Seeking Deeper Truths

Featured Artists

Transcript

Welcome to Articulate, the show that explores the inner lives of great, creative people. And on this episode of Articulate, The Only Way is Through. 

The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gregory Pardlo has come to terms with his own childhood on the page, and is now giving his own daughters a very different upbringing.

Gregory Pardlo: The way I grew up, our family life, it was like I was raised by wolves! You know, my parents were kids, and we were figuring it out.

Tori Marchiony reports on how Sonya Tayeh overcame a lack of early training to become one of today’s most in-demand choreographers.

Sonya Tayeh: I worked really, really hard for a long time and it was devastatingly difficult. But I loved every second of it.

(Excerpt from Gregory Pardlo’s “Problema 4”) 

At 13, I asked my father for a tattoo. 

I might as well have asked for a bar mitzvah. 

He said I had no right to alter the body 

he gave me. Aping what little of Marx I’d learned 

from the sisters down the street who wore torn 

black stockings with Doc Martens, I said 

I was a man, because I could claim my body 

and the value of its labor. This meant I could 

adorn it or dispose of it as I chose. Tattoos, 

my father said, are like children. Have one, 

you’ll want another. I knew there was a connection 

between the decorated body and reproduction. 

This was why I wanted a tattoo. 

In a different century, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gregory Pardlo would’ve been properly famous, the kind of person who might need to plan diversions as they move through the world. These days, though, even very fine poets like Pardlo enjoy a much more muted public profile. 

Gregory Pardlo: I was on the subway last week, and I walk on, the subway’s crowded, and I hear, “You’re Gregory Pardlo!” And I look up and there’s a young man. And I said, “And you’re a poet!” And he says, “Yes.” So, he asks, “How often do you get recognized?” And I said, “Every time there’s a poet on the train!” 

Pardlo is today a professor at Rutgers University, but at 18 he had all but given up on school. He was the child of two young activist parents, who were less than amused when their eldest son accidentally joined the military. 

Pardlo: I had a friend from high school who was home on recruitment duty, asked me just to come in and sit in the seat. I had no intention of joining the Marine Corps, but you know, you go in, and as a naive kid of, yeah, I was 18, the recruiter just made the world sound absolutely limitless, and enriching, and adventuresome, and I got caught up in it! 

Pardlo left the Marines long ago, but he says that what he learned there fundamentally changed him. 

Pardlo: I got so much out of Marine Corps boot camp, just the– 

AJC: Just in terms of instilling discipline in you? 

Pardlo: The discipline, the stability. The way I grew up, our family life, it was like I was raised by wolves! My parents were kids, and we were figuring it out, but I’d go to school on my own, come home on my own, feed myself, we ate dinner here or there as we could, the old TV dinners, very often. So, having a ritual, having a reliable schedule, having a reliable social structure, framework, in which to operate, proved to be really comforting to me. And I think it has a lot to do with my, well, it wasn’t called ADD at the time, I was just labeled hyperactive. But I’m pretty certain what I have is a form of attention deficit disorder. Having the Marine Corps structure really settled me down, and allowed me to think through problems. It wasn’t just the structure, actually, it was also the physical training. And in some ways, the violence of that structure, right? The threat of that structure. 

AJC: That’s what I was gonna come to. 

Pardlo: Yeah, yeah. 

AJC: You don’t have a choice. 

Pardlo: You don’t have a choice! 

AJC: They say, “Jump,” you say, “Yes, sir.” 

Pardlo: Right, right, and all throughout my life growing up, there was always a back door. “Mom, I really don’t wanna do this.” “Oh, okay.” “Dad, come on, this sucks.” “Alright, fine.” 

No such luck for his own kids. Pardlo has two daughters, 11 and 14, who feel the influence of their dad’s Marine Corps training every day. 

Pardlo: So, my daughter’s doing her homework last night, in fact, and she’s writing this essay on Malala, and she’s frustrated that it’s not working out. It’s a three-page essay, and she’s got five pages of notes, and I’m like, “It’s practically done. Just whip it into shape, and go to bed!” I come back 10 minutes later, her head’s on her desk, she’s weeping, very lightly, and I said, “This has to get done. “Quit your whingin’,” you know, like, “Buck up, kid, and get the work done!” This is the Marine Corps training. There isn’t an option. At some point, you’re on your own, and I try and prepare my kids for those moments when there’s no one else to rely on. You will, in most cases, be alone in your responsibility of getting something done. 

Pardlo can be as to-the-point in person as he is on the page. He observes and dissects emotional subjects in a way that reads like reason. This is especially true of his first book of essays, 2018’s autobiographical Air Traffic, which also explores a pivotal moment in his father’s life. On August 3rd, 1981, Gregory Pardlo, Sr. and around 12,000 other members of PATCO, the air traffic controllers’ union, went on strike. President Ronald Reagan ordered them back to work. 

Ronald Reagan: If they do not report for work within 48 hours, they have forfeited their jobs and will be terminated. 

Most refused, and were fired, including Pardlo’s dad. 

Pardlo: He felt his job was worth more than the pilot’s job. But I think throughout the union, throughout PATCO, there was a sense of jealousy. There was a resentment that the controllers were not treated with the same deference that the pilots got. They wanted their dignity, they wanted their work to be respected. I get it, yeah. 

After losing his job, Pardlo Sr. succumbed to depression and addiction, draining the family’s resources and developing a toxic relationship with his son. In Air Traffic, Pardlo Jr. didn’t hold back. 

(Excerpt from Air Traffic) 

The father I grew up with still resented the competing demands of an unplanned offspring. I was the mistake that he felt he was nobly taking responsibility for, and I was thus made to suffer the flexing of big Greg’s narcissism in all its demonstrative and petty renditions. I don’t mean this in a self-pitying way. Whereas he wanted from me a show of gratitude, I studied him. He interpreted my scrutiny as insubordination. This made our lives adversarial. 

AJC: When you were writing the book, your dad passed away while the book was being written, and I know that you went back, ’cause you had to change the tenses of certain things. What was the push and pull, or was there any, between now having to write about somebody who wasn’t there to defend himself, and whole respect for the dead? Did you go and fix anything in the book besides the tenses? 

Pardlo: No, the book was largely written, it was largely done by the time my father passed away, and I was in the editing process anyway. And keep in mind, my father had been sick for a long time, and in the last few years of his life, his mind was certainly distorted by whatever drugs he was on, whatever painkillers he was on. And his behavior was very erratic, and so I had accustomed myself, I’d grown used to the idea that he wasn’t any longer the father I grew up with, in his good days and in his bad days. So, my relationship to the man on the page was already kind of objective and emotionally, not detached, certainly, but I had– 

AJC: You’d worked through it, right. 

Pardlo: I had some distance on it, right, yeah. 

Gregory Pardlo, Jr. holds no grudges against his dad, thanks in part to the catharsis he has experienced by writing about their troubled relationship. In death, as in life, his father remains a powerful influence. 

(Excerpt from Winter After the Strike) 

In ’81, when Reagan ordered you back to work. You were President  

of the union local, you steered with your working-man’s voice, 

the voice that ground the Ptolemaic ballet of air traffic to 

a temporary stop.  

You crossed the picket line I walked 

with you outside Newark International.  

I could see the dark Turnpike for miles, the somber 

office buildings winking insomniac cells, the tarmac  

spread before us like a picnic blanket. And you, like a jade Buddha 

suffused in the glow of that radial EKG.  

You’d push the microphone in front of me, nod, and let me 

give the word. 

I called all my stars home, trajectories bent on the weight 

of my voice.  

You say you miss tracking those leviathans, each one snagged 

on the barb of your liturgy. 

I, too, get reeled in by the hard, now rusty music 

of your pipes.  

I follow it back to the day of your accident in the story you tell: 

You were sixteen, hurdling the railings dividing row-house porches  

from one end of Widener Place to the other to impress Mom. 

I imagine the way you cleared each one like a leaf bobbing on water, catching  

the penultimate. The rubber toe of your Chuck Taylors kissed 

by the rail, upsetting your rhythm, and you roiled in the air 

headlong, 

arms outstretched, reckless toward the last like one hell-bent 

or sick to the stomach. The way you landed, on your throat, 

the rail  

could have taken your head clean off. Since then, your voice issues 

like some wartime communique, a ragged, typewritten dispatch  

which you swallow with your smoker’s cough, black as a tire 

spinning in the snow. That winter after the strike,  

we were so poor you sold everything but the house. Tell me, Dad, 

when you’d stand at the door calling me in for the night,  

could you hear me out there, speaking to snowflakes falling beneath 

the lamppost? 

Could you hear me out there, imitating you imitating prayer? 

AJC: Wow. 

Pardlo: My dad. 

The choreographer Sonya Tayeh moves through the world with a clear sense of purpose. 

Sonya Tayeh: What I was taught in my life was to honor who you are, to live life with honesty and trust, and live it as full as you can. And if you’re gonna do it, do it right. 

And Tayeh has been doing right by dance for the past two decades. But she came to national attention in 2008 on the hit competition show, So You Think You Can Dance. Before long, she was choreographing for stars like Florence and the Machine, Miley Cyrus, and Madonna. There’s also been musical theater work, including Kung Fu, a retelling of Bruce Lee’s life, a star-studded, live TV version of the iconic show Rent, and the Broadway revival of Moulin Rouge. All this, plus commissions from heavyweight companies like Martha Graham Dance and Los Angeles Ballet. But despite her successes, Tayeh remains pretty self-deprecating. She says her greatest strength is simple, being relentless. 

Tayeh: I know when I’m lazy, I know when I’m phoning stuff in, or going into the things that are comfortable for me. When I am challenged, when I am terrified, when I am not knowing the answers, I’m my most fulfilled. 

But this fulfilling life in dance was not supposed to be possible for Tayeh, who came to dance unfashionably late. At 17, she was the oldest beginner many of her teachers had ever seen, but Tayeh was determined, and took her fundamentals classes with young children. At age 25, she graduated from Wayne State with a degree in dance, having finally found mentors who understood what she had to offer, and how she needed to grow. 

Tayeh: A lot of the professors had their own individual techniques, which then helped me celebrate my own. And understanding about how I wanted to move and how I saw movement. I worked really, really hard for a long time, and it was devastatingly difficult, but I loved every second of it. 

AJC: Did it seem like there was gonna be anything else that would hold your attention in such a way? It was always gonna be dance? 

Tayeh: No, no, no. I’m obsessed with it. I love it so much. It is torture, and comfort, all at the same time. I feel like I wake up, I open the door to the studio, and I’m staring at a mirror, all day. I never have mirrors in my room, but I’m looking at myself every day. All of my flaws, all of my questions, all of my limitations, over and over. But how alive is that?  

Tayeh (in rehearsal): You’re trying to clean and wrap the wounds. And rebuild them. It’s like saying, “If my words aren’t enough, maybe if I place my heart close to yours, you could hear that it beats the same.” Or maybe, “If you smell my sweat like yours, if I can remind you of… The connection maybe will change.” 

Tayeh has a seemingly insatiable thirst for deeply felt experiences, both in and outside of the studio. She’s often praised for the visceral quality of her choreography, the angular, emotive, explosive nature of her movements. This intensity, she says, is rooted in her understanding of life’s fleeting nature. By her mid-20s, Tayeh had witnessed the deaths of her father, a beloved cousin, and two close friends, experiences which fed a sense of urgency about her own life, that’s fueled her ever since. 

Tayeh: My innate sensibility has a highly physical, very passionate approach to things, because I think when I wondered why that was that way, I realized that I had a beautiful, beautiful life, thank God, but I experienced a lot of loss in my life, which brought an anxiety. So, I think there’s a lot of passion because of time. Everything that I do, my thought process, which, once I thought was dark and now I think is light, is because of loss, is because this life is this small. So, I don’t have time to concern myself with all of the other stuff. What I do have time for is to truth-seek, because it’s going to go by this fast. 

 And so Sonya Tayeh continues to harness her sensitivities to those things that affect us all, to make dance that’s profoundly affecting.