Warren C. Longmire is a poet and educator from North Philadelphia. He is currently in his second year at the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop, pursuing a master’s degree in poetry. Well-versed in technology, programming, hip-hop, and jazz, he intertwines every discipline with writing in systematic and digressive ways. Longmire spoke with The Daily Iowan about his writing and discovery of Bebop for his chapbook, a short booklet akin to a novella, “Bird/Diz: An Erased History of Bebop.” 

The Daily Iowan:  You are an American poet from what you call “the bad part of North Philadelphia.” What is the culture there that has impacted and shaped your writing? Can writers ever disassociate their writing from the places they are raised in?

Longmire: Philadelphia continues to be an extremely segregated city. It is one of the blackest, one of the poorest of the big Metropolitan areas in the United States, but you’d never know it if you were inside city centers and things like that. They seem to be very educated and very white. Growing up in that environment and then going to an Ivy League school and being involved in technology, I really got to see the way those divisions played out. I’m still ultimately accepted in academic spaces.

As for the culture of Philadelphia, I’m definitely a child of hip hop. I came of age in the ‘90s. I even write a lot about urban environments. Certain images were just straight up from my block of Bucktooth streets. Those images come up all the time. 

I don’t think writers can completely disassociate. Those are your most formative memories. The first things you write are ultimately going to be about home. When you’re coming from an oppressed and minority group inside the U.S., you feel a certain responsibility to speak to where you’re from and to be representative.

I try not to completely fall into that because, as a writer and as a Black writer, it’s important to let myself be myself. But at the same time, you never want to lose where you came from. 

Your new chapbook, “Bird/Diz: An Erased History of Bebop,” is one of your most revered works. It is described as a combination of erasure poems and response pieces to YouTube interviews and performances. What is Bebop? How did you research it?

Bebop is a subgenre of jazz born after World War II and out of the swing era. Black musicians were in the war and in a lot of bands. It got more international exposure when it came back from the war. It was the era where it went from popular dance music to more studied, smaller groups, and more technical music. 

Jazz was just always played in my home, and is still an important part of the African American tradition. My dad played trumpet, and he was on his way to passing at the point where I was starting this book. My entryway was about doing an erasure project. I was inside a bookstore and found a biography of Dizzy Gillespie, which was small and tight, and the language was fairly simple, but it went in depth into the history. 

An erasure poem is where you take a text that already exists, go through and find the words that you start to connect with, and you erase or blackout everything else. Part of my research was just watching YouTube and finding these performances and documentaries, and interviews. I just wrote to it, and some of it was transcription, but some of it was poems. Those became the interludes between different sections.

You’re in two very different fields: creative writing and technological programming. They are both very impacted by AI. How does that concern or innovation translate over in both fields?

I consider them both to be language arts. A lot of musicians, especially when I was teaching, ended up going into tech, and there are a lot of poets who think about text in more systematic fields.

What’s interesting about programmers is they have no problem with the idea of using AI to build their stuff. They feel like they’re designing the process, and it takes a lot of understanding to use AI coding well. Some people reject it, but most don’t. I think for writers, there’s so much investment in, not so much the idea of the piece or the system it lives in, but just the concrete words themselves that you feel like you’re losing a lot more if you have AI do it.

I have ethics around making sure everything on the page is my construction. When I’m making a piece of programming art, it’s the same thing as when I’m making a piece of writing art, especially if it’s a collection — it’s a system. 

Redundancies is an incredibly visual prose piece branching from contorted images of what appears to be a house. What was the process for writing this, and can you share more about the function of the imagery?

I worked in tech, like at Microsoft as an intern and I worked at Electronic Arts. Coming from the hood to being in a hypercorporate environment and seeing how unhappy people were there and how unhappy people were here was a mindf—. Redundancies is about the consistency of row homes, and I was thinking a lot about Daly City, right outside of San Francisco. It was the first time I had really lived in the suburbs. Every single house was the same. Thinking about the other people that I went to work with and the people that lived there, there’s so much homogeny that you get. I still do a lot of programming as a part of my own poetic work.