Put a Spell on Me: learning through listening, watching, and simply giving in

Once again I find myself sitting in a hardbottomed hardbacked chair staring into a scene I can transform to idyllic. There are flowers pushing closer and closer to the sun, a neighbor’s orange cat with a sweet white stripe and cinnamon bun eyes gazes longingly at me; a stray black cat with eyes like grapes trots along the fence. It’s warm enough this autumn day to have all of the windows open, the wind brushing the Buddha’s belly, the wind teasing me again. My cat sits on her little balcony, sniffing her plants, checking in on the basil’s tendency to lean toward the sun, the four-leaf clover’s sprouted white flowers, the reliable Hosta June draping the staircase. The cat goes from plant to plant to plant, up and down the staircase, tending her little, private empire. In the background, a Chinese opera rises, an argument picks up heat, a siren hungers for flames, horns blockade the rampant shouts of finches and pigeons. The black and orange cats are having a standoff, their mewling sounds like babies being beaten by semi-frustrated belts. The cat’s balcony has heard the clock strike and is back to being a fire escape, shaky and rusted, the heavy potted plants threatening its stability.

I’m thinking of how language makes and unmakes, how it breaks and mends, how it disparages and uplifts, how it uproots and plants. I’m thinking of how the word, when taken from the page, and put in the mouth, transforms all over again. I can think of another way to say this: once again, I’m thinking of what it means to lay a poem on a page, and what it means to find those words living in the throat: some forceful on their way out, others passively aggressively creeping to the tongue, even others coy and seductive on the tonsils, even others reticent or lazy, shocked or scarred, deeply aware of their power or not.

I’m thinking of Lillian B’s voice. I’m thinking of Jericho Brown’s tremulous shoulders. I’m thinking of Jacqueline Jones LaMon’s glasses emphasizing the fire in her forehead. Yes, I’m thinking of a church in Lowell, Massachusetts, a series of pews with doors to lock us in or temper us or protect us. And. But. I’m thinking of Jarita Davis’ Cape Verde. Thinking of Tara Betts’ Chicago. Thinking of Kamiliah Aisha Moon’s urban buses. Joy Gonzales’ public interiors. January Gill O’Neil’s erotic kitchen counters. After one hour plus of poems that transformed stained glass to liquid resurrections, how can I think of anything else?

When Lillian B took to the stage, wearing her cowgirl boots and tight-fitting cords, her knit scarf nearly masking the fuchsia highlights leaping from the ends of her hair like a misfit of flames, her famous doorknocker ring nearly tapping her central incisors, that viciously precious smile holding back the first word, I didn’t know what to expect. And then her corduroys moved with her hips, her words made their way of her mouth, and yes, there was Audre Lorde’s erotic seemingly catching the tail end of Lillian B’s scarf, pulling it from her neck, turning into Cleopatra’s asp, hovering above Lillian, circling her like a devilish halo, waiting for the cue to strike first the stained glass, then each of us. Need I say I was caught under her spell? Need I say, that for just one moment, I imagined Screamin Jay Hawkins singing, “I Put a Spell On You”? Yes, there was the hypercomic, the hypersexual, the hypersensual, the hyperintellectual, the hyperintutive, all mashed up, I imagined, on the page, and coming alive in Lillian B’s performance.

What I didn’t imagine was that the poem danced across the page in the particular way that Lillian B laid it out. Here are the final lines from the final poem she read, “Account of the Apparitions”:

We took blankets sewn
with thinning economic plans and called them

shawls. When we wore them,

we looked like movie stills, stretching to fit
the screen. We looked like faded slide film,
symbols tattooed behind our ears:
the $
and Eye of Horus—

It was all so hip. All so cruel. It was
a hip kind of cruel. It was a club.

No, I didn’t imagine that the words would be so close together, Lillian B’s voice had tricked them into drawls, matching more the clothes she performed in than the white and black of the page. Here, I find a very serious poem, a serious topic, with the lines stopping markedly, pointedly, to ask us to think here, ponder here. On the page, it’s a political piece stitched together with cultural markers and wide arms; on Lillian B’s mouth, it’s a Bob Marleyesque slight of hand: sensual in vocals and scathing in idea.

As I sat in that closed-in pew, my feet molding memories into the prayer stool, I wondered how my own poems could live newly, with such an attention to live performance. Yes, I admit it: I sat in church, looking at, I suspect, Mary, baby Jesus, and big Jesus, thinking of myself, my own poetic prowess, and the power of the voiced word. Yes, I wanted to put a spell on the audience; not that particular audience, I’d already wasted my seven minutes apologizing for the vulgarities that comprise my glorious body, wanting desperately to channel Cedric the Entertainer and just sang already, waiting for the tremors to turn my otherwise deeply melodic radio voice into that of a poisonous blue tree frog’s nightly warning song. Yes, I blew it, as I often do in front of audiences, in part, because I can’t seem to shake the fact that I’m reading my own words, out loud, to a group of listeners.

But what if I thought of those listeners as potentials? As Lovers? As parishioners of the word? What if I began to think of my own words as charms, spells, the vocal performance an amulet?

Three days later, I sat in the audience at Metro Tech College in downtown Brooklyn, listening to Lorna Goodison, who took to the stage and recited a poem as if she were merely saying “thank you for inviting me here”. Immediately at the close of the poem, she did, in fact, thank the audience for showing up. No pause, no shaking off of the poetic persona, no switching of gears, and just as easily as she slid from poem to thanks, she slid back into the recitation of another poem. This was no Lillian B performance; this was a poet who saw poetries in every exchange, every gaze, every translucent nuance bouncing against fluorescent light.

For a second, I remembered Jericho Brown, who took to the stage reciting a poem prior to welcoming the audience. But no, Jericho created a persona and allowed us to watch the creation. Lorna Goodison, however, was the poem and the person simultaneously. Once again, I sat there, intrigued, and powerless to do anything except lean forward (and, of course, capture one of my favorite Lorna Goodison poems via iPhone video recording, which you can see on my Facebook page).

At dinner, I commented on Lorna’s ability to simply move, and she said something offhand, like, ‘Oh, you just do it’, and once again, I sat there and stared, wide-eyed, studious, in deep admiration.

Interestingly, I never think of poets as natural storytellers; yet, I think of Lorna Goodison as such. She dotted stories throughout her reading; she invited the audience to treat her as a DJ, to toss out names of poems they’d like to hear; she paused in the middle of a poem to say something useful and witty; she ended poems by beginning a monologue; she ending a monologue by beginning a poem. Fluid. Yes.

Three days later, I sat in Paul Hall, Julliard School, Manhattan, listening to a talented group of violinists, cellists, a bass player, a trombonist, and a bass-baritone vocalist weaving a series of charms all inspired by Lorna’s poems. This time, when I had the great pleasure of sitting next to Lorna at dinner, I didn’t ask her about her performance. I realized that, for this poet, life is a performance. There is no distance to travel between being on a visceral stage and being on a visible stage.

I’m still here, on this hardbacked hardbottomed chair. It’s raining outside, and my cat has come in. The trees are not shivering, and the wind is blowing. The chimes sing, and somewhere in the background, a television tells me my lover’s home. My poems sit on two Lexar disks in front of me, and as I think of them, and imagine them in my voice, on my tongue, on my fingertips, I’m feeling a little less anxious, a little more like a Lillian B and Lorna Goodison mash-up, but in the key of Metta.

*
*
Poems by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram have appeared or are forthcoming in Subtropics, jubilat, Harvard Review, Sou’wester, RHINO, Mid-American Review, Cream City Review, Bat City Review, Callaloo, among others. She is a Cave Canem fellow, and was awarded a work-study scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference (2008) and most recently a residency at the Montana Artist’s Refuge (2009). She was a finalist for the Mid-American Review James Wright Poetry Award (2008), the New Issues Press Poetry Prize (2009), and received honorable mention in the Cave Canem Poetry Prize (2009). Her photography has appeared in the journals Makeout Creek and Valley Voices. She is currently the Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow in English at Williams College.

Lorna Goodison is a poet, memoirist, short story writer, painter, whose work has been gathered in From Harvey River, Tamarind Season, I Am Becoming My Mother, Heartease, Poems, Selected Poems, To Us, All Flowers Are Roses, Turn Thanks, Guinea Woman, Traveling Mercies, Controlling the Silver, and Goldengrove, Baby Mother and the King of Swords, and Fool-Fool Rose Is Leaving Labour-in-Vain Savannah.

Metta Sáma is the current blogger for ZORA! and appreciates any comments.

The Terror of Waking To a Day That is Both Beautiful and on High-Alert

Dearest Readers:


This month's post is an excerpt from a longer piece that I wrote, in which I examined the absence of community/spoken word artists in academic settings. I wanted to get a handle on, for example, why educators in the 21st century still felt the need to isolate non-Canonical authors and to create "specialty classes" to teach non-Canonical authors. Why, I wondered, aren't, say, SpokenWord authors simply part of the syllabus for a poetry workshop or a Contemporary American Poetry class? The below excerpt provides a reading of two SpokenWord authors, Devynity and Michele Mitchell, a New York and New Jersey poet, respectively.


I hope you enjoy this read, and I look forward to hearing from you.


Autumn's deep hues and verbal blues,


Metta Sáma



“I’m certain that anything that brings poetry to a wider audience is a good thing. At the end of the day, poetry needs to be seen as an ordinary part of our lives rather than something extraordinary. ” – Paul Muldoon



For poets whose work has found no place in academia, canonized halls, or the ears of Dana Gioia, poetry is not given to such ponderings as “can poetry matter.” Spoken Word poets, heavily invested in community work, seem to respond to Audre Lorde’s incredibly succinct and apt statement: “Poetry is not a luxury.” Often involved in local schools, hospitals, jails, and libraries, Spoken Word poets are performers, yet their work must live off and on the page. Zoë Anglesey, editor of Listen Up!, sees Spoken Word as an association with


…youthful wordslingers who involve themselves in aural
graffiti, verbal combat, slam squads, and roving posses of
like-minded masters at wordplay. Spoken word poetry
can also mean the recitation or reading of poetry that
rides on didactic rails of the irreverent rants and coming-of-
age rituals…this poetry often keeps a beat; it accentuates
rhythms to move a narrative, and strikes syllabic accents
to accentuate the music of a piece or an outrageous punch
line (xvii).


She goes on to describe the importance of oral storytelling in African-American culture. African-Americans have shown a commitment to an oral tradition while also being receptive of the relevance of a written text, a literacy tool that aids visual and auditory learners. Similarly, Native American, Mexican, Latin, and African storytelling is steeped in oral practices, particularly the fluidity of language, the power of words’ meanings to shift according to the times. In Nigerian, Senegalese, Jamaican, and Somalian traditions, call and response and improvisation are poetic techniques, signs of quick-wit and great storytelling.

. . .

Poet, hip-hop artist, and educator Devynity began performing at 14, and by the time she was 21 she released her first spoken word CD: “Tha Spoken Word Joint.” She has performed at the National Black Theater, the Afrikan Poetry Theatre, and the Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe and has appeared on the hip-hop radio show “Off the Top” on 1240 WGBB. She has been featured on the PBS show, “Souls of New York” and has recorded with Steele of the Cocoa Brovaz, Dead Prez, and Lyricist Lounge. She has opened for N’ea Davenport and performed with Malik Yoba. She is also a 2002 Grand Slam Finalist and Nuyorican Slam team member. An avid believer in teaching others to gain power through the spoken and written word, she encouraged her grandmother to write poems, and at the age of 71, her grandmother saw her first collection, “Soul Sauce,” published by RoseDog. Devynity’s poems are steeped in an African Diasporic tradition that privileges the aural arts over the written, proving that language is fertile, malleable, and motile. Crediting her grandmother and her mother’s love of storytelling for her own sense of lyric narrative, Devynity uses “an array of metaphors and conceptual lyrics condensed into melodic form” to share her messages.


When I saw Devynity perform at the Liquid Lounge I was awed by her historical knowledge and the ease with which she educated her audience about the abuses imposed on black Americans. Her subject matters, ranging from questions of color to femaleness and hip-hop to reparations to single motherhood, could easily be construed as didactic, but Devynity’s poems exemplify a sentient wisdom that belies her youth. Her freshness and energy captivated me, as did her confidence and playfulness. She writes in “Intro Piece”: “I started flowing when I was an embryo/matter of fact, no,/when I was a single cell/and while engaged in the first stages of mitosis,/I was composing an opus.” Her spoken word CD warns us: “The words you are about to hear are so hot your speakers may just burst into flames.” And, indeed, her words are on fire; she uses language fiercely, relentlessly positioning herself as subject.

“Red Bones Blues,” a more serious poem, enters an often-ignored discussion about intraracial contentions. These are dangerous waters for Devynity to tread, as African Americans often still warn one another to “not air dirty laundry.” But Devynity won’t be silenced: “Do not be fooled by the color of my epidermis: I am black,” “Beneath this first surface beats African drums and impoverished slums,” “I am revolution, I am 3/5 human according to this country’s Constitution, I am the asp that bit Cleopatra,” ending: “I am one of god’s creatures and my blackness answers to no one.” This passage invokes I John 4: “For whoever is born of God overcomes the world,” and reminds me of stories of slaves interpreting themselves as ancient Hebrews who were exiled in Babylon.

Her free associational connections show that history itself is free associational, reliant on making connections between events and people, time and spaces, grounded in the reality that language makes. Dreamscapes are not the material for Devynity, but vision. Like Alice Walker, Devynity urges black Americans to listen to their history and to go in fear of worshipping Africa and Africans as innovators, philosophers, kings and queens if this worshipping leads us to ignore less glorious times in African history. When I inquired about Devynity’s grasp of history, she talked mostly about what she still has to learn but described her long train rides from Manhattan to Queens as reading hours. She learns history chronologically in order to see the full picture and how history impacts the present moment and predicts the future. Further, Devynity wonders how one can speak when one is ignorant of history, so history provides a lifeline to her lyrics. She is a poet of practical optimism who recalls the glory of African pasts in order to remind her audience of what we’re capable of; simultaneously, she critiques the ways in which, for example, hip-hop and pop artists use African dance techniques to advance their own careers without investigating the history of dance or rhythm or music. In “Interruption of Redundance,” she writes: “Stop the tape/Nefertiti must be rolling over in her grave,” “Suddenly bumping and grinding/displaying ancient African rituals/and I wonder what is wrong/with you,” and “Wouldn’t you rather be out/in the hot sun picking /cotton, honey, cause even with what the industry pays/you sisters are enslaved by diamond chains.”


Her poems are well-crafted, picking and choosing words with deliberate care (in revision) to grab readers’ attention and to be heard. As she tells the “you” in “To the Wack MCs,” she uses big words because she knows how to “arouse you with this spectacular vernacular as I have ménage à trois with vowels and consonants giving birth to constant cosmic concepts that can dismiss the diseased emcees stepping to me. See you just met your adversary coming to me with that mediocre vocabulary.” Internal rhyming gives her room to ask serious questions in a playful tone and also privileges the word as a spoken art form. Like the most ecstatic Biblical verses, Devynity uses periodic sentences and lush images to emphasize her point and to show the multiple angles of viewing one object. According to Stanford scholar Paula Moya, writing from multiple perspectives is common for those who have experienced the silencing of subjugation and oppression. Devynity works in this tradition, capturing the voices of the young and old who live in impoverished urban areas and are negatively influenced by popular cultures that keep their mind in a state of oppression.


Devynity is not invested in imitating the sounds of words, syntax, or grammar. She is obsessive about her revisions, working diligently to make sure her poems stand out on the page. She uses hip-hop and colloquial speech as well as purely-lyrical language in order to emphasize the ways in which black speech is metaphorical and/or signifying. Her poems attempt to reach out to oppressed peoples and offer them tools to dig their way out of the dung heap. She works to not only advance her own knowledge, craft, and poetry, but she takes a deep interest in poets of the community. She advocates for poetry as that which establishes one’s place in the world, while also speaking from her particular positions in order to interpret the world. She works in an African Diasporic tradition which raises the consciousness, I believe, of Americans, proving that one doesn’t need to pilfer from a white tradition in order to be thought-provoking, insightful, original, and worthwhile.

. . .

New Jersey poet Michele Mitchell, author of the chapbooks mood and thinkin’ aloud, is attending school at Rutgers University. She’s working on her BA and hopes to be finished in May. Although she wanted to graduate, get to work, and keep writing, she’s contemplating a master’s in education. I ran into Michele’s poem, “Oranges,” on a Web site dedicated to New York and New Jersey poets and immediately began a fast friendship via e-mail. “Oranges” questions the word orange and its original and extended connotations, intellectually, spiritually, psychologically and emotionally.


the color of the day is orange

high alerts and higher pulse rates

higher prices for duct tape and plastic

the masses paying higher prices for gas masks

and hustlers are now sellin them on the low

……………………………………………………..

aint nothing gonna change but our air quality.

the color of the day is orange

like the home depot sign isnt that ironic

………………………………………………

a fact is a fact but the public gets told fiction

slurred is my diction as i get tongue tied tryin to explain

my mind wanders back to four wrecked planes

……………………………………………………………

the color of the day is orange

osama has more videos than blockbuster

where a new release is guaranteed

but our safety is not

………………………………………………

and not to worry

no wonder our vision is blurry

we have our heads up our a$$es

thinkin bout michael jackson interviews

frenchies full frontal view

that r kelly can molest young girls and still reach number two

how can america be the land of red white and blue

if the color of the day is orange?(1-5, 12-15, 18-20, 24-27, 29-36)




“Oranges” is a really great piece for several reasons: 1. It begins in the childlike wonder of locating objects in the sky (the sun), then 2. quickly moves from that space to begin a political discussion, which 3. swerves into a socially conscious speculation of the world. I love the moves it makes, the risks it takes, and its willingness to fall flat on its face, pick itself up, dust itself off, and fly again. This is a high-momentum poem, pulled by voice and rhythm, free associations and sound. Its frenetic energy mirrors the subject: the terror of waking to a day that is at once beautiful (sunny) and on high-alert. The color orange shifts shapes and is yet stabilized by fear; we all understand the terror alert colors by now, orange alert signaling the apocalypse. Yet, this fear has been unwarranted, and Michele shows where our fear and terror should be located: poverty in a country that is wasting dollars with alert systems. At times, the poet cannot seem to step out of a preachy tone—“we have our heads up our a$$es”—but mostly sticks with observation and speculation.


Michele’s poems are playful and provocative, energetic and sensuous in her voice and tone, buoyant and bountiful. Like the best Spoken Word poems, her words travel miles, reaching to her heart, her politics, her spirit. She writes in “Ars Poetica”:



from the words I took

call me a vocabulary crook

don’t need a dictionary or any book

to leave my competition shook

when i lick my lips and put a leer to my look

then, my flow is off da hook



This is a contemporary, urban voice writing a traditional poem, using the language of contemporary speakers, as well as the rhythms and sound effects of street musicians. The end rhymes remind me of “Jabberwocky” and other poems written for young writers, but reading the poems causes me to wonder if Michele is playing around with the “idea” that a poem has to rhyme. Michele is an intelligent poet who reads, listens, and engages with her audience, but this is not a poet who will sacrifice heart for head, seeing the two, instead, as existing in the same room. Michele writes “cave poems,” poems that enter the depths of the soul and wrench out whatever pains and joys, whatever exuberance and vulnerability, can reach the hearts of the multitudinous masses. Dana Gioia wonders if poetry can matter, and I say, read Michele Michele, and ask new questions.


While I will not advocate a new, continued, or redefined canon, I am writing towards a literacy campaign that promotes writing on its own terms. The project of a Spoken Word poet, I believe, is different than the project of an academic poet, and without doubt, different Spoken Word poets have different projects, as do academic poets. Our job is to ask: what is this poem saying? How is it saying it? Why and to what end? I am not suggesting that writers should eliminate tastes or preferences, but to decry a poem because it does not fit one’s personal standards is to show a limitation in wanting to understand and listen to the world. It is only after we are capable of entering into poems the way, for example, cubists entered into a painting, or the way a child enters a circus, that we can begin to appreciate poems and the poets who write them.




Works Cited:
Anglesey, Zoë, ed. Listen Up!: spoken word poetry. NY: One World, 1999
Devynity. Tha Spoken Word Joynt. NY: Furious Imani Publishing, 2000.
Gioia, Dana. Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture,
Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2002.
Lorde, Audre. “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” Sister Outsider: essays and speeches.
Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984.

Notes: the epigraph can be found at http://www.pw.org/content/tale_10_cruelest_months
Picture 1 courtesy of Monkey Paradox Productions (c)2008.
Pictures2 courtesy of Metta Sáma
Picture 3 courtesy of Mahogany Browne

"Closer to Knowing", an interview with DéLana Dameron

DéLana Dameron’s debut poetry collection How God Ends Us (University of South Carolina Press, 2009) rests on my lap. It is raining, and the trees intermittently shake the rain from their branches. I’m thinking back on the first conversation I had with DéLana, an energetic discussion of poetics. I hadn’t read any of her poems, but by the time the chat had come to end, I’d already proposed an interview. DéLana speaks about poems and poetries with sharp clarity and refreshing honesty; she’s quick to tell you what she doesn’t know, and quick to reveal what she does know. She’s a natural conversationalist and intensely intellectual. The poems in How God Ends Us spark with her wit; indeed, it’s difficult for me to read this book without seeing a stream of streetlights popping on and on and on. I’ve walked the streets with this book, read it in bits and pieces—at St. Mark’s, fresh out of its brown paper bag; on trains and at coffee shops; on my front stoop; and here, on this couch. This is a hard book to read in one sitting, a book that deals with tough subjects, that is confrontational and compassionate, reserved and lustful, full-bodied and heightened in its spirit. DéLana’s poems are visionary and move with the confidence of a woman who is beginning to come to terms with the blessings she’s been given: poet, seeker, lover, custodian of spirits.

The following interview was conducted over three days via email.

Hi, DéLana. Thanks for agreeing to participate in this interview. I'd like to begin by acknowledging that you are at a writer's retreat, and you've taken time out of your work to participate in this interview. Would you care to talk about this retreat? Where are you, and what are you working on?

Hi, Metta. Thanks for doing this! I am writing to you from Ithaca, NY. The landscape is definitely different from my Harlem studio. Much more quiet. I find myself missing the sirens and the sounds of St. Nicholas Ave. I am currently beginning my second of four weeks at the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. For the purposes of saying I went away to do “work,” I'll say I'm working on finishing/editing two poetry manuscripts. I also brought what I call a first draft of a novel, but given the pace that I've adopted here, I doubt I'll get to it.

You recently posted a very beautiful photograph of about 36 pages of a manuscript in progress. You'd pasted the pages on the wall, and I kept imagining your words speaking to you while you were awake and asleep. Could you talk a bit about your process for putting together your new manuscript?

Well, there are two manuscripts. One manuscript, Cartographer, already had some semblance of order. I felt I needed to “see” it differently, so I put it up on one of two bulletin boards in the studio. The second one, Suture & Cleave, is ironically older, but needs some more guidance. I had less of an idea of what I wanted when I started it. Before I committed it to the bulletin board, I spread out all of the poems associated with that project on the floor. I picked up what I knew I wanted to be the first poem and read it out loud. I like to name the things that I do. I called it a type of call-and-response ordering — something I’d never done before. I “call” out to the poems gathered by reading the poem in my hand, and “answer” by reading what might be the next poem. It felt right for this one.

Your first collection, How God Ends Us, begins with the poem “Lament,” a provocative apostrophe poem to God. How comfortable were you with starting your debut collection with this poem?

A friend found that poem buried in earlier versions of this book. Really, I didn't believe it to be that big of a deal. I guess when you move it to the front and have it be the place where the title of the book is “couched,” it's a different thing, right? So anyway, the poem “Lament” also had a different title — both the poem and the book. (“Lament” was titled “How God Ends Us,” and How God Ends Us (the book) was something different.) The friend said that the title of the poem could work as a great book title. I was hesitant. But I listened, as those not as close to the work can sometimes see it for what it is, for what it wants to be. I see things for what I want it to be, and at that time I wanted that book to be something different. When I brought the poem forward, the poems inside changed, the narrative changed, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to leave it in the beginning.

I know as a reader I like to look in the Table of Contents for the title poems. I always have such high hopes for title poems and what they should be. I know they should be strong to have such a big, flashy marker. I knew that if I was going to title the book How God Ends Us — which, only because I've had to justify it and think about it as a label of a collection instead of a single poem — I didn’t want the readers to open up the book titled How God Ends Us and then turn directly to a poem with the same name. In changing the poem’s title, there is still a bit of discovery in it. There’s still a chance to not run the reader away. So, I think I only became comfortable with putting it in the front after I changed its title.

Could you talk about the form of this poem?

Sometimes, I don’t know the thing I want to do until I’ve done it. For “Lament,” I had a notebook full of notes and lines and images. I had these images in this book that sort of felt like they “went together.” I tend to say when I’m stuck with writing something, but have some of the elements, then I turn to form. So I had these six or so lines in a journal, and I wanted to “do something.” ( I was sitting in a coffeeshop with a friend, and we were having our writing time, and I had nothing to write.) I thought, how can I make these lines work in a poem? I thought about the different forms of poetry that I knew that incorporated a full line and used it in a repetitive fashion — the less writing I had to do! I enjoy the pantoum for this. Outside of its poetic beauty, you only really have to write half a poem because of the nature of repetition of the lines. But I had six lines, and I didn’t know what to fill in between lines like, “How God does end us” or “Disaster is the moist inside of a lie” or “spirits in the spaces of the house.” So I thought about the nature of the sestina, and the way the end words rotate. I put the two together: the pantoum and the sestina. I jokingly call it a pantina. Maybe it’s been done before? I haven't seen it.

Side note: I was talking to another friend about this poem, as I get many questions. Perhaps its positioning in the manuscript or its message or its form. I told him that I felt that form was a one-hit wonder; maybe the form and the message were meant to be together, and for that one time only. It’s tough to find six other lines you wouldn’t mind seeing six more times. However, while up here in and around the gorges of Ithaca, I've managed to do a second pantina. I'll let you know if I decide to keep it or not.

My response to this question seems to be getting long and winding. But I do want to say, I love form. I don’t believe this manuscript portrays my level of love and trust and engagement with all types of form. The other two manuscripts, more so. I believe when I have the words to say but not sure how to say them/present them, I turn to form. Most of the poems in this collection already had a way of speaking, a form when they were written. I just had to obey and write them down. There was little coaxing.

I appreciate you talking openly and reflectively about journaling and being so clear in delineating journal writing and poem writing. Many writers, I believe, would love to hear how writers think about the two having very different functions . . . How do you balance (do you?) poetic restraint with exploding emotions in poems?

I suppose my poetics are rooted in the emotional. And the narrative, the story. So my poetry believes it exists for emotions while telling the story. But you have to tell the story. You have to tell the story well. You cannot let emotions get in the way of telling the story. I have journals for that. Maybe it’s about compartmentalizing? So the tears and all have been shed in those pages. The why why why’s have been asked and asked (and is asked daily) and fingers pointed and name-calling in those moleskin pages. So I don’t use poetry as catharsis in that way. I have outlets. But I do use poetry to portray/convey/paint something that I believe others can relate to. When I decided to try and put these rather personal stories into poems, I did not want to use names. In my personal journals I use names. I think names in my family poems would distance the reader from the action/emotion that is happening — preparing a body for a funeral, massaging the stiffening joints of the ailing. Maybe that is the answer: I restrain by withholding names. For example, there are two grandmothers I write about yet in the poems I don’t distinguish between the maternal or paternal grandmother. . . . They are essentially “grandmother.” Only one is still living . . . through the book, and in my real life.

Your response to calling of names has me particularly intrigued as does the wonderful definition you offer of “ancestor.” Part of what I found compelling about your manuscript, in fact, had to do with this notion of naming (not identifying, in terms of formal names) the pain, of naming the spirit, of naming that which haunts and rises and builds. (I'm thinking in particular of the poems “How Quickly the Sun Comes,” “Closer to Knowing,” “Parable of the Hungry Missionary,” “All Hallows’ Eve” and “It Is Written.”) Does the naming settle the account, does it open up new avenues, new possibilities? Do you learn from your own errors, from the errors of others? What does the space of the poem teach you that the space of the journal cannot? (Here, I’m thinking of the pair of poems “The Red Thread” and “How Quickly the Sun Comes. ”)

Metta, I like this question for that it asks me to think and so “name” here in my response. You are asking me to name my naming, and perhaps it is the settling I am not wanting to do. Firstly, yes, the space of the poem allows me to feel, to process differently than the space of the journal. It is more controlling. It demands a bit more shaping — a certain deliberateness that works in conjunction with the journaling . . . maybe like something you turn and twist in order to see it differently. Or like the artist that has this huge landscape she wants to paint, but walks around with a small framing device so she can better see her focus.

So then, my journal is the large landscape — the mountains and marsh, the gorges (here, Ithaca is seeping into my response), and the poems are the smaller frames of the bigger picture.

The act of writing the poems did allow me to settle the sorrow, the accounts . . . in most of the cases deal with a loss, although one could argue that all of the poems — even the more sensuous or “love” poems — deal with a certain loss. I think turning over the whole essay, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” by Audre Lorde would serve as a sufficient answer to this chain of questions. In it she says that poetry serves as an illumination for “those ideas which are — until the poem — nameless and formless, about to b birthed, but already felt.” So, I suppose the journaling allows the feeling, and the poetry — because of the uses of metaphor and imagery — gives light to things I might not have considered or seen until I tried to sit down and write the poem or later, read the poem after it was written.

Lorde also says — and I underlined and starred this — that we women can “train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared,” and that is the heart of what I try to do, I think. It is the heart of what I was trying to say all along…and it is with the writing and my ability to write and my allowing myself to write that the heavy stuff “[loses its] control over [me]” — so to borrow my grandmother’s language, by the time I get to the poem, it serves as a method for “rebuking” the emotions that could consume me. So, poetry is not a luxury, but a process for dealing.

Ah! A process for dealing, yes, yes. (Of course, my head has me thinking of a great game of spades, “the hand we're dealt” and how do we play that hand? Poems? Poems that confront the thing that hurts?) You mention Lorde, who also makes a statement, perhaps in Zami, that while confrontation makes her ill, it’s sometimes the most necessary and urgent thing to do, to get at the name. (Am I dancing around truth? Perhaps . . .). But let me ask you, what is your process of transposing your feelings into language? You spoke about finding a form to fit your emotions and ideas and complexities, could you talk about finding the language to fit your feelings? Does this make sense? (And I must side note to the readers, I’m thinking here of DéLana's earlier poems in the book, and some of the later ones, where she addresses a mother.)


You know, I’m speaking a lot about journaling, but I think my life as a writer would not have happened without it. Indeed, my life right now might not have happened without it. I think the journaling helps to initially fit the feelings into language. When I teach poetry writing workshops, I plan a segment of time for writers to compose a block of prose. Generally, that prose is prompted. Sometimes, I prompt myself by keeping a word bank and choose several words and free-write while trying to incorporate the words. I know a poem is at the end of it all, but like marathon running, I try to pace myself and just focus on getting the words. Maybe the idea of putting together a jigsaw puzzle works better: so, it is easier for me to spread all of the pieces on the table or floor and fit them together that way and watch the image emerge, than to just pick up piece by piece and try and figure out where it should go. Surprising things happen when I mine and sluice the prose for lines or images or phrases. Poems like “Cuspidor,” especially, came from a process like this.

Also, I think in analogies and similes, and if I find one that I like (in “The Red Thread,” I tried to plan on this idea that a bird will abandon its nest if it senses the presence of an “other”) then I try to see if I have an aspect of my life that I could play within poetry.

Other times, it is — one could say — already written. That did not mean to point directly to the poem, “It Is Written,” but this point will fit here, too. Everything that happens in poems like “All Hallows’ Eve” happened as I said it. The magic is then, that it happened and I was able to see it and live it and write it. Poems like “Excavation” could be part of my filling-in process that I named (and the poem admits that, by the speaker saying, “I imagine you, Mama . . .,” although the discovery that the poem speaks about . . . is already there.)

In the poem “My Grandfather Wouldn't Know Me if He Saw,” you end with the statement: "Clairvoyance is a gift / I will not accept.”(31) Do you see poet as a gift?

I do see poet as a gift. It is given. Sometimes it is realized, sometimes unrealized. Sometimes cloned in a weaker state and sold at a higher price. Sometimes rejected. My father rejected his poet self. I think I picked it up. Or maybe, he was The Giver. But I hate this idea of “gift” as some thing that is given and runs out and is not given to everyone. I don’t want to go down that road, but I believe it is a gift, and many people have it, but I also believe it is also something that can be done without gift (though we could argue whether or not it’s any good), without “that thing” —and sadly, that takes away from the credibility of others, but there you have it: It can be (is!) manufactured and sold wholesale.

The poem before “My Grandfather” sort of “accepts” the idea of clairvoyance or seeing as an inheritance (the poem “Inheritance”). The ability to “see” (as in dreams — the dead, the dove, the “spirits hiding in the spaces of the house no one inhabits” . . . can I quote myself? I just quoted myself.). It’s interesting that I rejected it — did/sometimes do — reject it. But I believe my ability to “see,” my gift, is connected to me as a poet. I use my seeing and feeling gift and apply it to poetry — an art form full of images.

The first section of How God Ends Us is a series of libations of sorts; you call forth names of those who have passed (and even in your acknowledgments, you call forth the names “so there is a tomorrow,” to quote you quoting Sonia Sanchez). Do you remember as an act of love, an act of learning, an act of maintaining memory? (There is no “or” there, and please take this where you want. I’m mostly asking you to speak to your dedication to the spirits of your ancestors. As well, I’m curious about the obligation to self. In “My Grandfather,” the narrator “double-fist[s] death” despite her grandfather's passing.)

When I was younger I wanted to be an archaeologist. I wanted to go around with my brushes and shovels and dig up ruins and study what people before me left behind. After I decided that that was too much science, I moved to wanting to study history, to piece together stories based on fragments of information, to be an archaeologist of stories. Part of understanding the study of history, and working, too, as an archaeologist, is that one takes pieces and pieces and creates whole epics . . . and somehow, the gone keep on living.

My writing is an attempt at fossilizing my family’s history. We are not big on oral history. In truth, the grandmother that died was big on storytelling, but I was not big on listening then, so much of my writing, my attempt at preserving is also a fabrication, a filling-in. Much like what paleontologists do to create a fully rendered dinosaur skeleton from a few bones found.

I suppose this concern for preservation is at once a learning, a making, a maintaining and love. I love my family, and so I want there to be a tomorrow for us.

In referencing the second part of your question, I should state that I have a hard time with this term “ancestor.” I did not grow up with this term on my tongue, and I think it is used in so many different ways that I do not know how to use it in reference to my “dedication to the spirits of my ancestors.” Call it generational. I just have this distanced relationship to the word “ancestor” and believe my dead or gone are just that — my dead or gone. For me to think ancestor is to think of someone with which I had no personal relationship. The people — the flesh and blood I have smelled and touched and kissed and hugged — I write about are real, and my dedication is only that they be known or remembered.

To myself — well, the “I” in this collection is slippery. My family is just getting to a point where they are reading the collection and talking to me about it. My father asked me about that poem [“My Grandfather”] and “The Space Between.” He wanted to know what they were really about. Before I had a chance to explain that the stories I told were sometimes fabricated, sometimes made larger for poetic dramatic effect, that the “I” isn’t always a direct correlation to the writer— namely, myself — he straight up asked if I was suicidal. I believe I asked myself that. My grandfather died of lung cancer. I was around and alive and chided him about smoking after they found the mass on his lungs. My sister and my mom and my grandmother smoked most of my life growing up. I hated it. I hated them all for smoking. My other grandfather — whom I never met — died when my father was in high school . . . we suspect it was because of his drinking. He did a lot of things to his family because of his drinking. I had a neighbor growing up who was found dead in his own blood from liver failure. We associate it to the fact that I never saw him without a drink in his hand. So I find myself one day drinking and smoking, and knowing the consequences of my actions, but doing it still. And writing about it. And holding myself accountable. That is at the heart of all of this — the majority of the obviously self-related poems, a self-reflection, a self-accountability. Maybe this collection is a huge obligation to self — more so than I thought.

I’d like to turn the tide one more time, and begin to wind down the conversation. I'm very curious about your new collections. Is there anything that you're free to share about Suture & Cleave? If I had permission to ask, I’d ask what are some of the concepts that you're looking at? What are some of the threads that run through the collection?

I’m still settling into deciding how to speak publicly about my project Suture & Cleave. It is a project that I believe best marries my love for history and poetry. I should give a brief story about how I came about the content. I received my BA in Third World and Non-Western history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Part of receiving your degree in this project is by conducting a research project and writing a thirty-page paper. The semester I decided to start this project, the only topic in my concentration was the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Ultimately, I wrote my research paper on how Palestinian civilians portrayed themselves in Palestinian feature films based on the history of the conflict. So, I had this wealth of stories swimming around and felt a need to write the stories into poems. This collection probably has my highest concentration of form, too, because I do not have first-person experience to this situation and didn’t want to handle the whole project in third-person, the poems are persona, and all rooted in real accounts of people experiencing their own erasure in war.

I'd also ask, but this is a secondary question, how do you know when one collection has reached its end? As someone who has two poetry manuscripts, one upstart novel, and now two beginnings of two short story collections sitting on one Lexar disk, I know the difficulties of having all of these projects. I'm beginning to suspect they’re bartering with one another, and the stories are trying to kill off the poems. How hard is it for you to juggle two manuscripts?

I don’t know that a collection has reached its end. I have this poem, “What Life Were We Expecting?” that I read sometimes at readings and say if I were still writing How God Ends Us, it would be like an addendum. Cartographer — a book considering how we map out our emotional and physical selves in relation to the city — I believe has a more definite end. I know I am just polishing at this point. Suture is the hardest to “know” — it is also a project I’ve been working on the longest. It is the song that never ends. I have to decide when I want to stop it, right? I have to decide when I am done trying to tell my piece of the story . . . and it’s not because I run out of materials for poems — every day something happens in the news in Gaza or the West Bank or East Jerusalem that would fit perfectly into the story I am trying to tell. But eventually, you have to see an end, and this collection more so than any, I believe will have the hardest time to tie up.

As for juggling them, I hold my breath for times and places like these when I can stop and breathe for a while. I definitely have to have on different hats at different times. My propensity to compartmentalize aids in this. I have heavy moments of creating without as much editing, and then I put on the edit mode and work that path. And I go where the creativity takes me. In Ithaca, it’s been all about Suture & Cleave.

Two final questions, and then I’ll let you get back to your residency at Saltonstall, and congratulations on that residency! Are you having fun writing toward this new collection; any poems that are playful in subject or tone or construction, for example?

Unfortunately, the subject matter makes it hard to have fun writing toward this collection. I'm looking for some things, though. However, I did notice that when I read some of the pieces out loud in the “call-and-response” manner I spoke of earlier, the sheer nature of some of the forms turns the words into a type of song. A certain rhythm emerges, and the rhyming lifts it a bit. So it’s less trudging through mud, if you will. I mean, you know what you’re reading is heavy stuff, but my hope is —that is, what I found reading it to myself after some time away —that it’s not as heavy as it may seem.

Finally, inquiring minds would love to know: What is your favorite word, phrase, attitude, and activity?

Favorite word: for a long time, when I learned the word, I looked for every opportunity to use the word “feign.” I don't know that I have a current favorite. I'm taking applications.
Favorite phrase: My initial response was to give you my new year's motto. It’s carried me through 2008, and I renewed it in 2009: “It’s a new year, and I'm a grown ass woman.” A phrase I use a lot: “Don’t judge me.” But not in a tone that sounds as serious as putting it here right now does.
Favorite attitude: being skeptical/questioning
Favorite activity: I’ve come to have this certain relationship with the spinning/cycling class at my gym. I miss it up here in the mountains. It was a great de-stressor.

*
You can find DéLana, How God Ends Us, and a reading schedule on her Web site, www.delanadameron.com

You can find me here, where I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

In Summer,
Metta Sáma

Lit in the City

“Poems do not have a monopoly on poetry.” –T. S. Ellis

A friend recently asked me to define “poet” for her. I quickly quipped: “Someone who takes the time to write a poem and see it all the way through.” I didn’t take much time to respond to her question, because poet seems less speculative, less query-forced than “poetry” and, to some extent, “poem”. What is “poetry”? What is a poetics?

When Amanda asked me to write for this blog, I immediately lit up, thinking about the poetics of poetry and poetry of poetics, thinking about the lyric sensibility of sidewalks and flashing hands, red lights and men with floppy hats lighting cigarettes on the corner. Without the dynamics of what’s currently around me, a very different poetry, meditative and prosaic. (Life in my Midwest was less about the musicality of a woman’s dress and more about the decisions she encountered in deciding on a dress or a skirt.) In this City, a young boy taps his empty plastic water bottle against his open palm. A man’s key chains click against his backpack. I can close my eyes and hear poetry: this woman walks in stochees to keep up with her dog’s trochees. Listen to how she says “Sooo oh fee”. Poetry. A child cruising on the sidewalk, “’Scuuuuse me”. Poetry. A woman hits the table, “You neh veh lees en too meeee!” Poetry. The silence followed by public realization of not love. Poetry.

I’ll use this blog space, in part, to investigate the sensations of poetry and poetics, looking as keenly at a woman’s legs in jete as Bianca Spriggs’ “one tattooed calf”.

I do hope there’s enough to entice you, to invite you, to slip into your head and stay with you in dream and wake states.

This blog is our blog, and is dedicated to women of the African Diaspora. Come on this journey with me.

In summer,

Metta Sáma