Overwhelming against it. I was drug czar, director of National Drug control policy, 8 990. We didnt have this kind of research then. We had some, smattering. But now it is overwhelming, the harm that marijuana does. And i just have to believe or want to believe the American People are not informed of these facts. And so the point of the book was to get these facts out so they can make a second judgment on this, an informed decision. Let me get to the end of my story. I think in colorado which has been kind of ground zero here, that they will reconsider at the end of the day. Host uhhuh. Guest try to put this jeepny back in the genie back in the boding and recriminallize because theyre starting to see the results. You can watch this and other programs online at booktv. Org. And its day two of booktvs lye coverage of the Los Angeles Times festival of books. On your screen the campus of the university of Southern California, home of this 20th annual festival. Yesterday we covered programs on journalism publishing, World Leaders and more, and today we continue our live festival coverage with author panels on u. S. History, california history and crime. Youll also be able to talk with authors such Azzam Quinones and ben shapiro. Theyll sit down with us on our outdoor set to answer your questions via twitter and by phone. Check booktv. Org for a complete schedule of todays events, and you can see schedule updates all day long at the bottom of your television screen. All right. We kick off todays l. A. Times festival inside newman hall on the usc campus. Youre going to hear from Claudia Rankin author of a book called citizen, which was a finalist for the National Book award. Live coverage of the 20th annual Los Angeles Times festival of books starts now on booktv. [inaudible conversations] hi everyone welcome. Im bridget mullins, im a professor here at usc in the master of professional writing program, and im so thrilled to be here with Claudia Rankin today. And i want to thank the l. A. Times festival of books curators for asking me to be the moderator and the interviewer today because there are so many amazingly qualified people on this campus at the moment, and im just sitting in the catbird seat. So i need to make a couple of announcements before we start. Please silence your cell phones. And theres a book signing following this session. The book signing is located at signing area one and its noted on the festival map in the center of the event program. And that personal recording is not allowed. So i as i just mentioned i am so delighted to be here with Claudia Rankin. Just by way of introduction, how many of you have read citizen . Oh, great. [laughter] this will be a conversation. Okay. So as you know citizen just won the l. A. Times poetry award. [applause] and it won the National Book circle Critics Award in poetry, and it was nominated for the award in criticism, which is a first, and i think it speaks to the crossgenre, hybrid nature of the book. Her other titles are dont let me be lonely and american lyric, got plot, she also writes plays and frequently collaborates with her husband, the filmmaker john lucas, on videos and she is also a chancellor at the academy of american poets. So this book citizen, has captured americas attention and i mentioned to claudia that i wanted to start with a quote from theater director peter brook from his book the empty space. He says, i know of one acid test in the theater, it is literally an acid test. When a performance is over, what remains . Fun can be forgotten, but powerful emotion also disappears, and good arguments lose their thread. When emotion and argument are harnessed with a wish from the audience to see more clearly into itself, then something in the mind burns. The event scorches onto the memory an outline, a taste, a trace, a smell a picture. So that line that the acid test is when emotion and argument are harnessed with a bush from the audience a wish from the audience to see more clearly into itself, and so with claudias work i think that this important book has coincided with this desire for america to see more deeply into itself and shes accomplished this. And so were just going to start with claudia reading from the book and get her voice in the book. Well, thank you all for coming out today, this morning. Its im full of gratitude, thank you. So i feel like i have one shot. [laughter] whoa, okay. Ill read this piece that was written because i was curious to know if in the white body there were moments where if inside the white body there were moments where whiteness knew that it was behaving because it was white. Like there was so i asked a friend who i walk with because she owns one of these white bodies. [laughter] and i said can you tell me a time when you know that something that youre doing, youre doing because you are white . And she said, oh, you know in l. A. Not so much, but when im in new york, i know that when i enter Public Transportation and i see that empty seat next to a black body, i sit in it. Theres a sort of scan that happens in me. And i said, well, you know, its funny, because when you think about the black male body thats something i do myself. So then we had a really for me great discussion about the ways in which bodies try to, white or black or whatever color, try to step into a breach in the fabric of america into you know places that as ordinary, everyday citizens we know theres a problem. A deep a rooted problem. And we do what we can. And what we can means we take our body, and we put it somewhere. On the train the woman standing makes you understand there are no seats available. And, in fact, there is one. Is the woman getting off at the next stop . No. She would rather stand all the way to union station. The space next to the man is the pause in a conversation you are suddenly rushing to fill. You step quickly over the womans fear, a fear she shares. You let her have it. The man digit acknowledge you as you doesnt acknowledge you as you sit down because the man knows more about the unoccupied seat than you do. For him you imagine it is more like breath than wonder. He has had to think about it so much you wouldnt call it thought. When another passenger leaves his seat and the standing woman sits, you glance over at the man. Hes gazing out the window into what looks like darkness. You sit next to the man on the train, bus and the plane, waiting room anywhere. He could be forsaken. You put your body there in proximity to, adjacent to, alongside. You dont speak unless you are spoken to, and your body speaks to the space you fill, and you keep trying to fill it, except the space belongs to the body of the man next to you not to you. Where he goes, the space follows him. If the man left his seat before union station, you would simply be a person in a seat on a train. You would cease to struggle against the unoccupied seat; when where, why. The space wont lose its meaning. You imagine if the man spoke to you, he would say, its okay, im okay. You dont need to sit here. You dont need to sit, and you sit and look past him into the darkness the train is moving through, a tunnel. All the while the darkness allows you to look at him. Does he feel you looking look at him . Looking at him . You suspect so. What does suspicion mean . What does suspicion do . The soft graygreen of your cotton coat touches the sleeve of him. Youre shoulder to shoulder though standing you could feel shadowed. You sit to repair whom, who . You erase that thought. And it might be too late for that. It might be too late or too early. The train moves too fast for your eyes to adjust to anything beyond the man, the window the tile tunnel, its slick darkness. Occasionally a white light flickers by like a displaced sound. From across the aisle tracks, room harbor world the woman asks the man in the rows ahead if he would mind switching seats. Its then the man next to you turns to you, and as if inside his own held, you agree that if anyone asks grow move youll tell them were traveling as a family. [applause] thank you. So one thing about hearing you read the work is to hear this voice which has its your voice, but theres a dissolve in that theres such identification with the speaker of poem and then with the man in the subway. And so theres its almost as if identity dissolves into this identification. Theres this i just realized now, theres this huge deal of empathy which happens. And i wanted to ask you this, and i think this might be a good time, is the use of the second person. Which displaces us a little bit because we look at the book and we know that you wrote it. And you talked a little bit about your process in writing the book where you asked the group mind to come into the conversation. Uhhuh. So i guess that choice of the second person versus i think somewhere in the book you call it the brahman i versus this you which is inclusive. Uhhuh uhhuh. Its very striking to start reading the book and to see all these microaggressions told in second perp. Could you, could you talk about that choice . It wasnt a choice initially. I think i started working in the first or in the third person, and then i realized that the struggle of the text was how do you get a reader not to think they already know . Because i think these are old problems. Theyre ancient. And they have stayed with us you know, now we can say centuries, right . And so how do we reenter in a way that allows us to have to interrogate again . And the second person lawed that because allowed that because it meant that the reader had to say this person is doing that and that person is doing that. And i perhaps see myself standing here. And so those people who said they didnt see race, i dont see race, youre a little obsessed by race because i only see human beings. You know began to say things like, well that person must be the black person, or that body must be the brown body or thats probably a white guy. And then suddenly race enters the space, and then one has to take a position around whether or not one is capable of holding the actions of one of those people. So that, that was the sort of the thinking behind the second perp. But person. But another part of me loved this idea if youre talking about sort of minorities, that youre actually talking about the second person. That the position of the other is the second person. So on a sort of language level, there was that kind of sort of deliciousness around the way that second person met the use of the word other. Theres also a multiplicity of voices in the book a generosity. James baldwin, so many voices in the book and ralph ellison. And i thought of the last line of invisible man which is who knows, but on some level i speak for you. So that idea of the role of the citizen or the responsibility of the citizen is to notice things and to speak about them. And thats thats a role that youve been put in since the publication of the book. I dont know how many printings its had now i think six. Six . It might be up to six. Phenomenal. And theres been a change orphan one of the page on one of the pages. I dont know how many of you have recent editions but in the edition i have, which is the First Edition on 133 i think it is no its yeah. Its 134 and 135. And as you know since most of you have read the book, the book moves from microaggression from from the second person anecdotes that are really powerful, each and every one, and moves by accretion. And we have a gorgeous lyric essay about Serena Williams and it moves forward and then we have these macro aggressions that are sometimes they almost seem like unutter bl. So theres just, its like a breckian signage. Break had written around the theater walls, dont stare so romantically. Its almost like thats the architecture of the book as well. So in the recent editions of the book, there are more in memories. Theres not just Jordan Russell davis can, theres not just theres now eric garner, john youford, the list goes on walter scott is outside the lust but inside the list yeah. And so theres something of a First Responder energy to the book thats kind of, i think, sending waves through america. But also on that facing page, can you talk about what youve done in recent printings of the book . Well i after the killing of Michael Brown i was thinking about Darren Wilson and you might remember he said it was as if a demon was coming, and i saw, i saw him and i saw hulk hogan. And so i began to think um, whats going on inside that head of his, you know . And i dont mean it i think its important. And so i really was just thinking about those statements. And so i wrote down because white men cant police their imagination, black men are dying. And i thought it was the first line to something that i would continue to think about this and think about Darren Wilsons statements. But then Everything Else i wrote seemed to fall back into because white men can police their imagination, black men are dying. And then do you remember the other policemen asked the black guy to get his license and the guy reaches in the car to get his license and the man shoots him . And then you have the audio recording, and the black guy says to him, why did you shoot me . And he said because you reached into your car. And he said, but you asked me to get my license. And in the voice of the white policeman, you also hear a kind of confoundedness. Like he too is like i dont know why this happened. And you can hear it. You can hear it. And so which is, i think, a very different kind of body than white policeman who shot walter lamar. I mean, we could see that when he picked up the taser and dropped it by lamars body. Im not saying that there is one body one white body in terms of this kind of interrogation. But that um, that led me to want to think about what is happening inside the white imagination relative to the black and brown body. But that moment itself is itself. And so i ended up just moving it into a very loose haiku. And putting that replacing that in the later edition of the book. Its, its a very strong haiku moment. It does it takes, it takes you, it takes you actually deeper into the book i think. And so, but you also you took out the Justice System right . Is that right . I did take out the Justice System. Initially the page read in memory of Jordan Russell davis on one side, and then on the other side it said, it had the date of the Justice System. That case, if you remember, that was the case where the white guy lets call him that, the white guy saw russell in the car playing music with his friends, and he shot him. So he shot into and he claimed that he was afraid, and thats why he killed him. But, and initially he got off. But then the case somehow i dont remember exactly how it went, but now hes in jail. So it seemed like the Justice System had actually shown up on that one. So it didnt seem correct to leave it there for that. So that led to the desire to change it, to be more accurate, you know . I think when you are as you say, being a First Responder, you want to kind of First Respond with as much information as you have. And since we had more information, i thought well, we can change it. The book folds in a lot of techniques that maybe werent available to poets from a hundred years ago or even twenty years ago. Theres a capaciousness and a conversation that seems to be happening, and you know the book. Most of you have read it and its got a beautiful heft to it. But its also, it contains illustrations that arent illustrations. Its not a factic poetry. It requires interaction almost in the way that a play script requires interaction. And part of me wondered because ive taught this book three times now, and every time ive taught it ive been amazed at the subtlety, but also the appropriateness of the placement and the resonance of some of the images. And i wondered if you could talk about that process of finding the images or having the images folded into the text but not as an illustration as a scene. Uhhuh. Its almost like a scenic its an aperture into another conversation, a parallel conversation. Uhhuh. Very powerful images throughout. And then at the end you have these scripts of situation videos which you can watch online, and theyre also very powerful with the techniques of slowing down the action and the voiceover coinsiding. But coinciding. So theres a lot of visual, theatrical energy in the book. And so i wondered if you could talk about the um imagines and is this images and is this different from your other work . Does it expand on a process that you had had before . Or is it, is it a natural progression for this project . Well, i really i love bridget for saying im a visionary, but actually i think blake also had poems and imagings. And in his case maybe a little bit more illustrative, i think. So there has been a kind of line coming down can. Whats different i think about citizen and the use of images here has to do with the visual arts community. I had to get permission to use many of them. All of them, i had to get permission to use. And because of that i feel that it opens out the space of the page so that it really is a conversation between the many minds that supplied the stories in this, in this text and the sort of amazing Creative Minds that created the visual pieces. So i loved that the inclusion of the images meant an opening out of a conversation. And a consideration that one couldnt a conversation that one couldnt control. That also was exciting to me, because i have absolutely no idea what bridget took from the images that she saw. I mean, i know why i used them but that doesnt account for what will happen when somebody else interacts with the text and the image. So to it makes it, the space, much more alive for me. And that was exciting. The, you know the sense that one cannot and does not want to control the reader. Let it take them where it takes them. In terms of how its different from the other work i think that in citizen for me the stakes are a little higher. I was, i was very concerned with having the images enter the work authentically, so i was interested in what generated the work itself. So, for instance, nick cave i used a p