Poetry &
Poetry &: Skip Tracer with Jive Poetic
Saturday, March 1, 2025, 2 pm, Dia Beacon
Event details
Saturday, March 1, 2025
2 pm
Dia Beacon
3 Beekman Street
Beacon, New York
Free with museum admission.
DJ and educator Jive Poetic’s hybrid poetry-prose memoir Skip Tracer (2024) blends memories of his childhood and adolescence with his extensive genealogical research to uncover the many paths his ancestors took in the New World—Jamaica, Brazil, Cuba, Panama, and the United States—as well as sojourns in Britain. To skip trace is to search for someone’s whereabouts, particularly that of the missing or of a person who does not want to be found. Despite the unfathomable losses of identity, family, language, and culture in the Middle Passage, family stories passed-down, correspondence, legal records, and other artifacts are evidence of not just daily existence but resistance to ongoing oppression from the de jure segregation of earlier eras to long-standing police violence against black and brown communities. For this event, inspired in part by Steve McQueen’s Bass (2024) on view in Dia Beacon’s lower-level gallery, Jive Poetic remixes live audio, video, and imagery from the book while sampling other important artistic and cultural references to the diaspora, using poetry and music to tell a new story of struggle and resilience.
Jive Poetic is a Brooklyn-based writer, organizer, and educator. He received his BA in media studies from the State University of New York at Buffalo and his MFA in writing and activism from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. Jive Poetic is the founder of Insurgent Poets Society and Carnival Slam: Cultural Exchange, as well as a co-founder of the Brooklyn Poetry Slam. In 2017, he became the first recipient of the John Morning Award for Art and Service.