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.

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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.