Ronaldo Wilson

b. 1970

image description

Born in Millington, TN, a Navy Base. Googled the city. There’s a photo on the Wikipedia page of Woodstock Elementary, which flashed me back to being in the driveway that wraps around the school to a small white boy in glasses, on the back of a his mom’s bike in a baby seat, little boys, me among them, hurling epithets at him: “Hey Googly-Eyes” or “Four-Eyed-Freak!” Such is the tension in my now happy obsession with reading glasses: 20/20 otherwise, but let me say, that as I look back, his eyes point to the kind of man I like to see, now. 
 
To Guam, over a few years, Military Zones, Officers, Blue Angels, and there, filling the scooped holes in the sand— a few beats away from the Mariana Trench—with liquid wax, sticking wicks in them, letting the “candles” cool with the class.  Lunch: A Hamburger wrapped in Aluminum Foil, Ketchup.
 
Back to Millington.  Playing in a tree house.  My desire then, to climb up it, and to stare.  Eat, boiled hotdogs.  Up there, cicada shells.  The trucks in the Tennessian Summer spout pesticides.
 
My mother upholstered the inside of a Ford Pinto station wagon, and we left for Alameda, CA. Slept at Rest Stops and Motels.  Dad let us steer.
 
In California, I learned the body is made up of salt water, mostly, and I’d fish in the Bay, and I watched one Perch on a hook dance to its death.
 
Sacramento, one boy I know from high school was shot in the head, left dead near the river.  Science, Beakers.  Drove a Volkswagen Scirocco.  Cal, Berkeley, the wagging tongue of a pervert wanting to meet in Dwinelle. His running shorts, see through.
 
Candy, my alter-ego from Jr. High to High School, even at home from college.  Lots of Phone Sex—learned the ropes of a conceptual notion of race & being this way, to be an imagined girl, to get old men to fall in love with me, her, to get off, and to vanish from any direct history of the self by hanging up.
 
I am a fish and love to swim, do yoga, and play tennis—I sought and seek fluidity.  NY, CA, NY, CA.  I ricocheted for many years back and forth, lovers, love, DALLAS, still do, my partner, my love – we had a cat that we borrowed, until it died by a car hit.  A film is being made about it in which I’m Pudgy.  I try to keep the fat off and sweat a lot
 
In NY, in an M.F.A. program at New York University, late nights at S/M Clubs in the then-Meat Packing District, Street Tranny Queens, Banjee Boys, working on my earliest “real” poems, or the poetry as point of view—freak wants to suck cocaine off my cock in a Dungeon, waves of men. Hotel-Tea-Rooms, anywhere, but started a PhD at City University of New York Graduate Center, and finished it, in three states, over 13 years, on 20th Century and Contemporary Black Poetics, Poetry, and Visual Culture, and I am now, currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
 
Before that, I taught at Mount Holyoke College in MA.  Six years of cutting my teeth, tone, and vision between the poem and the critical essay, led me to complete my poems and the life in which it all began to COLLECT—
 
My first book, winner of the Cave Canem Prize, Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), is a series of prose poems that captures the interrelationship of the two central characters, looking into their psyches and thoughts of race, class, and identity: Black, Asian, and Queer, who travels through dreams, city streets, gyms, porn theaters, beaches, ferries, familial memories and landscapes.
 
My second book, Poems of the Black Object (2009), winner of the Thom Gunn Award in Gay Poetry and an Asian American Literary Award in Poetry, contains works that slip between poem and essay, theory and epistle, revealing even more ways back into the fluid world, offering ways to make even more elastic yet still sharply pointed questions around and through race, sexuality, and desire.

read more

Central to my research and an influence in my poetry, the visual artist Ellen Gallagher points out that “black bodies” have been “materially and physically constricted.” However, for Gallagher, “being doesn’t only exist inside the body.” As she puts it, “this is not a slave narrative. It’s after the explosion. The fracture has already happened.”  The opening lines of Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem, “Boy Breaking Glass,” help to illustrate this point, as the speaker decries: “I shall create! If not a note, a hole,/ If not an overture, a desecration.”
 
It is in the after-the-fracture field, far from the realm of the poem, in the realm of the black body and its insistent constriction and desecration, where the radical form of the poem occurs. To write poems and to write about African American poetry and visual art is to mediate one’s self-construction within the explosion and after the fracture.
 
The intersection is fluid, where my eyes are not infected.  I am allergic, these days, so much. The red you see is rage. Steroid drops abate.  There is a battle, inside, and it is violent.  There is a battle and I am giving you, fluid.  Pushed, I stretch out to hit the ball, the head speed of my racket is quick—the ball will spin away from you. I am an object revolving through race, sex, and desire, native and other to Black/Asian/Queer. I live between Santa Cruz, CA. and Long Island, NY, and I often let go, after going off, posing with jawbone in mind. 
 
A coming book, Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose, Other is framed by a father’s dementia, a vehicle through which to explore racial and sexual violence, trauma and pleasure through multiple forms, from the sonnet to the journal, free verse poem to the lyric essay, to original ink and watercolor portraits. I slip outside of myself. Another, Lucy 72, originally seventy-two poems written in long, loosely structured couplets, are now honed down but still in couplets, to reveal a fluid narrative perspective that explores race, sexuality and representation both within the field of my imagination and, simultaneously, in my observations and analyses of my experiences in artist colonies.
 
As a poet, critic, and artist, I explore various conceptual possibilities that extend beyond the poem into expanding notions of poetics and critical inquiry across multiple mediums.  I have also been engaged in a solo multimedia project, Off the Dome: Rants, Raps and Meditations. These soundscapes, also at once a discrete album, are inspired by freestyle rap and performance art, combine totally improvised, original poetry captured on my iPhone, documented while jogging on the beach, dancing, practicing yoga, sitting in cafés or restaurants that vocalize interrogations of representation, selfhood, and place. To be free.
 
I’ve studied with many poets: June Jordan, Ishmael Reed, Yusef Komunyakka, Sharon Olds, Galway Kinnell, David Rivard, Cornelius Eady, Toi Derricotte, Allen Ginsburg, Gwendolyn Brooks, Myung Mi Kim. I've also studied wih many critics -  Barbara Christian, Alfred Arteaga, Michele Wallace - and those who’ve helped me to work between poetry and criticism - Eve Sedgwick, Meena Alexander, and Wayne Koestenbaum.
 
I’ve also been influenced by peers and mentors: Dawn Lundy Martin, Duriel E. Harris, Khary Polk, Wesley Yu, Iyko Day, Torkwase Dyson, M. Nourbese Philip, John Keene, giovanni singleton, Tisa Bryant, Erica Hunt, and many others whose work, conversations, and often collaborations have fueled my engagement with poetry, language, and art. 
 
Out of books, I stared at water, the brown slick of the Mississippi River, then the wide beaches in Guam. Overlooking cliffs, I lived near the Mariana Trench, Navy brat, playing on playgrounds made of land-bound Navy ships, a submarine buried in a field, the sleek surface of a copper plaque that marks memory.  
 
What keeps me a poet arises when I swim, today, in the resort pool, stretching, my back loose, fingers curled then opening, hands cutting below, my arms dart forward and release. This movement twins my backhands yesterday: my left hand pulling back the racket’s throat, like a bow and arrow before I make contact, the arms wing out, my chest opens.  How I strike the water is how I hit the ball—almost unconsciously—I enter the poem through its motion, time and space. 
 

Andy Fitch. "Ronoldo Wilson with Andy Fitch." The Conversant July 2013. [pdf]

Dad's Garage

Ronaldo Wilson

2012 Digital recording of spoken word Duration: 9m 15s Material courtesy of Ronaldo Wilson

Related

X

Related Topics

Related Contributors

Related Works

contributor

X

Ronaldo Wilson

b. 1970
image description

Born in Millington, TN, a Navy Base. Googled the city. There’s a photo on the Wikipedia page of Woodstock Elementary, which flashed me back to being in the driveway that wraps around the school to a small white boy in glasses, on the back of a his mom’s bike in a baby seat, little boys, me among them, hurling epithets at him: “Hey Googly-Eyes” or “Four-Eyed-Freak!” Such is the tension in my now happy obsession with reading glasses: 20/20 otherwise, but let me say, that as I look back, his eyes point to the kind of man I like to see, now. 
 
To Guam, over a few years, Military Zones, Officers, Blue Angels, and there, filling the scooped holes in the sand— a few beats away from the Mariana Trench—with liquid wax, sticking wicks in them, letting the “candles” cool with the class.  Lunch: A Hamburger wrapped in Aluminum Foil, Ketchup.
 
Back to Millington.  Playing in a tree house.  My desire then, to climb up it, and to stare.  Eat, boiled hotdogs.  Up there, cicada shells.  The trucks in the Tennessian Summer spout pesticides.
 
My mother upholstered the inside of a Ford Pinto station wagon, and we left for Alameda, CA. Slept at Rest Stops and Motels.  Dad let us steer.
 
In California, I learned the body is made up of salt water, mostly, and I’d fish in the Bay, and I watched one Perch on a hook dance to its death.
 
Sacramento, one boy I know from high school was shot in the head, left dead near the river.  Science, Beakers.  Drove a Volkswagen Scirocco.  Cal, Berkeley, the wagging tongue of a pervert wanting to meet in Dwinelle. His running shorts, see through.
 
Candy, my alter-ego from Jr. High to High School, even at home from college.  Lots of Phone Sex—learned the ropes of a conceptual notion of race & being this way, to be an imagined girl, to get old men to fall in love with me, her, to get off, and to vanish from any direct history of the self by hanging up.
 
I am a fish and love to swim, do yoga, and play tennis—I sought and seek fluidity.  NY, CA, NY, CA.  I ricocheted for many years back and forth, lovers, love, DALLAS, still do, my partner, my love – we had a cat that we borrowed, until it died by a car hit.  A film is being made about it in which I’m Pudgy.  I try to keep the fat off and sweat a lot
 
In NY, in an M.F.A. program at New York University, late nights at S/M Clubs in the then-Meat Packing District, Street Tranny Queens, Banjee Boys, working on my earliest “real” poems, or the poetry as point of view—freak wants to suck cocaine off my cock in a Dungeon, waves of men. Hotel-Tea-Rooms, anywhere, but started a PhD at City University of New York Graduate Center, and finished it, in three states, over 13 years, on 20th Century and Contemporary Black Poetics, Poetry, and Visual Culture, and I am now, currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
 
Before that, I taught at Mount Holyoke College in MA.  Six years of cutting my teeth, tone, and vision between the poem and the critical essay, led me to complete my poems and the life in which it all began to COLLECT—
 
My first book, winner of the Cave Canem Prize, Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), is a series of prose poems that captures the interrelationship of the two central characters, looking into their psyches and thoughts of race, class, and identity: Black, Asian, and Queer, who travels through dreams, city streets, gyms, porn theaters, beaches, ferries, familial memories and landscapes.
 
My second book, Poems of the Black Object (2009), winner of the Thom Gunn Award in Gay Poetry and an Asian American Literary Award in Poetry, contains works that slip between poem and essay, theory and epistle, revealing even more ways back into the fluid world, offering ways to make even more elastic yet still sharply pointed questions around and through race, sexuality, and desire.

Continue Reading

Central to my research and an influence in my poetry, the visual artist Ellen Gallagher points out that “black bodies” have been “materially and physically constricted.” However, for Gallagher, “being doesn’t only exist inside the body.” As she puts it, “this is not a slave narrative. It’s after the explosion. The fracture has already happened.”  The opening lines of Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem, “Boy Breaking Glass,” help to illustrate this point, as the speaker decries: “I shall create! If not a note, a hole,/ If not an overture, a desecration.”
 
It is in the after-the-fracture field, far from the realm of the poem, in the realm of the black body and its insistent constriction and desecration, where the radical form of the poem occurs. To write poems and to write about African American poetry and visual art is to mediate one’s self-construction within the explosion and after the fracture.
 
The intersection is fluid, where my eyes are not infected.  I am allergic, these days, so much. The red you see is rage. Steroid drops abate.  There is a battle, inside, and it is violent.  There is a battle and I am giving you, fluid.  Pushed, I stretch out to hit the ball, the head speed of my racket is quick—the ball will spin away from you. I am an object revolving through race, sex, and desire, native and other to Black/Asian/Queer. I live between Santa Cruz, CA. and Long Island, NY, and I often let go, after going off, posing with jawbone in mind. 
 
A coming book, Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose, Other is framed by a father’s dementia, a vehicle through which to explore racial and sexual violence, trauma and pleasure through multiple forms, from the sonnet to the journal, free verse poem to the lyric essay, to original ink and watercolor portraits. I slip outside of myself. Another, Lucy 72, originally seventy-two poems written in long, loosely structured couplets, are now honed down but still in couplets, to reveal a fluid narrative perspective that explores race, sexuality and representation both within the field of my imagination and, simultaneously, in my observations and analyses of my experiences in artist colonies.
 
As a poet, critic, and artist, I explore various conceptual possibilities that extend beyond the poem into expanding notions of poetics and critical inquiry across multiple mediums.  I have also been engaged in a solo multimedia project, Off the Dome: Rants, Raps and Meditations. These soundscapes, also at once a discrete album, are inspired by freestyle rap and performance art, combine totally improvised, original poetry captured on my iPhone, documented while jogging on the beach, dancing, practicing yoga, sitting in cafés or restaurants that vocalize interrogations of representation, selfhood, and place. To be free.
 
I’ve studied with many poets: June Jordan, Ishmael Reed, Yusef Komunyakka, Sharon Olds, Galway Kinnell, David Rivard, Cornelius Eady, Toi Derricotte, Allen Ginsburg, Gwendolyn Brooks, Myung Mi Kim. I've also studied wih many critics -  Barbara Christian, Alfred Arteaga, Michele Wallace - and those who’ve helped me to work between poetry and criticism - Eve Sedgwick, Meena Alexander, and Wayne Koestenbaum.
 
I’ve also been influenced by peers and mentors: Dawn Lundy Martin, Duriel E. Harris, Khary Polk, Wesley Yu, Iyko Day, Torkwase Dyson, M. Nourbese Philip, John Keene, giovanni singleton, Tisa Bryant, Erica Hunt, and many others whose work, conversations, and often collaborations have fueled my engagement with poetry, language, and art. 
 
Out of books, I stared at water, the brown slick of the Mississippi River, then the wide beaches in Guam. Overlooking cliffs, I lived near the Mariana Trench, Navy brat, playing on playgrounds made of land-bound Navy ships, a submarine buried in a field, the sleek surface of a copper plaque that marks memory.  
 
What keeps me a poet arises when I swim, today, in the resort pool, stretching, my back loose, fingers curled then opening, hands cutting below, my arms dart forward and release. This movement twins my backhands yesterday: my left hand pulling back the racket’s throat, like a bow and arrow before I make contact, the arms wing out, my chest opens.  How I strike the water is how I hit the ball—almost unconsciously—I enter the poem through its motion, time and space. 
 

location

X
  • Born: Millington, TN, USA
  • Based: Santa Cruz, CA, USA
  • Also Based in: Port Jefferson Station, NY, USA

comments

X