When Poets Decide Who Counts

Code Switch

NPR

Society & Culture

4.6 • 14.5K Ratings

🗓️ 29 April 2020

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

All month long, we've been answering versions of one giant question: Who counts in 2020? Well, April is poetry month, so we decided to end our series by asking some of our favorite poets who they think counts — and how all of that has changed in these strange, new times.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Shireen Madisole-Muragy.
0:01.6	I'm Jean Demby and this is Code Switch.
0:05.6	From NPR, all of April, all five weeks.
0:10.6	You're lying, it was only five weeks, it felt like ten.
0:13.6	But also like one day that would never end.
0:18.1	This whole year of a month we've been talking about who we are.
0:21.4	And what it means to count.
0:23.0	Because we are being counted.
0:25.0	In large amounts.
0:27.9	All of us, every single person in the United States.
0:31.1	Every ten years this happens, Jean, it's fate.
0:34.4	But 2020 is very different.
0:36.8	I can't argue with that.
0:38.3	Shireen, there's no way to end this without sounding pet.
0:43.0	Yeah, a good point.
0:45.0	We can stop rhyming now.
0:46.0	We were rhyming by the way if you all didn't notice that.
0:49.4	I was just trying to do something different
0:50.8	to get into the final episode in our census series.
0:54.4	For those of you who are just joining us,
0:56.3	all April long we've been telling stories about race and identity
1:00.0	to coincide with the one time every ten years.
	...

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