| UNDER THE SUN | Sean Avery Medlin’s Otherworlds The Phoenix-based poet and would-be rapper talks superheroes, gaming, and his new book. BY ROBRT L. PELA “I ’m almost always counting syllables,” the writer Sean Avery Medlin said the other day. “Even when I’m not writing poems.” Medlin’s meter is all over 808s & Other- worlds: Memories, Remixes, and Mytholo- gies, a new collection of his work published just last week. In “What It’s Like to Be a Suburban Black Demiboy,” he weighs race and gender (“I often feel not Black enough / not masc enough / or fem enough”); in “Money is Temporary,” he adopts the personae of a rapper who’s bitching about his streaming payout. It also contains ex- cerpts from skinnyblk, the album and stage play he wrote five years ago. “There’s not a lot of traditional form po- ems in there,” Medlin said of the book. “Not that I’m not into those things. I was just more interested in sort of establishing this new style for myself.” Going to school for writing taught him not to rhyme, he said. He sounded incredu- lous. “That’s really what they teach you in school now if you’re a poet. Rhyme is dis- couraged in the college classroom. I’m not sure why. Academia is just going that way. I had to shed that because rhyming is natu- ral for me.” Nina Paz Medlin said he used the pronouns “he” and “they” interchangeably and claimed not to have a day job. “I’m a full-time artist and I teach at the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing and I’m leading classes at Durango detention facility. I do monthly writing workshops at one-n-ten.” He figured out he was a writer early on. Surrounded by poets, rappers, musicians, break-dancers, and visual artists at Univer- sity of Wisconsin-Madison, Medlin thought, “Oh, okay, writing is a hobby and an expression, but it could be a career. It could be what I am.” His essays and poems often include su- perhero imagery. “I’m a superhero fan for sure,” explained Medlin, who’s 28 and grew up in Litchfield Park. “I love the idea of the superhero as American origin story, the connection of their powers to some- thing in their personality or their past — all of that is interesting to me. So when I was writing this book it was important to in- clude superheroes, some of them literal ones like Silver Surfer and the Hulk, and also like Kanye West, a hero to me growing up.” It’s important, Medlin said, to question and critique heroes, who tend to become symbols of something other than how they make us feel. In “Free Pt. 1,” he expresses disappointment in West’s support of for- mer president Donald Trump. “I wrote that one around the time Kanye went on a Twitter storm about Trump and there were pictures of him with Trump everywhere. Someone like Kanye, who once was a champion of race relations, for him to make such a drastic shift made me question the differ- >> p 14 9 phoenixnewtimes.com | CONTENTS | FEEDBACK | OPINION | NEWS | FEATURE | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | FILM | CAFE | MUSIC | PHOENIX NEW TIMES SEPT 23RD – SEPT 29TH, 2021
