A Conversation with HIP Host Owólabi Aboyade: poet, essayist, activist
by Carla Harryman
On May 7, 2023, I met with Owólabi Aboyade at our place on Canfield in Detroit to converse with him about his hosting of the recently revived Horizons in Poetry reading series, the original version of which Ron Allen founded with Wardell Montgomery and John Mason in 1982. As readers of the Blog and visitors to the website will know, the 2.0 HIP series was a bi-monthly zoom event that took place in 2022 and 2023. Over this period, HIP has been co-hosted by Aurora Harris, Ruby Woods, Jim Perkinson, Sonia Ponce, John Jakary, myself, and Aboyade, who has presided over many of the events. His emcee experience marked by intellectual spontaneity and ability to key into the poets’ presentations with an open generosity has enlivened the zoom space. I wanted to find out more about Aboyade’s writing, his reflections on activism, and his take on Ron Allen. I am presenting our conversation in two modes: in an introductory gloss based on notes from the first part of our conversation and as edited transcript of the second part of our conversation. I should add that our exchanges precede the writing of his RAP blog post, “A Pocketful of Reflections on Rebirth, Loss, and New Horizons,” since he contemplates his future post at the end of our conversation.
Introduction
On the Horizons In Poetry flier, Owólabi Aboyade is described as “father and multi-dimensional wordsmith: poet, essayist, MC, and creativity coach.” Then there is also Owólabi Aboyade the activist, who has been an advocate for environmental and disability justice and was until recently Co-Director of the East Michigan Environmental Action Center. After leaving that position he decided to pursue an MFA in creative nonfiction at Pacific University in Oregon. It seems fitting that Aboyade, with his multi-faceted dedication to the written word, to disability justice, and to environmental justice in Detroit, was a star host of the 2002-2023 iteration of the HIP poetry reading series, which the likewise multi-faceted poet, playwright, sobriety mentor, Buddhist, and activist Ron Allen co-founded. Our conversation intermingles topics of artistic generation, performance, page-based writing and grief, disability, and creative community. Aboyade, who was a child when Horizon’s in Poetry first emerged as a space of poetic community in Detroit, experiences Allen’s poetry from a perspective that animates the question of how Allen’s words on and off the page will be received by new generations of poets and readers of poetry.
While Ron Allen begins his work as a poet and playwright within the historical context of the Vietnam War, with a poetics that is in conversation with surrealism and avant-garde jazz, Aboyade’s encounter with poetry arises in the context of hip-hop culture and in a period in which spoken word performance has become well-established in the poetry slam scene. Aboyade characterizes Allen’s poetry as aggressive and raw, connecting this quality to a Detroit style emerging in the 1980s that he sees as defining something like a school of poetry and poetics, even as this quality is shared with music and visual arts cultures as well. In an interview, Detroit poet and fiction writer Kim Hunter echoes Aboyade’s take, placing Allen’s poetics in a “gritty and cosmic” literariness and in the “grounded bizarreness of Detroit’s aesthetic.”
In this vein, we note Allen’s connection to visual artist Tyree Guyton, with whom Allen collaborated on the play “Eye Mouth Graffiti Body Shop” and whose installations that “turn trash into treasures” fit Hunter’s sense of the gritty and sublime aesthetic ethos of that period. Both Allen and Guyton went to Vietnam, an experience “Ron hated” and has described in the “Roof Top Interview” (1998) with Jason Flowers as an extremely destructive experience that impacted his return to Detroit and delayed his personal and artistic development.[1] Not only does Vietnam become a scene of horror and political awakening, but Post-Vietnam Detroit was a space of violence and antagonistic social relations for those in the Black working class returning home from the war. Aboyade remarks on the impact of social violence on the body that compels a poetry of aggressive energy, one that inventively shifts invisible internalized-violence outward, also noting that such an aesthetic would be hard to replicate without the experience this energy moves through. While acknowledging the formal distinctions between Allen’s poetics and what happens in the 1990s, Aboyade also associates this raw energy with hip-hop, which Aboyade himself is influenced by; even as in recent years he has veered away from performance poetics toward a quieter page-based writing, the “energy” of which is more attuned to grief.
Another topic we touched on is that of community, particularly poetry community. Horizons In Poetry was not only a layered poetry reading event with co-hosts, featured readers, and audience inclusion through discussion and open mic, it was a realized vision of community that entwined collective practice and presentation in a spirit of mutual support and critique in a workshop led by Ron Allen. People who speak about their experience of the workshop describe it as a potent experience of community, a feast of language and hot meals, which Ron, a chef, would prepare for participants.
Aboyade compares what he imagines as the spirit of the workshops to a “potlatch.” This form of participatory openness differs from Aboyade’s more “formalized” experience of performance poetry, the presentational mode he describes as theatrical and somewhat scripted. It is evident in the way that Aboyade hosts the HIP events that he draws from skills practiced in the more formalized poetry slam venue, while turning emcee techniques toward the open exchange of “potlatch.”
In his HIP hosting and in our interview, Aboyade offers fresh perspectives on an earlier generation of writers. His takes bring the historical dimension of topics arising from the Ron Allen Project into a conversation with the present. In emceeing the 2022-2023 HIP readings, he models listening and feedback skills, activating the Zoom room as creative thought-space. As with the original HIP series, the co-hosting of HIP 2.0 readings requires navigations of a multifaceted event, which includes a featured reader, introductory readings by co-hosts, open mic, and discussion. A two hour on-line event that is thick with poetry and conversation can seem a bit daunting. Aboyade keeps the space live and open. One could say he facilitates the poetry reading as a listening-learning space, where insight, contemplation, and conviviality produce a particularly enhanced environment for a public experience of poetry.
Before the tape recorder was turned on for the conversation that follows, I asked Aboyade about the line from a Ron Allen poem “inside our tower of mutated freedom,” which he had incorporated into one of his own poems read on a HIP program. He explained that his reiteration of Allen’s line in his own poem was connected hip hop MCs’ techniques that include re-sounding or sampling language (and music) of past performers and the audience, using this to animate and create connections between contemporary performance, preceding artists of various genres, and audience.
Conversation with Owólabi Aboyade
CH:
We were talking about the poetry slam…
OA:
Yeah, poetry slam. Spoken word. I’ve performed hip-hop. I started out as a poet focusing more on spoken word. It was accessible to me. It was good. And then I started having an interest in writing poetry and, long story short, in 2007 I met Vievee Francis. She mentored, like five, six, seven of us. It was a small group of Detroit poets: Blair, David Blair was one of those. We called ourselves Write Word Write Now. Many of us were going from the stage to the page, and Vievee offered an introduction to what we call page poetry, to the craft of literary poetry. And she exposed us to many contemporary poets, and to methods of listening to and thinking about our own work and others’. This creative education provided a foundation for my current approach to revision.
Nandi Comer who just got appointed as poet laureate of Michigan was one of the group, a really really dope group. And there’s even more backstory, but I’m skipping over a few things, like reading the poet Li-Young Lee at that time. I really resonated with him a lot because of, again, the question of grief. He did a lot of stuff with the trinity, of man, son, and father. That was very rich and emotionally evocative. And I actually have a brother named Lee who passed from suicide. The best poetry that I wrote coming out of that time of study was called Lee, Young Lee. I named it after him. I’m working with AWE Society, a local publisher, to release these poems as a chapbook in 2024. And again, I had been situated inside hip-hop, its bragging. And the aggressiveness. I wanted to get into that vulnerability and mourning. Poetry offered me a way to do this.
CH:
So the movement from performance to the page gave you access to the vulnerability?
OA: Yeah. And also with performance, I guess I will also note I started out working with Grace Lee Boggs in the Boggs Center and those folks, and I would write political rally type poems about education or about visions of a better tomorrow or… distribution of resources, freedom schools. A variety of different topics.
CH:
What years were you active in the Boggs Center?
OA:
From 2001 to 2008 or 2009.
OA:
So again, poetry for me—that introspection, that emotional landscape, that grieving wasn’t the only thing. But that was the entryway. And then I still was organizing. While organizing, it shifted my emphasis more toward performance. And I kind of focused on hip-hop. Some of the folks in Write Word Write Now took poetry and ran with it. I’ve always played around in poetry, being a hip-hop poet, writing performance. I’ve done four hip-hop albums in the last ten or fifteen years. So recently, in the pandemic in 2020, I had just dropped my last album when performance shut down for a period. I moved into doing a lot of essays and nonfiction writing. I’ve made that the central part of my creative thing right now. That’s the craft I really want to get into right now. So when you say my poems are playful and spontaneous, part of that is because I’m just having fun writing them. I’m not focused on writing a poem that’s going to get published or meet others’ approval.
It’s an interesting dichotomy, because sometimes I think that having fun, I can hit a certain place that is hard for me to hear when I’m trying to write something “good.”
So we’ll see. I think I need to loosen up, but we’ll see how I navigate that. Right now, I sometimes write poems. I put them up on Facebook. And we talked in the pre-conversation about disability. I would love to hear about the class that you’re teaching recently. In the past three years, I’ve been exploring my experiences with chronic illness in poetry as well as in essays…I’m not a schooled poet. I wasn’t an English major. Now I’m starting an MFA.
CH:
Is it in poetry or nonfiction? I would imagine nonfiction based on what you were saying.
OA:
Nonfiction. Nonfiction. But you know, I haven’t formally studied literature. The thing with Vievee was the most extensive study in poetry I’ve done…. Though I’ve participated in some workshops I think of myself as kind of raw and unschooled and there are certain things I haven’t dove into. I’ve participated in workshops in peer sessions, but I haven’t had a systematic look at literature, and I’m still learning the vocabularies of writing, seeing what I resonate with, and letting the different genres bounce around and inside of me.
CH:
That’s a great place to be in.
OA:
Thank you. I like the interplay of it. And I like the school that I’m going to—Pacific University. One of the things they talk about is writing being an ongoing conversation. This idea that writers are responding to each other, influencing each other. I really like that. And I’m looking to put my voice further into the conversation.
CH:
As you were talking I was thinking about your hopscotch relation to the poetic, but also thinking about writing as a conversational art and that as a host you are a very good listener. You key into something specific in your comments or shine a light on something you’ve heard.
OA:
Thank you so much. You know, when people don’t understand about hip-hop, like being the MC and the emcee. To be an MC in a classical sense and not just a rapper, you have to freestyle, you know, and that’s a skill. One of the old hip hop MC games is you would be on stage and somebody would just say a word, and then they would say another word and then they’d say another word. You might just be making this rap or telling a story or just freestyling this rap. One of the things emcees can do is with the audience, like “hey…you with the red hat on, you look like the elephant, you know, dada da da da. Walking to the moon. That is the month of June. We’re standing in the room, you know, high noon, you know, you with the blue shirt. You look like a goon who might swoon too soon…” And so part of…the hip-hop vibe is just playing with the whole room. Playing all the things that have happened and letting them swirl around. Then, you can’t comment on everything. I’m not a journalist. I’m not going to give a summary. You let me spit this back at you? Let me spit this back at you. Even that is the influence of hip-hop, you know, swirling around. And like you said. What it is to emcee, you know? Hmm… Emcee means rapper, but it also means host.
OA:
[Hands CH a copy of Riverwise magazine]. This is a Detroit magazine, the spring issue I just share. They published a poem of mine, “Cold Turkey.” It speaks to all the things that we’re talking about. The subtitle is “A retrospective of the author’s last six years retiring from community activism in Detroit and beyond.”
[The poem can be found here]: https://riverwisedetroit.org/article/cold-turkey/
CH:
I’d love to hear about this if you want to say a few things.
OA:
It ties into how I came into Disability Justice around 2017. I had a health crisis and a friend pointed out I was very involved in organizing against the incinerator that HIP’s Kim Hunter, you know, even preceded me in and was a part of the long history of Detroit’s opposition. We were at a meeting and I was having…they call it heart failure, which is a very harsh name to hear, to hear that your heart is failing.
CH:
Whoa!
OA:
…So I was having a lot of fatigue. But I was still going to meetings. I was married with a child at the time and I was like, yo, I got to step back… A friend of mine pointed out two things that happened at the meeting. One, the conversation just went immediately to who’s going to do the work that you were doing – you know, who’s going to replace me. Aiko Fukuchi and I have become actually much closer, and it was a surprise that only one person besides them.—only two people afterwards asked how I was doing. You know what I’m saying?…I had escalating needs and I couldn’t be in a space that felt like it only valued me for what I could do. You know, when you’re in a crisis…So disability justice and care work and other forms of organizing in which care is part of, healing is a part of it, caught my attention. But even more than that, just the last three years…I’m a writer. People ask, “What projects are you working on?” I’m just not running around doing community stuff the way I used to. But I do collaborative things. I do collaborative art projects. I’ve just made that shift relatively recently.
OA:
And again, I appreciate disability justice. One of the things I observed at that time is a number of friends, a number of people with chronic illness started confiding in me about how they would just be hiding these things and going to work for nonprofits and then they just come home and suffer the consequences from just trying to make it through the day. But how are you in a justice organization—and there’s this incompatibility with your needs? People were really sharing those kind of experiences. We’d be thinking through together, do you want to stay there or do you want to leave? Do you need a new working environment? What do you need from your work organization? Those different types of conversations were a form of disability justice. It’s wild, the pressure to hide these things about yourself and to feel that this work is incompatible with those things, you know?
For four years I worked with Detroit Disability Power and was helping to facilitate a support group for people with chronic illness and disability as well as caregivers…I’m glad they put caregivers in because caregiving is very big in Detroit…Parents and elders become disabled over time. People are giving all this energy and changing their lives, you know what I’m saying? Even more if you have children with disabilities. I worked with that project for four years.
For me and my journey, I think I’m still looking. I still got to come out the other side. Part of me going to the MFA is just about this question, how can I make a living in a way that’s compatible with my health needs and with my health capabilities? If I can write and communicate and converse throughout the week and make income off of that then that’s a lot more feasible for me right now. I’m glad I did the community organizing in my twenties and thirties. I was all over the place, throughout the city, around the country. And at the same time, it’s a heartbreaking story. I think the Riverwise poem “Cold Turkey” has some elements of heartbreak….you’re doing justice and you’re doing community…but when your needs aren’t being met, when you feel that health is putting you on the outside and community is not meant for you it’s very heartbreaking. That to me is an aspect of disability justice. And I love writing about this stuff every once in a while. I’m not like some artists. I was just at a conference on disability arts…and some artists are like, Boom, I’m a disability artist, you know, a central identity?
CH:
Right.
OA:
I write about all sorts of things. I have fun, quote, unquote, writing about it….This is one of my favorite lines, beginning of part two, [from “Cold Turkey,”] “When I was twelve my kidneys/ held too much pain and retired from filtering waste/ Held too many silent tears and/ Started a work stoppage, wildcat strike,/ My first Detroit Black/ Activism.”
CH:
It’s so witty. And it calls up a whole world of the political. In the body.
Part of the sense of grieving also seems to have to do with this near impossibility of making a life that joins the actuality of the body to the actualities of the world.
OA:
Under capitalism.
CH:
You know in the way that everything is structured.
OA:
Absolutely. Yeah.
CH:
It would be interesting to think about points of contact with Ron Allen’s work. Some of my thinking comes out of my teaching Disability aesthetics at EMU as well as being part of a group that created a Critical Disability Studies Minor.
OA:
Are you with Petra Kuppers?
CH:
She’s at the University of Michigan and I’m at Eastern Michigan University. But she was a visiting scholar at Eastern last year and did a series of events.
OA:
Okay! I’d seen those events.
CH:
In the Disability Aesthetics class there is no requirement that one has to identify as disabled. I was interested in putting a lens on work that is made by, through, around, and in relationship to disability so that the connection between art and world is viewed through multifaceted connections to and modes of disability, particular to the works we are looking at and to who we are as readers, writers, and artists. One of the poets we paid particular attention to is Larry Eigner, who was quadriplegic and is associated with what people call “New American Poetry,” which is associated with the post-war avant-garde. His writing has become increasingly impactful in the context of disability poetics. Only rarely did he bring his disability as a topic into his writing. His writing is environmental, rich with soundscape. He lived in situ, and his ears were open to the environment from this position. His situation speaks to some of what you are talking about. His disability was such that he had to be cared for. Attention had to be drawn to his body. The fact that he had the care…
OA.
Yeah right…
CH
…meant that he could make this world of writing, which is large. So I am thinking about a poet whose body is in a particular relationship to how their work gets made. It’s a multilayered system. And this brings me back to Ron Allen’s work because he was schizophrenic and he was on dialysis.
OA
Using dialysis?
Ch
Yeah, he was.
OA
I’m on dialysis.
CH:
I noticed that. One of the stories people bring up is the phone calls he made while on dialysis. He kept friendships going in this really vivid way. He had…
OA
…So much time doing that thing.
CH:
And then the use of schizophrenia is pretty present in his writing, though once again, he doesn’t write about topics. He writes through conditions.
OA:
Yeah, yeah.
CH:
So it’s volatile and full of movement.
OA:
I love how you put it. “Writing through conditions”
CH:
You know metamorphic, it doesn’t get nailed to a “thing.”
OA:
An issue that’s been one of the biggest shifts is what you just said. Like I was saying before, I used to do poetry for rallies. That’s the shift I want to make in terms of being a writer, you know, with a capital W. Ha-ha. What I’m saying is that shift—I’ve written issue poems and poems to get people mad or involved.
CH:
The assignment.
OA:
Yeah, yeah. Like this is a rally and everything has a purpose, you know? I still do that every once in a while. But like you said, writing through conditions—I aspire toward that, being in relationship with the world, not just the topics or themes about the world. There’s schizophrenia in the world and there’s dialysis in the world and somebody got beat up in the world and you know, there’s smoothies in the world, whatever—the objects you pull down to create that world or to reflect that world. That’s a big part of the shift because I think that for a lot of activists, the arts are instrumental, like their goal is to win that campaign. Their goal is to change the policy…they intersect with the artist in an instrumental way. Make us something that is going to help us do this specific thing, you know? I’m trying to make that shift continue, make that shift advance. I resonate very much with that.
CH:
There’s something in this conversation for me that is not only generational but yet feels generational, because of the silence around mental disability. My brother had severe depression and was suicidal, tried to kill himself, and now he’s more disabled because of that attempt. Our folks were in fear and terror around his mental illness. It’s a profound experience. Discourse is now changing so that some people have more knowledge and may not be so fearful. I’ve heard people wonder if the emerging discourse gives rise to more disability, but I don’t think that’s what’s happening. It’s a good thing that there is an emerging language of mental disability reaching into the public sphere. This connects to how I wanted to create this class with a syllabus that was multi-generational, so that we’re sensing our way through circumstances of disability without striving to pin things down. Generational differences can be seen as threading through us in the present.
OA:
I love, I love that. That’s a big part of the appeal to me. The appeal of the HIP and the Ron Allen project is generational. I’m not of that generation. I wasn’t hanging out in the eighties and nineties. I was a little kid or teenager or whatever…And so that’s part of my excitement, to explore even something that was just there, like, man, how am I going to write this piece? It’s not my generation. I didn’t live through it. Am I going to write this piece of our generation and the things that you did with Ron Allen? You know, it’s a challenge, but I also find value in it, and I think that there’s a value in how you describe Ron Allen. This is one of the big stories that I want to do with my MFA and with…I just wrote a book review on this biography of J Dilla which will be published in Riverwise in 2024…
And through writing that piece, looking at Dilla as a cultural figure who came from Detroit and I was like, wow, I want to write about cultural things.
CH:
That’s great.
OA:
You know I want to do this. I want to learn how to write about the HIP and about what it meant. I think that there’s a value in threading that and then telling those who are the same age that y’all were in the eighties and nineties now telling, you know, letting them experience that and not telling them what to do, but just, you know, say “here’s this cultural movement, check it out.” I find an intrinsic value in helping to, like you said, weave that thread – the generational thread – in a way that helps in a way so people can interpret for themselves.
CH:
Yeah, exactly.
To be continued…
[1] The phrases in quotes are from Kim Hunter in a video interview with Richard Reeves.
