A unique and inspiring 7 minutes with the award-winning poet, multi-platinum songwriter & best-selling author.
Photo by Daniel N. Johnson
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Story Production: Aaron Calafato
Audio Production: Ken Wendt
Photo: Daniel N. Johnson
Music Contributor: thomas j. duke
Podcast Coordinator: Cori Birce
Production Assistant: Lennon Janovyak
Creative Consultant: Anthony Vorndran
Original Guitar Composition: Aaron Calafato
You know, like a story or a poem. Any piece of art, it's really just a ride. And I'm the first person in my audience on the first person taking the ride. I try not to overly strategize my inspiration because I feel like to strategize inspiration is one step away from manipulation. And if I'm manipulating my audience, as I said, I'm manipulating myself first. So, I like to be surprised by my pieces. But I also want to leave myself and everyone else in the end in a place of empowerment and hope and infinite possibility.
Hey everybody, Aaron Calafato here, you just heard award-winning poet IN-Q. I figured I'd let him lead the introduction to this week's episode. If you don't know, besides being a renowned poet IN-Q is a multi-platinum songwriter. He was named Oprah's Super Soul 100 list of the world's most influential thought leaders. He's the best-selling author of the book of poems Inquire Within which I have and recommend. And he recently, and this is timely, started a podcast around the art of poetry, also titled Inquire Within with IN-Q.
You should check that out and subscribe. Now, IN-Q's real first name is Adam. But as he told me in our conversation, one of his first loves was hip hop. And early on, someone told him that because of his curiosity and the fact that he was always asking questions, he should go by the name inquiry. And that eventually evolved to IN-Q. And part of his journey to becoming a poet began with two loves. One, as I mentioned before, was hip hop. But as he revealed in this very vulnerable and funny story, before hip hop, there was basketball and more importantly, Michael Jordan.
Yeah man, Jordan was more than a hero, Jordan, in my mind, was like my dad, you know, like which is so crazy to say, but my dad wasn't around. And so when you have a hero, you just project a bunch of shit onto them that has nothing to do with them. I remember my mom was into this movie called Beaches.
Yeah.
You know this movie?
I know this movie. Is Bette Midler in this movie?
Bette Midler is in the movie. Yeah.
I actually believe a second cousin that I have is actually in the movie too. This is a weird thing. So your mom..So your mom's into Beaches?
She likes this movie Beaches. So she got the tape. She would like play it all the time in the house, you know, the tape cassette in the thing. So, one day she leaves the house and I literally, like, got out my Michael Jordan poster. Oh, I have to give you a little context. At the time, my mom and I had this deal that I could send my dad a Father's Day card because we knew where he was, but he wasn't in the picture at all, like I'd never had word one with him.
And so I was, like, real excited to send him this Father's Day card when I turned eight. This was our deal, you know, like I was going to be somehow mature enough to handle whatever happened. And it's not her fault she was doing. An amazing job as a mom and I was just pestering her. You know, I really wanted to know my dad, and meet, my dad. And so she just said, OK, like 8 you know, you're old enough. So I send him this card, and then I would just go down to the mailbox every day and just wait. You know, I was like wait for the mailman, and so we never got anything back, my memory's a little foggy on it or we might have even gotten a return to sender, but at a certain point, it was clear that nothing was going to happen. And I just was so heartbroken over this. And because I had built it up, you know.
And so she leaves the house one day and I'm home alone, and I take out my Michael Jordan poster from off the wall and I hold it up and I play the Beaches soundtrack and I literally sang Wind Beneath My Wings.
You know, you are the wind beneath my wings. Fly so high in the sky. I fucking sang the whole song to Michael Jordan's postor. And I cried in the end. That's real, and then I fucking put it back up and I went back in my room and probably played nintendo or I don't know what I did, but yeah. So Michael Jordan was my hero. And then my second love was hip hop just because I absolutely loved the freedom of expression.
I told IN-Q That I was good at telling stories but bad at writing poetry. But then he turned the tables on me and put me through an exercise that demonstrates there might be a poet and poem inside all of us.
Let's just do an exercise like what's going on in your life right now. Like, I'll just ask you, like a very specific question, what are you working on, like what is something specific in your life that is something that you wouldn't talk about at a dinner party after meeting somebody for 15 minutes or maybe even on the podcast when you're interviewing somebody, what's something real that's going on for you that you're like, I'm fucking figuring this shit out. I'm working on this
On a personal level or on a career level?
You could do either one, but do the one that's harder, not the one that's easier.
Personal level is trying to figure out ways to set boundaries with people that I love.
OK, so what you just said is a fucking poem. I mean, that is so clear to me that if you sat down for a half an hour somewhere where you were by yourself, you didn't have any distractions and you weren't looking at your phone and you really thought about that subject like, I want to be able to set boundaries with people that I love. And what that means to you and why you want to do that? And then you just start writing.
It doesn't have to rhyme, it can rhyme, it doesn't matter, man. I don't put rules on art. The only thing is you have to intended it to be a poem. And if you intend it to be a poem, then it's a poem.
All right. I gave it a try. Here's a little haiku. Bear with me. I love you enough to tell you to stop. I pray you have enough love to listen. Next, I asked IN-Q about the transition from hip hop to the poetry he writes today,
I mean, I've always kind of explored all different subjects in my writing, but I would say, you know, when I first got to the lounge, I was heavily. Still kind of like, I don't know, into the competition side of writing, and I had to kind of work myself out of that. You know, because when you're used to like battling people, there's this element of like so great, which is maybe why I felt empowered, you know, it was like the only space that I had where I could say I'm great and to say it out loud and to be witnessed and to stand behind that, which helped me feel that in other areas of my life, you know, but I had to work myself out of that because no one wants to hear how great you are when you're in your 30s.
You know, being great is, you know, is a young person's game when they still haven't faced their own mortality. And, you know, they still believe in their own legend story. You know, all of that gets really boring pretty quickly and you start realizing you're a part of something and you start becoming more conscious about how you want to contribute. So I try to contribute through my art and through my life.
Sometimes the simplest questions are the ones we overlook. So I wanted to make sure as our talk ended, I got to ask N-Q Why he likes poetry?
I think that I like doing it because. I've never been able to answer the question of why I'm here. I've never been able to answer the question of who I am. And. I've never been able to answer the question of how to make the world a better place. And I think that all of those questions are really at the core of what it is that I explore in my art, and I'm hoping that. By putting those explorations out through poetry, it allows other people to start to ask those questions for themselves, and if enough of us are asking those questions in the world, then maybe we can make this world a little bit better than how we found it.
