MY FIRST...

In this moment, I imagine (I am) an Olympic [torch] relay runner. I am gangly, stalwart, muscles warmed by months, if not years, of training and witnessing. Face forward, palms, heart upward, open to the horizon as the brilliantly blazing torch is passed.

I have read "Zora" under Metta Sama’s direction, and I am grateful to have been entertained by it and learned and grown from her eloquence and generosity. I pray that my journey with Zora possesses its own love/magic.

It is timely that this changing of the guard comes now, when I find myself back in Oakland, where many firsts happened: my first open-mouth kiss (which was memorably gross); my first realization that more Black children than a handful could inhabit a school at one time; my first coming to terms with the fact that Black people are a brilliant people; my first hair show; my first cuss word … my first memory of poetry.

In the early eighties, AC Transit, the local bus system, had a campaign to increase poetic awareness. Each bus was equipped with a rectangular poster to and from school. Most vividly, I remember boarding the 51 at 14th and Broadway to coast and bobble to Oakland Technical High School, situated on five sprawling blocks between Piedmont – an affluent community at Oakland’s north edge – and the dubious hoods of North Oakland.

I don’t know if I became conscious of Gwendolyn Brooks' "We Real Cool” on the day it was first posted, or if it had been there long before. But, at some point, I remember the comfort of seeing it, like the bus driver, in the same place every day. At some point, I remember searching every bus I boarded for the words it held, remember reciting them aloud. “We real cool. We / left school. We / lurk late. We / strike straight. We / sing sin. We / thin gin. We / jazz June. We / die soon.”

The more I read it, the more I saw Oakland in it. It was the first time I connected my real life existence with poetry. I loved it.

I thought long and hard about how to come into this beloved space, even started a few projects that I am choosing to use for future posts. Like any good first experience, I've chosen to keep it intimate. Stay tuned in the months ahead for interviews and conversations, video, articles and book reviews. For now, I am paying homage for the roads crafted for my getting here. To Gwendolyn Brooks, to Ntozake Shange, to Amanda Johnston and Metta Sama… Thank you.

The Tara Betts and Antoinette Brim Interview, Part 2

Antoinette: I am so pleased with how forthcoming you are answering this question. I had been hesitant to ask it, knowing that this is a topic you have most likely been asked to speak on over and over. We are in a unique time in this country’s history as it pertains to race. Some are touting this as the post racial/racialism age, yet racism seems to be mutating into new and more challenging strains. So, issues of racial identity and existential crisis seem to be more important than ever. Do you see this affecting the course of poetry, particularly black poetry? Should it be? Is there such a thing as black poetry?


Tara: I don’t know if it’s an existential crisis unless having a diverse family and/or community frightens you. There’s always been this hopeful idea that we’re done with racism, but we’re not. There are still a lot of people who have not acknowledged some of the basic things about the diverse and omitted history and culture of America, and on a much larger scope, the world. There’s a reason why bell hooks, Aaron McGruder, and Tim Wise are talking about these issues, and why people like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh are on the other end of the spectrum. It’s profitable to polarize people and not get them to look realistically at the economic, social, educational and health of the country. It’s easy to distract people. For example, I was floored to see how Lebron James got so much prime time television coverage when citizens in Oakland were rushing to bunker down against possible riots when the verdict declared Mehserle guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the murder of Oscar Grant.


In terms needing to say “black poetry”, I feel like this is a question a distraction and pull us away from writing the poems, reviewing the work, writing essays, publishing and starting our own literary institutions. On one hand, do we have “white poetry”? No, not really. On the other hand, I think our poetry is inherently infused with all of our selves that comprise our identity. It’s inescapable. All the parts of you impact your writing—your experiences, your reading choices, your aesthetic choices, your vocabulary, and the people around you. There is no non-influenced bubble where poetry happens, and those conversations where people discuss how politics is contributing to the decline of poetry annoy me too. I want to ask someone to explain if “Dulce Et Decorum Est” or Audre Lorde’s “Power” is not a good poem because they are bogged down by politics. Please justify Robert Hayden or Gwendolyn Brooks to me! What do you think about the implications of insisting on the term “black poetry”?


Antoinette: Well… [Sighs] You have really gone deep. I am not sure that I can advocate for a “black poetry” or a” black aesthetic.” There are so many ways to be black. I have been accused of not being black enough. It hurts. Even wrote a poem about it. [Laughs] Even so, I know that race is a social construct that is not going away. It is foundational; fundamental to how our world works and perceives privilege and place. Therefore, I feel compelled to want people of color to define their poetics for themselves. People of color should shape the conversation and the literary criticism about their own work. The conversation and criticism will occur. Additionally, no one lives outside of the body politic. We are birthed into our worlds and identities by the body politic. We must define ourselves in its shadow. So, we might like to just write and be, but it is not that simple.


Tara: I completely hear what you’re saying. We hurt each other all the time and get caught up in the labeling.


One of the things that I really enjoyed about Psalm of the Sunflower, is that you redefine a progression of a woman's life in so many ways from courtship to family, separation and grieving, then healing, and eventually romance. Could you talk a little bit about how that took shape?


Antoinette: When I began writing Psalm of the Sunflower, I hadn’t written for ten years. I had devoted myself to being a wife and mother. I was a part of a very legalistic church that felt all art should glorify God and when I tried to write hymns and psalms, well, they weren’t any good. So, ten years passed. When I returned to writing, I didn’t really know I was writing a book. I was finding myself and that process led me to the page. I think the arc that emerged in the book is the arc that I lived while writing it. It wasn’t until I sat down to order the manuscript that I saw for myself how I had moved through these stages. My process is very different now. While Psalm of the Sunflower grew wholly organically, my two subsequent manuscripts were written with the end in mind.


Tara: It always amazes me how many writers have left a religious practice that restrained their writing. It makes me wonder about other challenges that you may have faced in writing? I know I've felt pretty lucky, but I've been so single-minded at times that I've made a lot of sacrifices.


Antoinette: Yeah. Religion is a curious thing. On one hand, I am very grateful for all that I learned from my education, experiences and encounters with various religious traditions. A lot of it I still hold dear and much of it remains as my moral compass. On the other hand, I have witnessed firsthand how some people literally lose their “souls” at the hands of unscrupulous or legalistic traditions. But, that’s another book. For me, Psalm of the Sunflower speaks to some of this. It is hard to miss the many metaphors drawn from various religious traditions, but here they are my solace and not my undoing. Two things have been an enemy of my writing: my former religious practice and time. My former religious practice steeped me in fear, condemnation and learned helplessness. Time didn’t wait for me to right myself and begin to write again. Now, I have made peace with the passing of time and have learned to rest in my faith and spirituality.

Tara: Ultimately, it's about balance. I think it's also interesting how people derive so many interpretations from a text when writers can and do make intuitive choices, right? You're mentioning the metaphors from religious traditions, but because you know them so well, it may not be intentional until you revise or select poems. Or if you think about the sequence or what goes in each section, there may be an idea of a progression, and it resonates from this feeling that simply says this is right. I have that "feeling" often before I begin a poem, even if I decide on a deliberate form for a poem.


Antoinette: Tara, in all honesty, I shudder when I hear the word “balance” these days. [sighs] We all want, maybe even need, it. But, no one seems to know how to find it. As for my metaphors from religious traditions, I think it is the language I know. These stories and parables are such a part of my upbringing and adult life; they are the shorthand I speak. Funny that these metaphors find themselves next to metaphors of Billie Holliday and red lipstick. People are complicated and layered. I like that about people. They are treasure troves of metaphor, language and experience. I love that art allows an audience to peel back these layers.


Tara: In the first section, the color red emerges again and again. It's a sort of sensual color but also a sort of lifeblood pulsing through these poems, did you start out with this in mind? How did these poems come together as you were constructing the book?


Antoinette: I had to go back and look. [Laughing] I can’t say that it was intentional. Thinking about it now, this time in my life was a very visceral and raw time – a red time. Menarche refers to the first menstrual cycle of a woman. It signals the beginning of womanhood. And, it awes me as a woman to consider how one can lose the essence of life and still live. And, then give life. So that poem, Menarche, comes in the first section. It heralds my reentrance into womanhood after having given it - myself and my power - away. It acknowledges the price and peril of womanhood. In the poem, Eve, there’s Eve’s apple (temptation, guilt, shame, etc.) and all of those monikers that rest on the shoulders of women. And of course, there is the poem, Freedom is Red. Red is royal in some cultures. It also denotes blood, courage, and struggle. I don’t think you achieve freedom without those things. And, incidentally, I don’t think that this is just my story. It is what women do every day to find/define/evolve into themselves and to raise their families.


Tara: It's funny how sometimes people think a piece of your writing is just the story of the writer. No one takes into account that the story or poem can be imagined or fictionalized. Yet, when someone is writing they may be thinking of what happens to a group of people or human beings in general and personalizing it. Or even, an overheard conversation or something in the newspaper. Writing isn't just about "you" necessarily. Writing can be an entry into another community that lends itself to empathy, right? You see other people as you see yourself, a person with strengths, fears, feelings and vulnerability. The details in Psalm really speaks to the feeling without beating a reader with abstraction.


Antoinette: I am glad to hear that Psalm speaks to this notion of transcendence without being overly didactic. Like I said, I went to the page to figure things out. I am glad that others can find themselves and encouragement in its pages. I have learned after years of reading and studying literature that people are people. We have the same wants and desires basically. Once we get past the social, racial and political constructs, we all want connection, community, purpose and love. I may be oversimplifying; but at the end of the day, those are the things we want and need. Now how we acquire these wants and needs - therein is the poetry.


Tara: Yes, sometimes I find myself wondering why people shut down when it's so clear that the identity of the characters and the author doesn't obscure their humanity. I tell my students all people want and experience the same things, but in differing degrees. You're born. You experience love, hate, success, failure, loss, grief. You struggle, work, celebrate, and die. It seems simple, but how does one person's experience make that unique? How does one voice stand out or tell us so much about life and being human? I ask these kinds of questions often.


Antoinette: I think we, as human beings, live in fear. In varying degrees. I think even those who appear fearless are afraid and just live fully anyway. I strive to be one of them. [Laughs] And, sometimes when we are presented with literature that mirrors or magnifies our fears, we resist it. We want to think it is not relevant to us. Of course, I am speaking in very general terms. And, I am still working all of this out in my own head. I encourage my students to set aside their biases and fears, so they can truly engage with the literature – to let their initial contact (with any piece of art) be one of open-mindedness.


Tara: I’m curious. What do the poems you enjoy or reread have in common, if anything? Are there patterns that you notice? I tend to appreciate narrative and form, but I’m finding that I separate content from the form of the work more readily than I used to. I can appreciate someone who is adept at manipulating words, but I want to feel what they’re saying.


Antoinette: Tara, actually there are a few poems that I revisit. First, Langston Hughes’ Dreams because it is the first poem I remember reading. I didn’t know what a poem was, but I knew whatever this was, I loved it and I wanted to read more like it. I didn’t have any real dreams then; I was 6 or 7, but I knew I would “hold fast” once I had one. Second, Brooks’ The Bean Eaters. It was the second poem that I remember reading. Remembering these early discoveries brings to mind the joy of first falling in love with literature. I often go back to Walcott’s Love after Love because it reminds me that it is possible to “love again the stranger who was your self.” And, to Yehuda Amichai’s, Wildpeace. Because, it is beautiful and I, too, want peace “like wildflowers,/suddenly, because the field/must have it: wildpeace.”


Tara: Some good choices. I can’t imagine being a kid and not seeing myself in Langston Hughes and Brooks. It’s a silly question, but what was your first impression when we first met?


Antoinette: We were at the Cave Canem Foundation retreat. It was my first one. I was very recently divorced; still timid and very humbled to be there. I was in awe of the diversity of the poets. They were all black, but with varied voices, backgrounds and histories. You were sitting across from me. Quiet. I remember the smooth hazel texture of your hair and your light skin. I remember that I smiled, thinking how amazing it was to have such a range of beauty in one place. And, to know that I belonged there, too. And, then I realized, I was staring.


Tara: I think the range of beauty at Cave Canem struck me too. It wasn’t just the intellectual prowess and the range of interests of every poet that filled me with awe. When I look at pictures, I think of how breathtaking it is to see that range of what beautiful can look like. I also think it’s overwhelming as a person of color to be in a space with so many other writers of color who may not experience that range of writers where they live or in academic settings. So, you see this and it’s just an affirmation that you’re not alone.


There’s often been a joke that there should be a fundraising calendar featuring the sweethearts and heartthrobs of Cave Canem. I think they’d have to do a couple of versions of the women’s calendars since there are so many talented brilliant women! Of course, I remember seeing you in 2003 at the podium reading your poem in a soft clear voice, and I thought just your height and your sense of pacing made you seem regal, and you always know how to work that lipstick! I did notice you seemed a bit shy then, but now I know better! I count you among the elegant. I think the women of Cave Canem have reminded me to embrace beauty and an intellectual, creative life. There’s room for that, and I think there’s a space for all of us. Sometimes, we have to insist upon it. Other times, it just happens as it should.

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You can buy Tara's and Antoinette's books, Arc & Hue and Psalm of the Sunflower, respectively at Willow Books website. Antoinette & Tara welcome comments and further questions; please leave any thoughts for these authors on this blog space.

The Arc & Psalm of Tara Betts and Antoinette Brim: Part 1 of 2

I first met Antoinette Brim in the summer of 2006 at the Cave Canem Retreat in Greensburg, PA; it was my first summer at Cave Canem, and I was still a little hazy about my “place” in what I imagined to be a “Contemporary African American Literary Canon” in the making. My memory of being there that summer alternates from glum weathers to pressurized atmospheres to intensely bright spots in the clouds. Antoinette was one of those bright spots: she seemed to bounce in her gait, and yet never seemed to quite touch the ground with full force. There was lightness to her. When I read Antoinette’s poems, I look for that lightness, and I find complexity, emotions that are at once vulnerable and brash, succinct, feisty, and winsome.

Tara Betts’ name was one I’d encountered on many tongues, a name I’d seen referenced so often, I found myself nearly weekly scouring the internets for her poems. We met a few years ago at the Bowery, where we were both scheduled to read poems in response to national flags. Tara’s poem had me laughing and nearly howling, thinking and analyzing. I wondered: how did she do that? Her presence was infectious; her poems, provocative, risk-takers.

When Aquarius Press announced their 2009 titles, I immediately jumped and asked Tara and Antoinette to give ZORA the honor of interviewing one another. This blog post will appear in two doses, due to the constraints of the space. I have to say I’m quite happy that the space constraints exist. Tara and Antoinette, in their conversation, are as thoughtful, open, direct, and questioning as they are in their poems. Take your time with their conversation, deliberate with them, as they ask and respond to some of the most heavy and heart-rending questions concerning poetry in the twenty-first century.

~Metta Sáma

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Antoinette: Where would you place yourself in the African American poetic tradition? What trails are you blazing and/or what gates are you keeping?

Tara: I haven’'t really thought about my place(s) in the African American poetic tradition beyond that I see myself in women’s voices and working-class voices. I feel that I’m very steeped in the blues and hip-hop as a matter of upbringing, but I’d like to hope that my work is speaking to people who do not always get a chance to speak. I’d also like to think that I have the freedom to explore different directions in my work. I feel deeply impacted by Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Patricia Smith to name a few, but I’d also like to say Muriel Rukeyser, Marilyn Nelson, Maxine Kumin, Afaa Michael Weaver. I’d like to see myself in a continuum with Hayden, Sterling Brown, Dolores Kendrick, but still feel free to write a broad range of work that extends expectations like Wanda Coleman or Ed Roberson. I’ve never been much for gate-keeping. It sounds exclusionary, rooted in hierarchy and the same behavior that has kept people out of the literary canon that should have been there a long time ago.

Antoinette: I, too, am very conscious of adding muted voices to the mix of poetry making its way into the mainstream. I think when I think of gate-keeping, I don’t think of gates closing (exclusionary); I think of keeping gates open. Diversity is a tricky thing. One (woman or ethnicity) in the mix often denotes diversity to the larger community. I wonder about this sometimes. But I write what I write. And I hope that I am contributing to the tradition in a meaningful way.

Tara: Well, now, you have me curious about where you see yourself in the tradition.

Antoinette: The first semester of my MFA program, Ruth Forman, posed that question to me. I was stunned. First, because I didn’t yet see myself as a poet. So, to even suggest that I might be a part of the larger tradition seemed almost sacrilegious to me at the time. Second, because before grad school, my education (while amazing) had focused on the canon and very few writers of color. This put me on the path of searching out black writers and their work. Ruth gave me a reading list that was so extensive I was reading at stop signs and traffic lights. All these years later, I am still learning and reading. And I still have so much more to read and discover. If I am blessed with a long writing career, I would like future generations to note me for my honesty and vulnerability on the page. For writing about things we don’t usually talk about in polite company. For being an unapologetically bold, black woman writer. I would like my work to display an arc of growth and transcendence. I would like to make the ancestors proud of me.

Tara: I have to admit that the thing I hate most about moving is my growing collection of books. I am forever reading and searching out new books. I’d like to think that I’d not embarrass my ancestors and elders and my possible children.

Antoinette: I am intrigued by locale and locus in your work. Action happens in very specific places, whether physical sites like a house or bathroom – very domestic places or in very intimate woman places – a shedding uterus or conception on a cellular level. Even geographical locations seem somehow domestic and/or sensually female. And it seems that music accompanies it all, marking time. Can you speak to how you use music, space and theme in your writing process?

Tara: You know I was thinking the same thing about your work! When I was rereading Psalm of the Sunflower, I thought the colors were so rich—reds, blue, purple and gold, gray. The sputter of rocks while driving down gravel road and the covered bridges. All of it made me think of growing up in the Midwest, when so much of your book is rooted in Arkansas. I think music permeated the space that I was in so much that I cannot picture my childhood without those sounds. There is no Betts Tavern for me without Al Green, and there is no adolescence for me without hip-hop. I think writers populate their work with the details that convey the feeling of experiencing something, and studying journalism in undergrad really pushed that instinct for me, so when my poetry started to grow stronger, I think it heightened that impulse. As far as theme, I sometimes run from the idea of it, but I’m seeing how themes can organize a literary experience for a reader. Usually, I write a lot, then I see themes emerge, but I’m trying to work on a project now with that kind of focus to stretch my capacity to write in different ways. I just don’t want to overdo a thematic book when I’ve seen some excellent books that aren’t all fixed on one subject per se.

Antoinette: You bring up an interesting point. I, too, am always writing. But, since Psalm, I have been writing exclusively for particular collections. The direction or theme has presented itself, and I have been working with it. I often wonder if this will be my writing process from now on. I have so many poems and collections waiting in line in my head. Sometimes I miss the organic stumbling that marked the creation of Psalm. Over time, I must have cut 50 or so poems/pages from it, like cutting a gem and letting bits of it fall away. How has your process changed since Arc and Hue?

Tara: I think I am a little bit more conscious of language and how to extend an idea over the body of a longer poem. I used to struggle with that, and my poems were becoming so short. I’m also intrigued with the short form, and I’ve been writing a lot of poems that way, particularly these 7-line poems called kwansabas. My focus is more intense, even if I step away from writing for a while. I often find myself wanting to write all the time, and just feeling distracted by mundane tasks. Even still, the mundane tasks still can become fodder for writing.

Antoinette: Please talk about your poem, “What It’s Like to Be a Mixed Girl (For Those of You Who Aren’t).” The last line is quite declarative: You’re black. There are those black, white and/or biracial who might disagree with this statement. And while this seems to be a very personal poem, the title aside, that it is “for those of you who aren’t” denotes a subtext that speaks to a certain politics of identity. These are very provocative and polarizing issues right now. Please explore the politics of identity in light of your poem.

Tara: Where I grew up there was no doubt in my mind that I was black. Mixed, but definitely black-identified. I have heard these arguments for census boxes and interracial categories for years, but I’ve also been shared space with many black families who say I look like cousin so-and-so, so it’s a relative state of mind. Some people with parents of different races tend to lean more toward one culture than another, which doesn’t bother me. What I’m curious about is why do you lean that way? Is it because you grew up around a majority of people in that particular culture or community or is it because you’re ashamed of that culture, community, or even one of your parents? Some people want to accurately identify all the parts that make them who they are. I imagine if I had spent more time with my mother’s family and learned French, I would be more in touch. I do have a cousin that I relate to like a sister because she lived with us when I was a teen, so she’s probably my closest tie to my maternal side.

As for me, I grew up in a predominantly black community where my mother was the only white person around. I went to Catholic school while my parents were still together and that felt like culture shock to see how white children lived so differently than we did. My grandparents that I spent the most time with were my black grandparents. When my parents divorced, my mom moved us to a block of Section 8 apartments, mostly black and Mexican tenants. It wasn’t until I moved to Chicago and went to college that people started to question my black identity.

In terms of the poem, it was inspired by a poem from Patricia Smith’s first collection Life According to Motown, one of the first books I taught in its entirety to teens in Chicago. In it, Smith has a poem called “What It's Like to Be a Black Girl (For Those of You Who Aren’t).” At first, my poem was a riff from Smith’s that I wrote for her granddaughter Mikaila when she was a little girl. I initially thought about writing it as a kind of guide for little girls like Mikaila, who was probably 6 or 7 when I wrote it. I thought about dropping the parenthetical note, but I realized that there were not a lot of people who understand that experience of feeling like you belong to a culture, even if you do not have the readily identifiable traits that people associate with it. I’m also aware that there’s this dynamic among some people of mixed race that they don’t want to be called Black or African American for a number of reasons, so I wanted this to be an assertion that I would not compromise members of my family or my sense of self for light-skinned privilege. Other people can say what they want.

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End Part 1 of 2
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Tara Betts is the author of Arc & Hue (Aquarius Press/Willow Books, 2009). Her work has been adapted for the stage and performed on television. Her work appears in collections such as Bum Rush the Page, Gathering Ground, and both Spoken Word Revolution anthologies. She teaches creative writing at Rutgers University and workshops with teens. She is a Cave Canem fellow. Tara is working on a second poetry manuscript and several other book-length projects, including an anthology of Bop poems titled Bop, Strut and Dance: A Post-Blues Form for New Generations with Afaa Michael Weaver.

Antoinette Brim is the author of Psalm of the Sunflower (Aquarius Press/Willow Books, 2009). She is a Cave Canem Fellow and a Harvard University W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow at the National Endowment of the Humanities Summer Institute. She is a recipient of the Archie D. and Bertha H. Walker Foundation Scholarship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her poetry has appeared in various journals, magazines and anthologies, including the newly released or forthcoming anthologies 44 Writers on the 44th President, In Our Own Words: A Generation Defining Itself, and Just Like A Girl: A Manifesta. She teaches at Pulaski Technical College in North Little Rock, Arkansas.

"i taste in my natural appetite/the bond of live things everywhere": Remembering Lucille Clifton

14 February 2010

Last night my heart threatened to leave me--threatened to find the quickest route out of me, thumped against my chest in a silly attempt to loosen itself from the veins and arteries that bound it to me. My heart doesn’t know me like this: the woman who buries herself under covers, silent & tear-filled, nearly suffocating herself along with her grief. It wanted no part of it. The ox, after twelve inspired + laborious + challenged + charged months, was heading home, carrying Lucille Clifton to the otherworlds, and I was in bed at 9:39 p.m. I was having trouble breathing. Alexander McQueen two mornings ago. Lucille Clifton tonight. My lover & I had walked all over Sunset Park looking for orchids and oranges to celebrate the impending new year. We settled for tangerines with the leaves still on, bought from a woman in a van who bade us an early happy new year. We bought a tiger orchid plant from a woman in Bay Ridge who had a plate full of tiny Buddhas, tiny tigers & miniature oranges and lemons. We played a couple games of pool, then carried the orchid into the movie theatre and watched Benicio del Toro seal the death knell on his movie career. Instead of watching the horror play out, I pulled out my phone and texted my friend Beth, wishing her little Omar a happy 2nd birthday. My lover pulled out her phone, and discovered that Adela’s cat Chester had died. Something was nagging at me. The day before, I’d forgotten to celebrate the four-year death anniversary of my mentor, Herb Scott. My tongue was still stained from the wine I drank to celebrate his birthday, only four days previously. Something was nagging at me, but I was heading home with a tiger orchid in my hand and a bag of fresh vegetables and fruits, thinking about the tiger that was soon to roar in the new year.

It wasn’t long before I found myself quickly deleting a series of emails that seemed to be making my inbox swell, when I had to stop at the subject line: “Mama Lucille Transitions”. Somehow, the images of the remarkably pleasant day I’d just experienced were replaced with a noise I only hear when I don’t want to hear. Suddenly, my head filled up with the last song I’d heard that made me laugh and dance: “Shake shake shake, shake shake shake. . .”.

I went to Facebook to stop myself from giving in to the shakes that were lighting me, casting spells in my bones. I needed to post a Lucille Clifton poem, and just like that, the shakes intensified. My homepage went from various posts about “x” to a hundred poets catching the news early and posting various tributes and poems to and from Lucille Clifton.

From the brief notes:

“RIP Lucille. Thank you for the light.” (Crystal Williams)

“thank you thank you thank you” (Bettina Judd)

“Ms. Lucille Clifton, with my whole heart.” (Elizabeth Butler)

“Lucille Clifton, poet. Blessings on your transition, sistermother.” (Evie Shockley)

to the longer praisesongs and remembrances:

MendiandKeithObadike posted: “What a poet she was/is, what a teacher, what a model, what a guide. Hugging in all of you who were touched by Ms. Lucille Clifton, now our ancestor.”

Kimberly Ann Rogers posted: “oh beloved sister! how does the earth spin now without your voice? into the light beloved Lucille Clifton. Bless our boats from above.”

Tara Betts: “Ms. Lucille Clifton, I loved you for being you, for saying what needed to be said, for always remembering me as soon as you heard my voice, for calling me poet. I miss you already. Rest in Peace.”

Patricia Spears Jones: “sadness at the loss of Lucille Clifton's physical body; gratitude for her words and spirit. "soon we will be done with the troubles of the world" as Mahalia sang. She's done. We have to pick up the work she left for us to do.”

“In 2001 Ms. Lucille turned a room of 1000 novices into poets, bustling unconscious ignorant of the woman at the lecturn. She spoke, they metamorphose into hush, into the kind of listening her poems inspire. First-timers, they laughed like seasoned poets. They sighed. They sobered. Recognized, wanted more in their own...” Jane Alberdeston posted

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: “Lucille Clifton's death news is such a shocker, oh my dear God! I learned so much about her years ago by writing my doctoral oral defense on the topic, "The Influence of The African Oral Tradition on Black American Poetry: A Connection Between Lucille Clifton’s Poetry and its African forebears, using Okot p’Betik’s "So...ng of Lawino" as a Source of Reference." Now I treasure AWP 2009 where I last saw her.”

& Jessie Lee Kercheval encapsulated the hours that Facebook transformed into a Lucille Clifton tribute: “so sad Lucille Clifton has died! But loves that in her FB friend world that sad news and saying how much we loved her, her work, and will miss her is in post after post.”

20 February 2010

It’s now been one week since I read the news, and my heart still flips out a little. There are now more lengthy tributes to Lucille Clifton, and I imagine each of the smaller Lucille Clifton Facebook status update tributes have transformed into poems, have manifested in laughter and dance and groups of friends reading poems to one another. Last night, I listened to Marjorie Eliot play piano, challenging her bass player, often, to a call and response. She was in a gorgeous white shift dress for one set; in a floral flowing print for the second set. She was graceful and elegant and whimsical in her playing. In her, I saw a great and generous mentor, a woman who truly adored her art (and perhaps, as well, that soft-looking leather piano seat that she lifted her floral print over, so her whole lower body could be in contact with the feel of that material). She reminded me of my mother and a little of myself. And there was my heart, returned to me, swollen from swallowing too many words. Lucille Clifton’s words:

i was leaving my fifty-eighth year
when a thumb of ice
stamped itself hard near my heart

*
*
for the eyes of the children,
the last to melt,
the last to vaporize

*
*
whirling in a gyre of rage
at what my days had come to.
what,
I pleaded with her, could I do,
oh what could I have done?

*
*
i hunger to tunnel back
inside desperate
to reconnect the rib and clay
and to be whole again

*
*
and to be whole again

*
*
and to be whole again

*
*
Lucille Clifton was born on June 27, 1936. She carried a Life Path number of 7: “you entered this plane with a gift for investigation, analysis, and keen observation. You are a thinker of the first order. You evaluate situations very quickly, and with amazing accuracy.” Once, I wrote a poem after Princess Di died. Versace was also dead. Their Life Paths were also 7. In life, they, like Lucille, seemed to harness “spiritual wisdom. . . A built-in inner guide providing a strong sense of intuition”. I met Lucille Clifton once only. And yes, she had that look about her, that thing that made you either shut off your brain, fearing she could finger every syllable you hiccupped, or you pulsed hard, hoping she’d feel you and fill you up.

It is now 24 February 2010. I have not found words easy to come by. I want to say what is hardest to say, what may anger people to hear, but what do I care? I want to speak to you, Lucille Clifton. I want to say thank you for the grace and generosity and integrity of death. Thank you for the grace and generosity and integrity of living. I loved you quietly while you were living, I’ll love you quietly while you’re off in the otherworlds, refashioning yourself, building something new.

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 bit and pieces—at St. Marks, 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, fully 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 Saint 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 (University of South Carolina Press, 2009), begins with the poem "Lament", a provocative apostrophe poem to God. How comfortable where 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 anyways, 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? As well, there are several poems dotted through the collection that work within a certain established or invented form and/or rhetorical device. Could you speak to your interest in form and rhetorical strategies?

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 Hallow's 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 can not? (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 sidenote 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 archeologist. 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 archeologist of stories. Part of understanding the study of history, and working, too, as an archeologist, 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 that poem and “The space between,” mostly the poems where it seems if I am connected somehow to the speaker, then it is a direct correlation, and my father straight up asked if I was suicidal. I believe I asked myself that. Maybe that is where the idea “double-fisting death”. 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 diploma 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 – everyday 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 towards 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 towards 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.

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

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

In Summer,

Metta Sáma