Ama Codjoe shares her relationship with poetry and her goals for the residency.

Transcript
Ama Codjoe: Poetry is a way of existing in the world. So I think of it not just as a writing practice but as a way of looking and noticing and paying attention. In that way, it’s porous. It’s, I mean—everything about your life can be in a poem. That could be a phrase. It could be, like, a painting, a piece of art. And then I use the poem to kind of dwell with that, and in that dwelling, something else comes. And yeah, the poem starts to happen [laughs].

My name is Ama Codjoe, and I am the 2023 poet-in-residence at the Guggenheim Museum.

I’ve always loved to write, like, stories and poems. And I kept it really to myself because I didn’t really want anybody to mess it up, until I moved to New York.

And I had a friend who’s a poet, and she told me about an organization called Cave Canem, which is a home for Black poetry. And that was the first time I shared my work with people. It was like a beautiful, beautiful community. And then I applied to the fellowship that’s basically an intensive summer retreat for three summers. I mean, that was like my education in poetry. That’s the beginning of—one of the beginnings—of my life as a poet.

[Hey everybody. My name is Ama Codjoe, I am the poet-in-residence at the Guggenheim Museum. You’re going to be experiencing a brief poetry reading on the rotunda floor. So if you’re interested, feel free to grab a stool, hang out by the fountain, gather around.]

So the Guggenheim residency is for a poet to design public programs with poetry at its heart. And what’s really cool about it is you have the resources of the Guggenheim Museum and an amazing team, to help execute a vision. And that vision really is totally wide open.

So, to me, the poet-in-residence position is like an ability to dream and innovate and think big. I holistically wanted to think a lot about what audiences or collaborators might be overlooked, and how I can plug them into what I’m thinking about doing for the museum.

[My hope is that you had many moments of sensuality, of pause, and of care in your museum experience tonight, and that those moments continue into the evening.]

So the theme of the residency [laughs]: “I feel, therefore I can be free.” It comes from an essay by Audre Lorde called “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.” She’s saying, like, “There’s one model of thinking that is ‘I think, therefore I am.’ I’m going to add to that: ‘I feel, therefore I can be free.’”

For me, that evokes a sensuality. And that’s what we experience when we’re really present. If we allow ourselves to receive the fullness of what a piece of art, including a poem, can give us, that means that we’re feeling [laughs]. But that feeling, and being in touch with how we feel, is a way into liberation and a way into thinking about what changes we may want to make. Like, if something feels wrong, then we may be inspired to think about what can we do to change that, which is, like, a road into social action, or protest.

So one of the goals was to make programming that invited the public—and New Yorkers—to come to the museum, to see it as a place where they would like to return to, where it’s of use to them.

Audre Lorde would say, “Poetry’s not a luxury.” It’s not a luxury. So to be able to, I think, put it in its rightful place, it’s with the public. Yeah.

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