Below is an unedited email exchange between Poet of Theater and one of our editors, Remi Dawns, that took place between October 14th, 2025 and November 13th, 2025. There are grammatical errors, imperfect questions, and it is somewhat long. Although, above all, it is sincere and compelling. We recommend following Poet of Theater on instagram @poetoftheater2 and watching some of his work before continuing.
Thank you,
Sentenced
Oct 14, 2025, 11:36 AM
Hi PoT!
We’re really excited to do this interview with you! I’m Remi Dawns (they/them), and I’ll be taking the lead on this interview, but other members of Sentenced may have some questions to offer as well.
Before we get started, I want to go over some housekeeping:
In this interview would you like to be referred to by name or username, is there anything you’d not want to talk about, and is there anything else we should know beforehand?
I want this interview to be fairly casual, so I may ask questions that are long and/or imprecise. When the interview is published my questions will be truncated to only have the necessary details. We plan on keeping your responses unedited, but if we do edit your words in any way for readability or something like that we will let you know before release so you can sign off on it.
We want to include a brief introduction on who you are to put before the interview for people unawares on who you are. How would you describe yourself and what you do? Don’t worry about providing too much or too little information as we’ll take what you say and mix it with our own observations to make a little intro.
As this is a correspondence interview, you can take your time if wanted when responding. We have no deadline. I will respond within the day, unless something awful happens to me, which I’m sure won’t. This interview will be about 5-10 questions in total, depending on how it is going.
If that all sounds good, here is my first question(s):
What was the earliest experience you can remember which impacted your view of the world and politics? How influential was it? I know not everyone has a memory like this, but coming from an “apolitical” conservative family I remember formally learning about sexism when I was four from a friend and that knowledge changed my perception of the world immensely. I suppose a more general question would be: what ideas/events/conversations/things shaped your political identity when you were really young?
-Remi
Oct 18, 2025, 10:28 AM
Hello Remi!
You can refer to me as Poet of Theater. My presentation to the public is precisely who Poet of Theater is.
Thank you for the due diligence in letting me know the format of this interview and for notifying me if my responses are edited for publication.
As for the intro, I’m a broadway level diva who is concerned first and foremost with working class people. I eat language, taste it on my tongue and feel it in my belly. I am sensitive to repetition of style and form. I understand all the rules of art and intellectual life and I’m not beholden to any of them. What I do is bash apart the art and thought of western civilization and then sort through the rubble for anything I find useful and amusing. I perform my poetry, am an excellent hostess of dinner parties, and am a moderately published author.
If that all sounds good, here is my first question(s):
What was the earliest experience you can remember which impacted your view of the world and politics?
The first thing I knew about politics and the world at large was that I was low, my family was low, and my neighbors were poor. When I was six, I noticed that we were all different colors and races, and that all we had in common was poverty. To quote myself “Looking at my street, I figured black people had to be here because people didn’t like black people. Same with Mexicans, Filipinos, and Koreans. But looking at tv, I saw what white was supposed to be, so I figured my daddy must have fucked up to have us stuck down here with the “minorities”. And I started thinking I might be fucked up too.” White Snitches, poem. So my first political question was “Why are we low?” I could see that the things racists said about my family and neighbors were untrue, and so there was a gap in the official narrative I was presented.
Let me know if thats sufficient. Feel free to ask away! Nothing is off limits for me 😉
Poet of Theater
Oct 19, 2025, 3:39 PM
Thank you so much for your thoughtful response!
When you started to think you might be fucked up, in what ways did you find you were fucked up or not fucked up? And what did you do with that knowledge? This is an aside, but did your dad share your beliefs about the world, about class and race?
Oct 23, 2025, 12:52 AM
I knew we were supposed to be bad because we were poor, and because I could see my mind worked way differently than my family and peers.
I knew we were messed up because of my birth mothers family. My maternal grandmother is the most evil person I’ve encountered so far. She stabbed one of my step grandpas on two separate occasions. She had a thing for mobsters, took out credit cards in her kids names, started businesses just to run them into the ground, and tried to have my father killed. I knew I was bad because I was low class and violent. I knew I was bad because my father had no education higher than an associates degree from community college paid for with military benefits. And my maternal mother used to leave me in dirty diapers in a filthy home while she got fucked up. She abused me sexually and her and my grandma used to drug me and traffic me. She was on welfare most of my life and she wasn’t very pretty. I knew I was nothing, and I still happily remember that today. It’s the reason why I have no limit to my ambition.
I knew I was fucked up because with my maternal family, it was always people getting faded and fighting each other. Two of my uncles were low level drug dealers. One was pushed into the path of a catholic priest for being gay, and has similar hair and psychosis as me. The other was a misogynist bully and wanna be tough guy who I remember making sexual comments about his six year old daughter’s calves after her sister’s catechism. He always wanted to pose as a gangster, and wanted everyone to call him “Rocky”.
I knew I was fucked up because my home culture and family culture ended up being primarily Vietnamese, and I had to constantly choose between preparing for a future with white people, and identifying with those around me. The only thing I heard from outsiders about Vietnam were replayed scenes from American made Vietnam war movies. It was infuriating to hear the other boys getting off on ideas of “asian” sex workers. So I grew up resenting white people and, at the time, trying to outwardly assimilate.
My father and step family were at odds in the beginning, but by the time I came back from China to guide him into the next life in 2008, they were best friends and I remember being numb and in a fog at his funeral as my uncles and aunts eulogized him. He encouraged my brother and I to learn from her family. He thought racists were stupid, had been beaten around the living room and thrown out of his parent’s house when he was seventeen or so, for bringing home a friend then housed with local white people to purge him of his D’nee culture and language.
Another thing I did based on this youthful perception of my situation, was to approach everything I want to be good at or understand in the manner my father taught me to fight: don’t wait for the other person to make the first move. They say they’re gonna hurt you, go at ’em with everything you’ve got. Kicking, screaming, biting, pulling their hair until they’re on the ground, and not moving. Then, you stop.
And I took this aggression, and the spacy, aethereal way my brain worked and used it to become an intellectual and man of letters. At age 9, after being accused of not knowing the spelling and definition of “irrelevant” by an inner suburban type, I spitefully resolved to kick the shit out of education and attack any and all learning that I cared to, so that the white people from tv would have no choice but to see that I learned their shit better than them, and that I was smarter. And I also had secret hopes of changing my family and educating them about a better way of life.
In third grade, I was getting into too many fights and was made to spend recess in the library. I never came out. Books became my escape from the pain and confusion of my world.
I continuously pictured myself shaking my fist at the sky full of cherished leaders and authorities. I knew because I was crazy I could beat the hell out of them. In the world of Ideas, I was a giant, eating them all up and getting off on the abstraction they exist in.
Because of my neurodivergence, being a bit schizophrenic/psychotic, I can imagine whole worlds in my head and believe in all of them at the same time with equal fervor, or I can murder them all at once. When people told me about god, as a baby, I took it seriously and saw god watching me as I picked my nose in Sunday school. And what most people see as differing beliefs, and personal choices, I see as collective spirits inhabiting portions of our nervous system. I have spoken to god and buddha many times. I have beaten and killed them, and the devil and Reason. Any spirit or demon who enters me is entirely at my mercy. I can expand my insides to engulf the infinite infinities of
And, because I’m dyslexic, I can and do invert every meaning. For my undergrad, I wrote about the practice of critiquing ideological critique. I spin things naturally, so its easy to turn the tables on everyone, including myself.
So from knowing that there is nothing real about ideology and academia, and that both sustain the bourgeois order, I can let go of any pretense for a greater truth rising high above us all, other than the connections and relationships we are able to make and hold onto.
When I got older, my father turned more to the right. He listened to talk radio and watched fox news. He’d call me a socialist when we’d get in our arguments, and it killed him that I couldn’t be persuaded or silenced. In my junior year of high school, I was reliable in most classes to distract the teacher for awhile with unending arguments. Once, I was stopped by the head of the school Christian youth club. It was during class, and I was on my way to the bathroom. I shit him down and felt him almost chest to chest with me, shaking with fear and adrenaline.
Oct 25, 2025, 12:41 PM
What a thorough and beautiful response. I’m going to hold off asking a question until Sunday, when our Sentenced meeting is. I’d like to share this with other members and ask them what questions could be asked next. Thank you so much!
Remi
Oct 25, 2025, 12:49 PM
I’m so happy to know it was well received. Keep me posted!
Oct 28, 2025, 6:18 PM
Hey! Sorry for the late response. We’ve just been mulling it over for perhaps too long.
Your circumstances are fascinating and sheds light on a lot of your beliefs. I am struck by one element of your online presence that seems influenced by your past. You often use “aryan” when referring to those with regressive beliefs, in a way that deviates from how it is colloquially used. When and why was it integrated into your lexicon, how would you personally define aryan, and how does one spot an aryan? And, while we’re on the topic of your online output, what is your creative process/philosophy when it comes to making things online?
Nov 6, 2025, 10:20 PM
Aryan is someone who thinks white, i.e., in league with the king, the ruling class. It thinks of itself as a wholly free individual. It imagines itself walking alongside the big leader, strolling arm and arm, and surveying the wreckage of society around it. It is what Malcolm X referred to as the house n word.
But the Aryan thinks of itself as the regular standard human being, and thus is more beaten down than the “n word” his master speaks of.
It pretends privileges extended to it by its master are not ever revocable by that same master. They think the hunk is real, instead of just steroids, exercise and a performance of something dominant over man and over the land, something like a king.
How pathetic to live freely in a mind of your own replicated in the millions with such a finite range of thoughts and utterances available to think and say.
White people, related to me, in my classes, in public and on the screen have been horrible to my closest relatives and my father for betraying his race. And my Mexican relatives and neighbors. I always believed I had to assimilate to white people just like my family and friends. My compromise was to not be racist but to be intellectual and know all about Western Intellectual Issues. I became literary and over the heads of many. In China, I was treated as a treasured guest precisely based on my endearing Nordic visage and bearing.
I had to choose whether or not to take on the affect, language, and ideas of white people. I had to choose how to be white, when to be white, and what to internalize the way I internalized Buddhism and respect for my elders.
I grew up eating with chopsticks and always having fish sauce and Sriracha in the house, while hearing the outside world and my own relatives, call my mom an “asian whore”, “dirty”, and all the racial slurs for Vietnamese people then in fashion. I saw my the buddhist temple/monastery my mom went to get shut down after upper class aryans in Orange County went to the city council saying that we were loud, creating traffic accidents, had weird smells, and were suspicious.
Our kind of buddhist temple is all about quieting our minds and attending to what we are doing, and all that is happening around us and inside us in the present moment. Everyone cooked and cleaned and gardened together. Everything was spotless and the loudist our kind of buddhism gets is chanting. But they shut it down because their words were more Viking than my step mom and the buddhist nuns providing a sacred community for war refugees who’d lost their country.
In China, I did everything I could to avoid other white people. This is where I first saw the great it in its international Diversity. The Australians were racist like the Dutch and the Canadians. They all had that same dull, bored, dazed white affect. They had no respect or appreciation for the grand life we were being given by the people of China. They expected to be mobbed and adored like Divas.
I outworked them, out studied them, and immersed myself in China to be rid of them. When I came back to America in 09 I was staying in Norwalk and Whittier, just like before I left and I was going to three different community colleges at the same time to get my transfer credits maxed out.
I was back with my kind of people, back down where I belong, until I finished my credits and got into Whittier College. I met with two Chinese professors and had a fifteen minute conversation with them in Mandarin about my experiences, what I had studied, and the books I was then working on.
My first semester I had a panic attack partly because a middle class white lady professor was rejecting everything I said or did. When I wasn’t in school, I was subbing at an elementary school in my old Neighborhood. This was an education class and I’d already been teaching all ages for seven years. She hated me because I had confessed to her that I was intimidated by her due to her being a middle class white lady.
At the same time, I began a campus organization to bring together different activists and promote the dorm workers unionizing.
Whittier college was, for me, a sea of white people which I had never imagined being so close to where I used to stay with my birth mother and step father. The neighborhood was mostly Latino.
Nobody wanted to talk about the union effort, and I realized that I only identified with the old ladies cleaning up after these kids because they looked like my community. And the reason I identified with the cafeteria workers was because I used to be one too. And all the campus workers were invisible to that sea of white people. I never got in with the white kids. I ended up hanging out with all of the non white scholarship students. They were all brilliant over achievers, and I love them still. And one of them I loved most of all, and I asked him once why it was so hard to get white people to get involved in the movement. And he told me I wasn’t white. ANd I wanted to kill him. I felt exposed, ashamed, and rejected
I was considered hyper conscious of my race. It was in college that I began to toy with the idea of speaking as a White Man in my own voice, knowing that if I presumed the same freedom of speech with white people that they themselves claimed, they would be infuriated and volatile.
After college, eventually, I went back to teaching, as a tutor, sub, and Summer School teacher for international students. As a sub, I’ve been reported for racism by white people a few times. That is because they think they are fit to judge me as a defective white, because I talk to latino kids, sometimes, as someone who is from a latino city. and who is part Mexican. That, I speak on a familiar term culturally, and my attitude may be more like Vietnamese or Mexican people when it comes to children. But white people often interpret my difference and caution around them as a sign that I have failed to live up to their standards for white people.
I think the final straw was recently when I was dealing with mostly black and brown students being discriminated against and sexually abused. I saw quite clearly that the only people who had my back, and cared about the students, were people in the hood, and all the white allies and people of color leftists suddenly had “full plates” and were mincing their words instead of giving me a yes or no, when I asked them to help these kids. That set off a cascade where I was kicked out of every group or community I was a part of in Long Beach, and each time it was the token of color director or manager, or the aryan itself, calling me crazy and dangerous.
I’d already decided that my only way to market myself, was exactly as I present myself at any given time, with no concern for conventional demographics.
It was after being barred from this open mic I used to go to, amid all the another aryan attacks I had going on, that finally sent me on instagram.
And I made the choice to talk about white people the way I would to my step mom, or mexican and african american friends. It invited hordes of these inadequate inner suburban aryan its. That triggered my own reaction to knowing that this social media shit is the main social environment of most of us, and, especially, my students. So I decided to treat them with complete honesty.
Aryan is a term that had come to me after seeing how white people don’t think of ourselves as killers and savages because we think white is some real ethnic identity, rather than a strategy of class management.
And since my main difference with most white people is that ive always been marked as white, I realized Aryan is a way to mark white people as believing in a specific racial ideology instead of believing that “white” is some genetic or innate quality within them.
I don’t market myself, as of yet, except as a broadway level diva. I try to make my own categories sometimes, when I do ads on instagram, but I have had little success with ads and I’m broke. Being honest on my instagram, caused the aryans to get my first account shut down. But, as of now, they seem to have given up. I’ve had hundreds of them decline to follow through on threats of violence, or come to the addresses they were posting for me when I invited them. I treat online agression, from THE TROLLS, as they call themselves, the same as real life aggression, knowing that anyone who can fight, or has been through enough violence, doesn’t take it lightly, or feel the need to fantasize about it.
The more I promote anti Aryan hatred on my account, the more I realize the homogeneity of this indiscriminate mass of stuff who think of itself as discrete individuals, and is just one confused mess or slimy blob, whose only hope is complete and immediate submission to Poet of Theater.
As for my approach to content, the stuff with me speaking off the cuff and summarizing what I really feel about whatever I’m reacting too that mostly do good. And stuff where I speak Mandarin. Thats whats easiest for me to do anyways.
Sometimes I do sketches, which I love more than my reactions, but those barely get likes. I try to use my instagram to promote my audio drama What If Billionaires on Patreon, and my Taylorverse audio drama on Kofi, as well as my youtube channel and tik tok. But I barely work on all of those, especially with teaching, I barely have time to make one reaction a day. In the long run, I want to do live shows and sell merch. But I’m relatively slow with stuff like that, as its new to me.
Nov 9, 2025, 6:47 PM
Thank you again for your thoughtful response.
I had more questions planned, but you have answered a lot of them through your responses already, so I have one more thing to ask and then we’ll probably wrap the interview up.
What do you think we can do to get to your ideal future, and what does it look like?
Remi
Nov 13, 2025, 8:04 PM
Thank you.
I try to work for a world where ideals and abstractions are not experienced as greater than our own lives and relationships. I try to destroy ideas and ideals in my own mind first, to be ready for when they take over.
I want a world where mythology is loved for what it is, and not seen as the cause of so many mutual fractures in our collective whole,
