Eve Ewing is being recognized by strangers now. She says she didn’t expect this, and she’s not entirely comfortable with it. Still, it’s happening: On the bus. On the street. At cafes. At least once a week, out of the blue, someone in Chicago stops her and tells her she’s wonderful. Some of which makes sense: She’s outgoing and warm, has purple hair and cool clothes. But it’s no humble brag: “When Obama was giving his farewell at McCormick I was there and I showed up on TV, and someone on Twitter said, ‘There’s a shot of Eve Ewing on MSNBC — and she’s looking at her phone.’ They had a screen shot. Mortifying! I’m not famous! Maybe the bar is set too low? Or Chicago is too small?”
She dreams of being a recluse, she says.
Ewing is a poet and sociologist, an educator and visual artist, an essayist, a closet “Star Wars” fan and a local Twitter celebrity. All of which would be typically consistent with a reclusive lifestyle. Yet, at Trader Joe’s the other day: “I’m literally talking to myself: ‘Where is the frozen kale? Where is the ginger ale?’ So I asked a clerk and she said, ‘Ginger ale is right there — and I’ve read everything you have ever written.'” As I walked through the University of Chicago campus in Hyde Park with Ewing recently, a student slowed down on his bike and craned his neck closer to get a better look at her, then pedaled onward.
“After my 10th book,” she said, “I think I’m never leaving the house. I’m going full Salinger. I’ll just come out occasionally to throw rocks. I can’t wait to be a total weirdo.”
Here’s the problem with that:
Ewing is having an unlikely breakout. Never mind that “Wikipedia Brown,” her Twitter account, has become a Chicago-centric staple and draws 30 million views a month. Her first book, “Electric Arches,” an eclectic mix of poetry, narrative and visual art, is one of the fall’s buzziest books, praised in Publishers Weekly and Paris Review alike. No less than Don Share, editor of Poetry magazine, describes her as the future of poetry: “She feels like what’s missing, you know? She’s an architect of a new landscape, doing these seemingly disparate things, and doing it seamlessly. She’s a poet, yet a sociologist, yet of education, and the writing is sometimes about education, and she’s a teacher — she’s connecting the dots in a way that makes poetry less abstract. People love to say they serve a community through art. Here’s someone actually doing it. She really is electric.”
Her book release party, earlier this month at Marwen gallery in River North, sold out in 12 hours. To repeat: A reading of a debut book of poetry sold 106 tickets, and quickly. (Indeed, two weeks after its release, “Electric Arches” was already in a second printing.)
At the reading, Chicago’s creative class, and Ewing’s friends and family, filled a large room, sinking into folding chairs. A high school poet (Kara Jackson, at Ewing’s request) read first; then one of Ewing’s mentors (poet Tara Betts) read. Then, Chicago writer Nate Marshall, an old friend serving as her hype man, introduced Ewing: “You might know her from Northside College Prep! You might know her from Harvard University! You might know her from the University of Chicago! You might know her from Twitter ….”
Ewing, punctuating the air with her right hand, read in a high bell of a voice, confident and playful: “Koko Taylor flew from Memphis to Chicago on a jukebox/ The jukebox could grant three wishes/ Koko Taylor wished for lipstick the color she saw in a dream/ She wished to be born again, under a good sign/ She wished for a better jukebox ….”
Afterward, Hanif Abdurraqib, a writer and music critic and close friend of Ewing’s who attended the reading, told me, “A lot of her work deals with imagining a futuristic, fantastic Chicago, and it finds comfort in world-building, but still honors the real people who live there. Which is hard. I think Eve and I get along because we both want to create a world different from the way it is. Mine is Columbus, Ohio. But I’m a cynic, and she’s a perpetual optimist, an Afrofuturist who speaks to a Chicago that could be.”
Also afterward her mother, former Chicago radio reporter and producer Sylvia Ewing, said she had never seen her daughter read poetry in public before. She felt “vindicated.”
Eve Ewing held the room transfixed.
They were leaning in, gasping at some lines, sighing at others. She finished with “Affirmation,” written for youths in Illinois prisons, a call-and-response work, a throwback to African oral traditions. She said: “Say, ‘I am magic.'” And the audience shouted back:
“I am magic!”
She kept up this back-and-forth several times, building drama where kitsch might have been. Watching her was to wonder about poets who read their work in an exhausted monotone — and wonder if they liked anything as much as Eve Ewing liked commanding a presence. Afterward a friend from high school whom Ewing hadn’t seen in years approached her: “She said, ‘You were 16, I was 15, you said, ‘When I grow up? I’m going to be a public intellectual.’ To be honest, I have no memory of that. But I do believe it.”
There’s a piece in “Electric Arches” that is not quite a poem, though it reads like a poem. And it’s also not quite a work of dark comedy, though it bleakly recalls one of those, too. It’s an image of a blackboard, some very teacherly cursive script — a work that Ewing created several years ago at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, where she was completing her doctorate in education. It was constructed to blend in, to appear both authentic and somewhat easy to miss. Ewing made a faux chalkboard with a small eraser ledge, and on the board she wrote an unnamed teacher’s daily schedule:
“8:30 Good Morning Circle
9:00 I’m raising the children you have forgotten
10:15 And you have no (expletive) clue
11:05 Lunch”
It was inspired by the 2012 Chicago Public Schools teachers strike, Ewing said: “I was at Harvard, homesick for Chicago, and started thinking how it’s not OK for teachers to express anger, and though a lot of that has to do with gender and teaching as a feminized profession, a lot of teachers have a right to be angry. When people found out I taught in CPS they said ridiculous things, like, ‘You must be a saint,’ and ‘The parents don’t care.’ I would be praised for ‘venturing into the jungle,’ which was just racist and so wrong. People can’t see teaching as intellectually rewarding in itself, so I got mad.”
The piece is a lot like the best of Ewing’s work, in that it’s not only poetry, or only visual art, or only funny, or only furious, or only pulled from the history of CPS problems. Ewing says “Electric Arches” is about growing up in Chicago and “using your imagination to construct alternate realities,” though frankly that feels limited: It’s also about Prince, Logan Square, Chicago policing.
There’s a snapshot of a poem, “At Work With My Father,” about shadowing her father, a caricature artist who drew tourists at Navy Pier, that’s also about gentrification. Ewing writes: “You’d barely recognize it/ Navy Pier was a new and desperate thing/ And instead of fireworks a man set himself on fire/ And jumped in the water every night at ten, I’m not even kidding/ I’m telling you you’d barely recognize it.”
“This is the hip-hop generation,” said Marshall, “and a lot of the work impulsively resists strict genre. It’s comfortable sampling disparate elements to create a singular body. A bunch of samples make a Kanye song, each sample is different, but the work exists because those pieces are so different. Great artists do this: Their work looks disparate, but ultimately, like with Eve, there is an idea or two under which everything’s organized.”
Ewing, who is 31, is at the heart of a large circle of Chicago artists — poets, writers, musicians, including Marshall, singer Jamila Woods and others, many of whom met through after-school programs like Young Chicago Authors — who take the art world manifesto of social practice as a given. Meaning, they instinctively look for places where their art practice links up with their civic duty. “People don’t realize, specifically in Chicago, this particular community of writers and artists, they’re intrinsically connected with the community-organizing community,” said Amanda Torres, a Chicago native who met Ewing at Young Chicago Authors and is now artistic director of MassLEAP, a Boston-based youth writing program (which Ewing has worked with since 2011). “And I think one of the reasons that they’re getting popular is they understand that if they’re not going to be spotlighted by a larger mainstream industry or media, they’ll create their own industry, and when one of them does receive a little shine, they’ll use it to lift up the others.”
Drew Dir, co-founder of Chicago’s Manual Cinema, a shadow puppet performance collective, is preparing an upcoming fall show about Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks, written by Ewing and Marshall, with music from Woods: “The exciting thing about Eve is that she’s this pastiche in a way, and that’s sort of what we do, too. So she and Nate never came in with this specific image to dictate to us. They instead had clear ideas of what Brooks’ life and poetry meant to them — they’re just instinctively collaborative.”
Trouble is, the labeling.
As Share put it, there’s no shorthand available for artists with ambitions so varied. As Ewing herself said: “This is a perpetual problem. I do one thing — show love for my city, try to make it a good place to live — but the way I do it takes many forms. And there are no great scripts in society for what this looks like. My poem ‘Requiem for Fifth Period’ is about school closures, which is what I do a lot of (education) research on, which is what I have written about for The New Yorker, which is what inspires my art. I’m intrigued with black intellectual history — people who did multifaceted work. W.E.B. Du Bois did fiction, journalism, early infographics. Zora Neale Hurston was a novelist and anthropologist. There’s a pressure to compartmentalize, and like Whitman said, we contain multitudes.”
The morning after her book release party, I met her at the University of Chicago.
She did not want to sit and talk.
She walked and talked, and kept a running commentary about what she was working on and what she was thinking and where she was headed and how she felt. It was like spending time with a very clever, insightful Twitter account. She had studied English at the U. of C. as an undergraduate and felt a little weird returning to its library as an adult, but, No, 1, she’s coming to the university next fall as an assistant professor in the School of Social Service Administration, and No. 2, her next book, “When the Bell Stops Ringing: Race, History and Discourse Amid Chicago’s School Closures,” about the legacy of racism and school closings in Bronzeville, is coming next fall from University of Chicago Press.
Before sending it to editors, she needed a book at the U. of C. library about efficiency and education. “This library is so big and mysterious,” she said, moving swiftly through its stacks, the sleeping aisle lights waking up one by one as she glided from aisle to aisle. She talked about student grades as byproducts of the industrial age, the influence of Ford and Carnegie on student proficiency, the broader trend to quantifying life itself. She paused at a card catalog: “Efficiency is not the most logical value to have at the forefront when we’re discussing the development of imagination and spirit.” Then she continued on, talking about how, after leaving her science teaching position at Pershing West Middle School on South Calumet Avenue to study at Harvard, the school was closed, how “numbers were put forth to justify it, numbers that could be considered fairly arbitrary and compared test scores of neighboring schools, showing small differences. Which is frustrating. The contemporary rhetoric seems to suggest now that the further away we are from a subject the more we understand it, and what I say is, no, there’s unspoken history, there’s what these schools mean to these communities, which gets brushed off — then people are befuddled why folks want to save a school?”
Her poetry, her doctorate work at Harvard, her tweets — it’s about this and more.
“It’s easy to be jaded by the structural racism alone,” said Fatimah Asghar, a Chicago writer and performer (whose upcoming HBO series, “Brown Girls,” is based on her friendship with Woods), “but watching Eve I’m reminded how you can ground your work in research, and how she isn’t holding hers in an ivory tower. You can have all the knowledge in the world and if you’re not bringing it to a community, what’s the point?”
Charles Payne, a former chief education officer for CPS and professor at the U. of C., said in an email that Ewing’s approach and work would likely “be debated for a long time. I don’t know another poet-sociologist.”
Indeed, soon after it ran in Poetry in 2015, her poem “To the Notebook Kid” (which is included in “Electric Arches”), about the dreams of schoolkids and everyday realities in which they thrive and die, began appearing in high school classes around the country:
“yo chocolate milk for breakfast kid
one leg of your sweatpants rolled up
scrounging at the bottom of your mama’s purse for
bus fare and gum
pen broke and you got ink on you thumb kid”
Ewing herself, growing up in Logan Square, was not a great student, by her own admission. She wasn’t a bad student — she applied to a single college, the famously serious University of Chicago, and got in. But she had issues with resilience, her mother said: “You raise a child to have one foot on the ground and one in the sky, and you worry if people get them. Eve was a golden child and teacher’s favorite, but once she had a teacher who didn’t love her. I worried she couldn’t take criticism. She had a rigid, judgy thing.” Ewing describes herself not so differently, as a pretentious, self-serious kid, “a 14-year old writer with the unfortunate circumstance of still being in middle school.”
Driving through Logan Square, she paints her childhood world narrowly, a few blocks, some brownstones, a library, Logan Theater, Milwaukee Avenue. “The only time I saw the lake was field trips, but I never felt deprived. I thought the beach was Humboldt Park Beach. Some people in Chicago never had a carne asada taco and I feel bad for them.”
She said that, even as an adult, as she left for Harvard, “I felt on loan from Chicago. I had a sense I was being sent off by my community to do more for my community.”
I asked if she would leave again.
She doubted it.
She said, “I recognize this city is in many ways undeserving of my love but I love it without logic.” She said, “Sometimes when we see people thriving we have a limited imagination of what leadership looks like. We see Chance doing amazing, he should run for mayor. Michelle Obama, she should run for president. Political leadership is narrow. But can you find a way to leverage things you find joy in and give those gifts to your city? Maybe what being a poet looks like to me is different than what it looks like you.”
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @borrelli
