writing poems, but you don’t know how to break lines, but that’s what makes it a poem.” He was very kind when he said that.
And then he said, “Okay, go write some poems and don’t come back until you have some to show me.”
Debbie Millman:
You said that he gave you a huge gift. He took that cluster of words and he lineated it.
Elizabeth Alexander:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
How do you think he saw that?
Elizabeth Alexander:
One of the things that he used to say was, “The poem will find its shape. The line will find itself.” So he would say, “Just start writing and you will see what the natural shape of this poem is,” which was very mystifying to me when I first heard it, but I find it to be always absolutely true. And that doesn’t mean you can’t play around. You think it’s a long lined poem, you try it that way, but maybe you nip it back, but you start to catch a rhythm, and you start to sort of say, “Okay, this is the amount.” And then you say, “All right, in this next line, let me follow that amount. Okay, let’s see what about that.”
Debbie Millman:
So is it a negotiation?
Elizabeth Alexander:
It’s a calibration. I mean, that process sometimes takes a very long time, but then you’ve got sort of a mass and then you can put your hands in the clay.
Debbie Millman:
I’d like to ask you to read a poem from this period. It is from your first book of poems, The Venus Hot and Tott published in 1990, and the poem is called Boston. Can you tell us a little bit about it before you share it with us?
Elizabeth Alexander:
So it was a one-year master’s program, and Boston and Cambridge changed a lot. This was 1985. It was still coming out of the period in its history where it had such racial strife around busing. It was not a very well desegregated town. There were the remnants of that. And it was also a place where I had a hard time finding my community. So Boston Year.
“My first week in Cambridge, a car full of white boys tried to run me off the road and spit through the window, open to ask directions. I was always asking directions, and always driving to an Armenian market in Watertown to buy figs and string cheese, apricots, dark spices and olives from barrels, tubes of pastes with unreadable Arabic labels. I ate stuffed grape leaves and watched my lips swell in the mirror. The floors of my apartment would never come clean.
Whenever I saw other colored people in bookshops or museums or cafeterias, I’d gasp, smile shyly, but they’d disappear before I spoke. What would I have said to them? Come with me? Take me home? Are you my mother? No. I sat alone in countless Chinese restaurants eating almond cookies, sipping tea with spoons and spoons of sugar. Popcorn and coffee was dinner. When I fainted from migraine in the grocery store, a Portuguese man above me mouthed no breakfast.
He gave me orange juice and chocolate bars. The color red sprang into relief singing Wagner’s Valkyrie, entire tribes gyrated and drummed in my head. I learned the samba from a Brazilian man so tiny, so festooned with glitter. I was certain that he slept inside a filigreed Faberge egg. No one at the door. No salesmen, Mormons, meter readers, exterminators, no Harriet Tubman, no one. Red notes sounding in a gray trolley town.”
Debbie Millman:
Thank you.
Elizabeth Alexander:
Sometimes when I read that, I feel like I should say, “But then it got better.”
Debbie Millman:
Well, [inaudible 00:26:59]. Yes, you did.
Elizabeth Alexander:
But it was a very monastic year.
Debbie Millman:
Elizabeth Alexander in 2017.
Sarah Kay
Sarah Kay is a writer and poet who is also well-known for her spoken word poetry. When I spoke with Sarah in 2018, I invited her to read a poem to open the episode.
Sarah Kay:
“The universe has already written the poem you are planning on writing, and this is why you can do nothing but point at the flock of starlings, whose bodies rise and fall in inherited choreography, swarming the sky in a sweeping curtain that for one blistering moment forms the unmistakable shape of a giant bird flapping against the sky. It is why your mouth forms an oh, that is not a gasp, but rather the beginning of, oh, of course.
As in, of course, the heart of a blue whale is as large as a house with chambers tall enough to fit a person standing. Of course, a fig is only possible when a lady wasp lays her eggs inside a flower, dies and decomposes the fruit evidence of her transformation. Sometimes the poem is so bright. Your silly language will not stick to it. Sometimes the poem is so true, nobody will believe you.
I am a bird made of birds. My blue heart a house you can stand up inside of I am dying. Here, inside this flower, it is okay. It is what I was put here to do. Take this fruit. It is what I have to offer. It may not be first or ever best, but it is the only way to be sure I lived it all.”
Debbie Millman:
Sarah, we just had you read a poem as our cold open of the show today. Tell us a little bit about what you read.
Sarah Kay:
So I have a friend named Kaveh Akbar, who is also my co-author of a column that three of us write for the Paris Review online. And one time, Kava posted this photo that he had found on the internet, which was that scientists had dissected the heart of a blue whale, and hung it from the ceiling. And when they did that, it’s how they figured out that the heart of a blue whale is so big that each chamber of the heart is big enough for a human to stand up inside of.
And when Kava shared this photo, he shared it with the caption. This is just a reminder that the universe has already written the poem you were planning on writing. And at the time, I was like, “Oh no, I’m out here trying to be original. I’m trying to invent new stuff. What do you mean the universe has already thought of everything? This is terrible.”
And it really got under my skin. But then not too long after that, I saw this video that was making the rounds online that maybe you saw where there are these birds called starlings that fly in big formations called murmurations. And it’s like a cloud of birds and they usually move in amorphous shapes. But someone had happened to catch a video of these birds. And all at the same time, the birds moved and formed the shape of a starling in the sky.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, wow. I did not see that.
Sarah Kay:
And when I saw this video, the first thought I had was the universe has already written the poem you were planning on writing. And for some reason in that moment, it no longer upset me. And instead I thought, “Well, maybe it’s not my job to invent something new with each poem. Maybe it just means that it’s my turn to hold something to the light for a moment and consider it for whatever time I have.”
Debbie Millman:
Do you think that it is still possible though to create original art?
Sarah Kay:
I don’t know. And I also think that maybe thinking about it too much prevents me from making any art at all. So not to say I don’t care, but I try not to worry about it too much.
Debbie Millman:
I mean, I think it’s so interesting that the notes that we use to make music or the letters that we use to make words and then sentences and then paragraphs and stories and poems or the ingredients that we use to make food, they’re all pretty fixed at this point.
Not too many people are inventing a new ingredient. We’re all creating the same things from the same things, and yet there are unique voices. And I do believe that you are one of them.
Sarah Kay:
Well, thanks.
Debbie Millman:
I read that when you were, I think, a freshman in high school, you described yourself as a live wire of nervous hormones and underdeveloped and overexcitable.
Sarah Kay:
Oh, wow.
Debbie Millman:
Did you experience all of those emotions again? Is that what it was?
Sarah Kay:
Yes. Exactly that. Exactly.
Debbie Millman:
I love that quote of yours. So one afternoon after school, you went over to a friend’s house and watched the documentary Slam Nation. You said this about watching slam poetry for the first time. “I felt my two secret loves, poetry and theater had come together, had a baby, a baby I needed to get to know.” So why were these loves secret?
Sarah Kay:
That’s a great question. It’s different now, for sure. But I think the world that I was a 13-year-old in was one in which we didn’t have YouTube for starters, and I had never seen anybody that looked anything like me on a stage before, or really on TV. And so the idea of being a performer or an actress or anything that involved being in the spotlight did not appear to be possible or an option.
And I don’t even think I could articulate that. I know I couldn’t articulate that then, but I do think that that had something to do with it. And so to risk saying out loud that that was a dream or a possibility seemed just absolutely absurd, and I would have been laughed out of the building. I’m sure that was mainly in my head, but it certainly felt that way.
And I also didn’t know that poetry could be performed until that moment, and poems at the time were things I wrote in secret in a notebook that nobody ever saw. So that’s why both theater and poetry felt like secret loves.
Debbie Millman:
You were writing these poems on your own in your journals and then out of the blue, you received a letter informing you that someone had registered you for the New York City teen poetry slam. To this day, I believe you have no idea who signed you up?
Sarah Kay:
Correct.
Debbie Millman:
What did you think?
Sarah Kay:
I didn’t think much other than I love poems. It sounds like there will be other kids there who also love poems. Oh, I remember vaguely that documentary I saw a little clip of, I remember this is a thing. So I guess I could try it one time. I think something that doesn’t always get included in the narrative of this is that I grew up very close to ground zero, and September 11th happened when I was 13, and in the time period following all of the adults around me were very busy trying to keep the world from falling apart.
Debbie Millman:
Your mom had broken her leg, ankle?
Sarah Kay:
My mom had broken her ankle. Just everyone, teachers, parents, everyone was really-
Debbie Millman:
Your brother didn’t speak for months, I understand?
Sarah Kay:
Yeah. So there was a lot happening. And as a result, I didn’t want to burden anyone with whatever my 13-year-old thoughts and feelings and worries were. And to be 13 and try to wrap your head around terrorism was really hard for me. And so the only way that I understood it at the time was that someone had tried to communicate, “There is no room for you here,” which I understand is a very oversimplified way of reckoning an act of terrorism, but that’s what made sense to a 13-year-old.
And my parents were thrilled that there was something that I was vaguely curious about and wanted to go try because it meant a little bit of joy in what was otherwise kind of a dark time. And then the reason I think that it captured me so tremendously was that it was the first time as a 14-year-old girl that I felt like a room full of people were listening to me, and saw me, and I was allowed to talk about these fears and flaws and joys and doubts in a way that I hadn’t before.
And in some ways, it felt like the whole room was communicating, “There is room for you here.” And I don’t think I’ve ever forgotten that. And I think over and over again, anytime I’m in a room where people have come to listen to me speak, I never take for granted what a gift that is and what it means that people communicate to me that there is room for me here.
Debbie Millman:
I believe that there was a woman that was in the audience that you described as eight feet tall, having a very specific reaction that really encouraged you. Can you share that story?
Sarah Kay:
Yeah. I mean, the first time that I ever got on stage, I shared a poem, and I came off, and it was the first time I’d really performed like that in front of anyone. And I was so nervous and everyone else in the room was older and cooler, but there was one girl who came and found me and tapped me on the shoulder. And when I turned around, she said, “Hey, I really felt that.” And to know that something that I had made had had an effect on another person, let alone someone so much older and cooler was like a lightning bolt.
Debbie Millman:
You mentioned that you grew up in Lower Manhattan near the World Trade Center, and you were 13 living in New York City on 9/11 where you experienced the tragedy. You’ve written about it quite beautifully. You’ve written quite a heartbreaking and beautiful essay.
And you’ve also written some really extraordinary poetry about some of the terrorism that we’ve experienced more recently, and there’s a poem titled The Places We Are Not, which I’m wondering if you might be able to read today.
Sarah Kay:
Sure.
“A man plows his truck through the crowd, celebrating on the knees boardwalk, where my once love once, insisted that we could make it all the way through a triple layer chocolate mousse until we were both so full, we could not even bear to lick our spoons. I text a friend, ‘where are you?’ Which is code for, ‘Please tell me these new deaths are not yours this time.’.
If I scroll up, I will see the same text I sent her back when Paris was exploding a few moments or weeks ago, farther up, the same text she sent me when I was in lockdown in Jakarta as the man across town pulled the pin from his grenade. Not yours this time is a song that plays so often I cannot help but know the words, are you okay, is the hook. Are you okay, is code for, ‘We are not okay, but please remind me you are breathing.’
“Back home, the Black men and women I love look into mirrors and wonder if they are lost teeth in the mouth of an impatient God. Are you okay? I text impotent. Please remind me you are breathing. I am scared is not a good enough reason to not get out of bed. The world is falling apart, is not a good enough one either. I ask my mother if growing older means one wound piled upon another until we are just a collection of hurt, but she insists no. Sometimes someone gets married or has a baby.
Someone teach me a new song, please bring me a spoon and a mouth to lean across the table for this time. This time I am a jaw of loose teeth. I’m a collection of string. I’m a snow globe of worry. I am a Rolodex of fear. They are placing body bags over children on the sidewalk where I once pushed a ball away laughing.
I cannot possibly have any more love. I am already full.”
Debbie Millman:
Sarah Kay in 2018.
Amber Tamblyn
Amber Tamblyn is an award-winning television, film and theater actor. She’s also a novelist and a poet. I spoke with her in front of a live audience in New York City in early 2020 in celebration of the 15th anniversary of Design Matters.
You’re known for many iconic roles beyond Emily Quartermaine on General Hospital. You were Joan Girardi on Joan of Arcadia, Martha M. Masters on House, named for one of your actual friends, Martha Masters. Jenny Harper on Two and a Half Men and Tibby Rollins in the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants films. How do you feel about those roles now?
Amber Tamblyn:
I have many feelings. I have so many feels. I’ve spent, I think, so much of my now adult having an exorcism of the pain of those experiences of growing up in the business, but I also have a deep sense of love and pride for those characters and things that you would not expect you could bring off the page, you could. And I feel that I did, I guess, in a certain way, especially with things like sisterhood of the traveling pants. Who knew that that would be so deep and so filled with emotion and turned out to be such a wonderful, wonderful experience. And I came away from that with some of the closest friendships of my life with my cast members, America Ferreira, Blake Lively and Alexis Bladell.
But it does really feel like a different life in a certain way. It feels very separate than where I’ve been in the last maybe eight years, eight to 10 years almost. And for the most part, I haven’t really thought much about acting or the the way in which it brought joy to my life during those years. But I think because I’ve had so much distance from it, I have a new appreciation for it in a way that I didn’t before.
I’m about to shoot a show for FX, and it’ll be my first time doing something that I’m very, very excited about as a very exciting role. And so I have been thinking about it a lot lately, but I haven’t. I just haven’t thought about any acting, any of the stuff that I’ve done in a long time. It’s interesting that you’re bringing it up because it’s been at the forefront of my thought lately because of that.
Debbie Millman:
Well, I have a bunch more questions about it, but I do want to ask you if it’s true that you told Jon Cryer to go fuck himself in your audition for Two and a Half Men, which was in front of Chuck Laurie?
Amber Tamblyn:
Oh, 100%.
Debbie Millman:
So what brought that up?
Amber Tamblyn:
I think I also told Chuck Laurie to go fuck himself.
Debbie Millman:
Fair.
Amber Tamblyn:
Well, the character, she was sort of supposed to replace the half man idea. She was Charlie Harper’s daughter who was basically just a woman version of him, just an alcoholic foul mouth womanizer. And so I also was like, “I actually don’t really care if I do two and a half men. This is not like an audition that’s going to break me.” And so I was rude to all of the men in the room.
Debbie Millman:
And got the part.
Amber Tamblyn:
And I also-
Debbie Millman:
And men like that, don’t they?
Amber Tamblyn:
Sometimes those types of men do. I mean, as I said, I know narcissistic white men very well. Although both of them are lovely and Jon Cryer is especially wonderful. I think I had also signed in on the audition sheet, a fake name, which is kind of like a really messed up thing to do, especially if you’re going up first in the morning. I think I signed in as Jennifer Lawrence because then everyone who comes after you is looking and they’re like, “Oh, fuck. Jennifer Lawrence audition for this shit?” “Shit. Okay, I got up my game. I was like-
Debbie Millman:
You have a little bit of a sadomasochist streak in you?
Amber Tamblyn:
I guess so. God, Debbie’s getting real tonight. Someone give me a drink.
Debbie Millman:
I think we can make that happen. You’ve said that show business is voyeuristic, and that if you’re an actress, you’re playing that which the voyeur looks at for a living. People look at you to escape their realities, to invent their own new realities. How did you manage to keep your own identity, and how have you been able to avoid the often treacherous pit balls that other child actors have succumbed to?
Amber Tamblyn:
So funny because we were just talking about this. I think it’s twofold for me. Obviously, I think having parents who were a strong support system in my life, it was a real privilege to have that kind of upbringing and family. And I think also, poetry. Poetry really saved me in a way. Poetry was a third parent. Poetry was a guardian. It was a way for me to reflect on those experiences and be able to put on the page the feelings that I had, whether it was anger or frustration or feeling invisible or feeling objectified, all of those things.
Poetry was a real way for me to let those things out early on from a young age. And so I’ve been writing most people, well, I’d say maybe less so now, but there was a time at which most people were really shocked that I was a poet.
Even though I had been publishing the Simon & Schuster book that I wrote, Free Stallion was poems written age 11 to 21. I’d been writing as long as I had been acting. These were two coinciding forms of art and expression that I’d done from a very young age, and they very much informed each other. And one was like a salve to the other in a certain way.
Debbie Millman:
Well, you said that poetry was one of the few areas in your life where you felt like you had full control. Why did it make you feel like you had control?
Amber Tamblyn:
Well, as an actress, you are creating something that’s only really half yours, if that. You are putting yourself on the line emotionally, often physically, psychologically, for something you have no control over. You are interpreting the words of someone else that they’ve written. You are creating the world that a show creator has written and has created that they have envisioned. You are moving in the way that a director is telling you to move.
So much of that is about an interpretation of someone else’s art, of all of the people’s art around you, which is a great joy. And the people who do it really well are masters at it. It is using that empathic tool to tell a really deep and important story, if that is something that you’re very good at. But at the same time, after the acting experience, and this is something that I think so many people don’t understand about our business, is that you probably have only ever seen like 30% of the stuff that I have done, if that.
And that’s any actor. That’s Meryl Streep. That’s the most famous actor and the least known actor because once you’ve acted, there’s so many other levels that that piece of work has to go through in order to succeed to see the light of day. It has to be edited very well. And you have to hope that the editor and director are on the same page and that the director directed it well. Then you have to hope, even if you have a good film, you have to hope that it goes into a festival.
And then even if it gets into a festival, you have to hope it gets bought. And then if it gets bought, you have to hope they put the right marketing behind it. And then if they do that, you still have to hope that people go to theaters and see it. Same thing could be said about television.
You create something all the way through if you’re doing a pilot, it may never see the light of day, or it might go on and air for five episodes and disappear. So it’s a strange industry because you pour your heart and soul and physical self into things that often, no one ever sees or no one knows about. So in that way, I really felt like writing for me, at least if I failed by it, I was failing by 100% of my own self-expression, as opposed to 50% of an expression that was part of me that still might fail anyway, if that makes sense.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. There seems to be a lot of judgment when an actor tries something other than acting, whether it be writing, music, politics, even activism. Did it feel it was harder to be taken seriously as a poet because of your celebrity?
Amber Tamblyn:
Oh, absolutely. I think there was. I think I got discouraged early about ever sort of submitting my work or doing anything with it other than just writing and performing. I would do book tours. I would frequent a place called Beyond Baroque in Los Angeles where I would read a lot. And I think around the time I was writing Dark Sparkler, which really, really was a kind of exorcism for me. I was deep in the middle of a real existential crisis trying to figure out what I wanted to be outside of this idea of going into other people’s rooms and auditioning and interpreting their work and knowing I had so much more to offer. And-
Debbie Millman:
What did the existential crisis stem from?
Amber Tamblyn:
Well, it stemmed from the fact that I had only ever really played other people for a living my whole life since I was 11. People always ask me like, “How old were you when you knew you wanted to act?” And that sentence, that idea is something that I have come up against and talked about in therapy for so many years to think about how does a child have a choice? What choice does the child have in choosing that life?
It’s not really a child’s choice. That’s the choice of adults. And then the child spends their time trying to please adults by performing. And so then your life becomes performative. You are a walking, talking, living performance. It’s complicated. And so, Dark Sparkler was sort of this reckoning for myself coming to terms with myself with also, how do you talk about this pain? How do you talk about this invisibility while still knowing you are the most privileged person in any given room for the money you make, the job you have, the industry you’re in, that people would love to be a part of.
And I was trying to find a way to talk about my experience and my need for a certain kind of death. I mean, really, I was seeking death, not literal death, but a metaphorical death. I was seeking a ceasing, if that makes sense, an ending to the person that I was when I was younger, that person that really didn’t have any control over her life while she was creating these incredible characters that bring people so much joy, and I often had so much fun shooting them, there was an entire part of myself that was dying, that was not being given an opportunity to thrive and to become more.
And that book was a direct, I think, moment for me to let those things be talked about on a page and to be able to see them and see my own experiences, not only writing about these actresses that had literally died, but then writing these meta poems in the back about my experience writing about dead actresses. And it was actually Roxane Gay who published the first poem. It was like my first published poem ever.
She published this poem about Brittany Murphy. And I remember submitting it to Pank. A friend had said, “You got to submit. There’s a great editor there now.” I was like, “No one’s ever going to publish my work. I’m an actress. I’ll take myself seriously and that’s fine.” And I think she wrote me back in like two hours or something. It was very exciting. And it was a moment for me to feel like, oh, I can be taken seriously in the art form that I’ve done as long as I’ve acted. It was a big moment.
Debbie Millman:
Do you want to read that poem for us?
Amber Tamblyn:
Sure.
“Brittany Murphy. Her body dies like a spider’s. In the shower, the blooming flower seeds a cemetery. A pill lodges in the inner pocket of her flesh coat. Her breasts were the gifts of ghosts, dark tarps of success. Her mouth dribbles over onto the bathroom floor, pollick blood.
The body is lifted from the red carpet, put in a black bag, taken to the mother’s screams for identification. The country says good things about the body. They print the best photos, the least bones, the most peach.
Candles are lit in the glint of every glam. Every magazine stand does the Southern Bell curtsy in her post box office bomb honor.
The autopsy finds an easy answer. They say good things about the body, how bold her eyes were, bigger than hep burns, the way she could turn into her camera closeup like life depended on her.
Debbie Millman:
Amber Tamblyn in 2020.
You can hear my full interviews and hundreds of other interviews with some of the world’s most creative people on our website, designmattersmedia.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
We’ll be back next week with one last special episode called from the many years I’ve been doing Design Matters. Yes, this is the 20th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Mellman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.
Design Matters:
Design Matters is produced by the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.