Usually, Thursday night readings at Hurst Lounge just about fill the room. But Thursday night, as poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib stepped behind the podium to read, the room was overflowing, with people crammed into the aisles and standing practically in the hallway to hear him read pieces that touched on everything from a fight in a New Haven pizza parlor to spades to the criminally overlooked Mary Clayton.

Abdurraqib is the author of the poetry collection “The Crown Ain’t Worth Much” and the collection of essays “They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us.” His next book, “Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest,” will be released next month. After his reading Thursday night, he sat down with Student Life to discuss his upcoming books, why he never wrote about “Lemonade,” and to occasionally sign books and chat about his cautious optimism for the new Sleater-Kinney album.

The conversation has been lightly edited for grammar and clarity.

Student Life: Why write a book about Tribe Called Quest, and specifically why now?

Hanif Abdurraqib: Well, I imagined there would be a generation gap that allowed for their legacy to be lost a bit because rap moves so fast. I was really jarred by the fact that Phife died, and when he died I wanted to honor him. I think part of honoring him is kind of widening the scope for what they meant to a whole generation—my generation—and seeing that reflected in this generation, so it felt like writing that book made the most sense.

SL: The excerpt that was posted on Vulture—a lot of it was about how important the process of listening was with the CDs and the cassettes, and all that.

HA: Yes, cassettes are awful. But they were nostalgic in a beautiful way, kind of like punk scenes.

SL: And I was wondering how important that was to you…and I’m assuming you don’t still listen to Tribe on cassettes?

HA: I don’t listen to Tribe on cassettes, but I do think there’s something romantic about the rigor that it takes to find a song that you love on a cassette, so that when you arrive at that song you feel even more fulfilled than just skipping ahead on a CD or typing it into the internet and having it arrive to you. There’s something about the rigorous nature of pressing rewind and not knowing where you’ll stop or landing on the exact right spot. So I think cassettes are a romantic and deeply flawed machine, just like we all are, I suppose.

SL: Yeah, and there’s the idea of like forced immersion.

HA: Yeah, because you just want to listen all the way through. I mean, as music has evolved it’s become easier to listen to. With vinyl, it’s hard to listen to in the manner that we listen to music now, and cassettes were like that. But CDs were easier and digital’s the easiest.

SL: Do you think it’s different for people who are like me and are younger and found a Tribe Called Quest because a friend told them they were really good and they put them into Spotify and clicked on the songs that looked good?

HA: Well, yes, because I think you can immerse yourself in the work differently. I don’t know how much bigger of a Tribe fan I would have been if when I was young and listening to them, I could have gone back and found all the samples. When I was starting to listen to them, the Internet was in its infancy. And so finding origins and finding samples was hard work. And now you can just do it at the drop of a hat. So there’s a way to immerse oneself in the listening now that is almost more exciting I think, because you can really get to the origin points of a piece.

SL: Do you ever get lost on WhoSampled?

HA: Oh yeah all the time. What a great resource. What a beautiful, beautiful resource. There’s so much bad stuff on the Internet, but that is maybe the best thing.

SL: Your next two books, you have a book of poetry and the book about Black performance that you read from. It seems like they are kind of really different works to me. Is that something like intentional, doing two different projects, or something that just happened?

HA: Oh, it just happened. The poems, I’ve been working on since like 2016 or 2017 right after that book. And it was just ready to come out. The thing about the other book, the book coming out next year, is that the book deal I signed for, it’s a book for one’s coming out in 2020, one’s coming out in 2022 and I could not have another book come out on those years. So it’s at a point where, like, it’s now or never for the poetry collection.

But also you know I think that they are different books but they’re kind of using the same language to rattle around the same general ideas of what to do now, or the different modes that performance takes on. I think love and distance and anguish are a part of a performance, too. So I don’t think they’re that different, but they’re definitely different genres. They’re going to sell different parts of the bookstore.

SL: And when you’re working on these other books, is it something where you have to force yourself to write poetry, or do you just return to poetry on your own?

HA: Oh, I return to poetry always. And I return to poetry because I think that I’m baking poetry into all things that I write. So the root of what I’m writing is always poetry or the heart of what I’m writing, the language or the music is always poetry—it’s pulling from my poetics, my ground floor interest in poetics. So I don’t necessarily feel like I have to return to poetry because I always feel like I’m immersed in it.

SL: You tweeted something really interesting recently, which was that you haven’t ever written about Sufjan Stevens because there’s an essay that Jessica Hopper wrote about him, and she said basically everything you would want to say. I was wondering if there are any other artists like that where you’re like, “I want to write about them but I don’t know like what I could add to how we think about them. Or I don’t have a way in yet.”

HA: I mean the question I ask myself before I start writing anything is “Am I the person I would want to read on this?” You know I remember when “Lemonade” came out and I had all these feelings about it because I loved it and I was like, “But am I the person I want to read on this? Certainly not.” And that bore itself out. All the writing that came out about “Lemonade” was so great. All the writing done by black women was so great. I was not the person who needed to write on that, I was the person who needed to read and process that writing. So I am always asking myself like, “Am I adding to the conversation or is someone in a better position to do this than me?”

I think about The Band. I love The Band, but like Greil Marcus is the pre-eminent American scholar on The Band. So even though I love them, there’s nothing I can add to The Band. I love The Replacements, but with Bob Mehr’s book that came out, “Trouble Boys”, I can’t really add much to the conversation about The Replacements, you know? So yeah, there are a few bands but I’m also of an era where a lot of the bands I love have not been written about extensively. So I think my generation of writers has a chance to stake claim on the things we love and really make them ours.

SL: On kind of a similar note, is there any artist who you’ve been interested in since “They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us” came out but you haven’t been able to write about yet?

HA: Not particularly. Charli XCX is someone who I think is interesting. I don’t know what I’d write about Charli XCX, but I think Charli XCX is interesting. And that’s maybe the only one. Everything else I think I’ve had a window in to write about.

SL: You seem pretty into talking about and debating about food, but I don’t think I’ve seen you write about food that much. Would you be interested in writing about food or you don’t think you want to?

HA: I’m maybe not the person I want to read on food on a serious note. I’ve written a little bit about food, like Eater had me write this thing about this sorbet that I get delivered to my house every year. But I don’t have any critical language around food. And there are people who do that. There are people who are, like, literal food critics who know what they’re doing. So I think I’m comfortable ceding ground to those people and just stick to my tweets about fries.