Poetry Rocks Black Voices

This week, Poetry Rocks Black Voices celebrates Tiana Clark. The last several years of her career have been so demanding, so full of publications, awards, fellowships, readings and teaching that she says the pandemic actually forced her to slow down and take care of her accelerating migraines and ulcers. She also realized that constantly answering questions about Black suffering was re-traumatizing her and other Blacks. “I think it’s more important that people investigate and revel in Black delight, Black romance, Black blessings, Black science fiction, Black Magic and beyond,” she told Poets & Writers Magazine.

So, let’s consider some of her exhausting achievements during the past five years alone. After being selected for the anthology, Best New Poets 2015, she published Equilibrium, winner of the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. She won the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and the 2017 Furious Flower’s Gwendolyn Brooks Centennial Poetry Prize. In 2017-2018, she won the Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing, and other fellowships since then. Her first full volume, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood in 2018 won her the 2019 Pushcart Prize, an NEA Fellowship, and the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She teaches creative writing at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. So, let’s make a point to see a film, listen to an album, or read a book by the many Black artists, and appreciate their contributions to the world’s cultures. Start with checking out Clark’s website, http://www.tianaclark.com. Here’s a poem we all can identify with!

My Therapist Wants to Know about My Relationship to Work

© 2018 Tiana Clark. Source: Poetry Magazine Nov. 2018.

I hustle
upstream.
I grasp.
I grind.
I control & panic. Poke
balloons in my chest,
always popping there,
always my thoughts thump,
thump. I snooze — wake & go
boom. All day, like this I short
my breath. I scroll & scroll.
I see what you wrote — I like.
I heart. My thumb, so tired.
My head bent down, but not
in prayer, heavy from the looking.
I see your face, your phone-lit
faces. I tap your food, two times
for more hearts. I retweet.
I email: yes & yes & yes.
Then I cry & need to say: no-no-no.
Why does it take so long to reply?
I FOMO & shout. I read. I never
enough. New book. New post.
New ping. A new tab, then another.
Papers on the floor, scattered & stacked.
So many journals, unbroken white spines,
waiting. Did you hear that new new?
I start to text back. Ellipsis, then I forget.
I balk. I lazy the bed. I wallow when I write.
I truth when I lie. I throw a book
when a poem undoes me. I underline
Clifton: today we are possible. I start
from image. I begin with Phillis Wheatley.
I begin with Phillis Wheatley. I begin
with Phillis Wheatley reaching for coal.
I start with a napkin, receipt, or my hand.
I muscle memory. I stutter the page. I fail.
Hit delete — scratch out one more line. I sonnet,
then break form. I make tea, use two bags.
Rooibos again. I bathe now. Epsom salt.
No books or phone. Just water & the sound
of water filling, glory — be my buoyant body,
bowl of me. Yes, lavender, more bubbles
& bath bomb, of course some candles too.
All alone with Coltrane. My favorite, “Naima,”
for his wife, now for me, inside my own womb.
Again, I child back. I float. I sing. I simple
& humble. Eyes close. I low my voice,
was it a psalm? Don’t know. But I stopped.

This week, Poetry Rocks Black Voices honors Carl Phillips, whose 12^th volume of poems, Pale Colors in a Tall Field, came out last year. In a Kenyon Review article, the author wrote that the words in Carl’s poems are “constantly shifting ground…so that the central subject is never made baldly explicit. The poems (most of them) will support several interpretations, though no single interpretation perfectly.” Some readers get frustrated by ambiguity in poetry: Does it mean this? Or That? Phillips might answer “yes” to both of them. More than any other format of literature, poetry invites and honors any response, because it asks readers to ponder, to think of the many meanings suggested. A favorite example of Phillips’ “invitation” is his pairing of the words “Be wild. Bewilder” (from his poem “Ghost Choir”). What do those words mean to you, individually? Paired? Have fun pondering!

A scholar of Greek and Latin, and professor of Creative Writing at Washington University in Saint Louis, Phillips has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets. Among his many awards are the Academy of American Poets Prize and a Pushcart Prize. He has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. For more information, please go to https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/carl-phillips.

Luna Moth

(© 1998 by Carl Phillips. Graywolf Press.)

No eye that sees could fail to remark you:
like any leaf the rain leaves fixed to and
flat against the barn’s gray shingle. But

what leaf, this time of year, is so pale,
the pale of leaves when they’ve lost just
enough green to become the green that means

loss and more loss, approaching? Give up
the flesh enough times, and whatever is lost
gets forgotten: that was the thought that I

woke to, those words in my head. I rose,
I did not dress, I left no particular body
sleeping and, stepping into the hour, I saw

you, strange sign, at once transparent and
impossible to entirely see through. and how
still: the still of being unmoved, and then

the still of no longer being able to be
moved. If I think of a heart, his, as I’ve
found it…. If I think of, increasingly, my

own…. If I look at you now, as from above,
and see the diva when she is caught in mid-
triumph, arms half-raised, the body as if

set at last free of the green sheath that has—
how many nights?—held her, it is not
without remembering another I once saw:

like you, except that something, a bird, some
wild and necessary hunger, had gotten to it;
and like the diva, but now broken, splayed

and torn, the green torn piecemeal from her.
I remember the hands, and—how small they
seemed, bringing the small ripped thing to me.

How many poets can claim that they’re the subject of an Emmy-nominated documentary? This week Poetry Rocks Black Voices celebrates Sonia Sanchez, who has been lauded by artists such as Roots drummer Questlove for sparking the rise of hip-hop and spoken word art forms. There are actually more online video posts of Sonia Sanchez performing her poems than online text versions.

Sonia Sanchez was the Laura Carnell Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Temple University. Her many awards include the Robert Frost Medal, the Langston Hughes Poetry Award, the PEN Writing Award, the American Book Award for Poetry, and the Peace and Freedom Award from the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. For more information about her, please go to https://soniasanchez.net/

Next month, Beacon Press is publishing Collected Poems, Sanchez’s 18th book of poems. She has also published children’s books, plays and recordings in audio and video. Born in 1934, Sanchez has dedicated her life to Black liberation and studies, social equality and women’s rights. She has described herself as “a woman with razor blades between my teeth.” The poem below was written for her daughter, and it celebrates Black people of all shades of color. Here is a YouTube link for Sanchez performing “To Anita”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9mItCJtj6w&list=RDM9mItCJtj6w&index=3

TO ANITA

© 1971, Sonia Sanchez, from her first spoken word record: A Sun Lady for All Seasons Reads Her Poetry (Folkways Records 1971)

high/yellow/black/girl
walken like the sun u be.
move on even higher.
those who
laugh at yo/color
have not moved
to the blackness we be about
cuz as Curtis Mayfield be sayen
we people be darker than blue
and quite a few
of us be yellow
all soul/shades of
blackness.
yeah. high/yellow/black/girl
walk yo/black/song
cuz some of us
be hearen yo/sweet/music.

This week Poetry Rocks honors Yusef Komunyakaa. His numerous books of poems and prose have won so many literary awards, I can’t list them here. Readers who are military veterans may be interested to know that he won The Bronze Star for his service in the Vietnam War, and the Pulitzer Prize for Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems 1977-1989, which includes many of his works about his war experiences. Critics have called his book, Dien Cai Dau (1988) one of the best books of war poetry from the Vietnam War.” Born in 1947 in Louisiana, he is a senior faculty member in the NYU Creative Writing Program, and has been elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In April, his 18^th book, Everyday Mojo Songs of the Earth, will be published. To learn more about Komunyakaa and read more of his work, please go to https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/yusef-komunyakaa.

Camouflaging the Chimera
© 2001 Yousef Komunyakaa from Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems,
Wesleyan University Press

We tied branches to our helmets.
We painted our faces & rifles
with mud from a riverbank,

blades of grass hung from the pockets
of our tiger suits. We wove
ourselves into the terrain,
content to be a hummingbird’s target.

We hugged bamboo & leaned
against a breeze off the river,
slow-dragging with ghosts

from Saigon to Bangkok,
with women left in doorways
reaching in from America.
We aimed at dark-hearted songbirds.

In our way station of shadows
rock apes tried to blow our cover,
throwing stones at the sunset. Chameleons

crawled our spines, changing from day
to night: green to gold,
gold to black. But we waited
till the moon touched metal,

till something almost broke
inside us. VC struggled
with the hillside, like black silk

wrestling iron through grass.
We weren’t there. The river ran
through our bones. Small animals took refuge
against our bodies; we held our breath,

ready to spring the L-shaped
ambush, as a world revolved
under each man’s eyelid.

This week, Poetry Rocks Black Voices celebrates Amanda Gorman. When I featured Maya Angelou and her inaugural poem last week, I said I’d feature Amanda Gorman this week. I thought I’d be introducing her to you. Well, no need now, because she blossomed on the boldest stage, and the media went viral with “The Hill We Climb.”. What a wordsmith! What a powerhouse! And only 22. As President Biden overcame stuttering by reading and reciting poetry, Gorman did similarly. “God’s gift to me was my stuttering,” Biden has said. “But don’t let your learning disability define you.” Gorman told The Harvard Gazette in 2018, “I always saw [my auditory disorder and vocal impediment] as a strength because…I became really good at reading and writing.” A former United Nations Youth Delegate, she won a Milken Family Foundation Scholarship and graduated Harvard cum laude and Phi Beta Kapa. Her awards and honors will only grow with each passing day.

Those of you who are interested in how to write anything, I urge you to study the text of “The Hill We Climb” to see the rhetorical and poetic skills she uses: repetition, alliteration, assonance, true rhyme & near rhyme, and inversion of phrases to form different effects, e.g. “We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another.” She also alludes to Angelou’s inaugural poem, the bible and Hamilton, specifically with the line, “history has its eyes on us.” In addition, she used many signs in American Sign Language to illustrate her reading. In case you missed her powerful performance, here’s a link to it. https://www.npr.org/sections/inauguration-day-live-updates/2021/01/20/958743170/poet-amanda-gorman-reads-the-hill-we-climb

After you watch this, you’re going to want more. So, I’m sharing a different poem, one that Amanda Gorman wrote for the inauguration of Tracy K. Smith as National Poet Laureate. (See my post on Tracy K. Smith).

In This Place (An American Lyric)

© 2017 Amanda Gorman

There’s a poem in this place—
in the footfalls in the halls
in the quiet beat of the seats.
It is here, at the curtain of day,
where America writes a lyric
you must whisper to say.

There’s a poem in this place—
in the heavy grace,
the lined face of this noble building,
collections burned and reborn twice.

There’s a poem in Boston’s Copley Square
where protest chants
tear through the air
like sheets of rain,
where love of the many
swallows hatred of the few.

There’s a poem in Charlottesville
where tiki torches string a ring of flame
tight round the wrist of night
where men so white they gleam blue—
seem like statues
where men heap that long wax burning
ever higher
where Heather Heyer
blooms forever in a meadow of resistance.

There’s a poem in the great sleeping giant
of Lake Michigan, defiantly raising
its big blue head to Milwaukee and Chicago—
a poem begun long ago, blazed into frozen soil,
strutting upward and aglow.

There’s a poem in Florida, in East Texas
where streets swell into a nexus
of rivers, cows afloat like mottled buoys in the brown,
where courage is now so common
that 23-year-old Jesus Contreras rescues people from floodwaters.

There’s a poem in Los Angeles
yawning wide as the Pacific tide
where a single mother swelters
in a windowless classroom, teaching
black and brown students in Watts
to spell out their thoughts
so her daughter might write
this poem for you.

There’s a lyric in California
where thousands of students march for blocks,
undocumented and unafraid;
where my friend Rosa finds the power to blossom
in deadlock, her spirit the bedrock of her community.
She knows hope is like a stubborn
ship gripping a dock,
a truth: that you can’t stop a dreamer
or knock down a dream.

How could this not be her city
su nación
our country
our America,
our American lyric to write—
a poem by the people, the poor,
the Protestant, the Muslim, the Jew,
the native, the immigrant,
the black, the brown, the blind, the brave,
the undocumented and undeterred,
the woman, the man, the nonbinary,
the white, the trans,
the ally to all of the above
and more?

Tyrants fear the poet.
Now that we know it
we can’t blow it.
We owe it
to show it
not slow it
although it
hurts to sew it
when the world
skirts below it.

Hope—
we must bestow it
like a wick in the poet
so it can grow, lit,
bringing with it
stories to rewrite—
the story of a Texas city depleted but not defeated
a history written that need not be repeated
a nation composed but not yet completed.

There’s a poem in this place—
a poem in America
a poet in every American
who rewrites this nation, who tells
a story worthy of being told on this minnow of an earth
to breathe hope into a palimpsest of time—
a poet in every American
who sees that our poem penned
doesn’t mean our poem’s end.

There’s a place where this poem dwells—
it is here, it is now, in the yellow song of dawn’s bell
where we write an American lyric
we are just beginning to tell.

This week, Poetry Rocks Black Voices celebrates SHANE McCRAE, author of seven  books of poetry, his latest being Sometimes I Never Suffered. He is a contemporary poet, whose work has made that jump from publication by small presses and university presses to major publishers. Both his newest book and The Gilded Auction Block were published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. A professor of poetry at Columbia University, McCrae has won numerous fellowships including a National Endowment for the Arts, and awards including The Whiting Writers Award, the Lexi/Editor’s Choice Award; and his book, In the Language of my Captor was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the William Carlos Williams Award. In this collection’s poem, “(hope)(lessness),” McCrae shows that the white “keeper” (of slaves or prisoners or Blacks in general) suffers from the act of keeping. The relationship is still complex, as recent history has proven. To learn more about McCrae and read more of his work, please go to  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/shane-mccrae.

(hope)(lessness)

© 2017 Shane McCrae, from In the Language of My Captor, Wesleyan University Press

“And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.”
—Rudyard Kipling

The keeper keeps me    / He tells me
Because he has no hope
I have become an
Expression   of his hopelessness // My kind

Out-breeds his kind
He says   / And I have lived
With the keeper long enough to know
He thinks that means // Eventually

my kind
Will murder him and everyone he loves
and live in / His house
And eat his bread.

He fears he can’t defend
His house   his bread he
Has put his faith in things
That can’t be loyal in return

And also all his hope is gone
Because    he tells me
he has kept me for so long
How could he    / Free me

And not fear I   / Would seek revenge    /He says
he keeps me here
because he would if he were
Me seek revenge

He is a strange
Man he will not acknowledge
my humanity   in-
sofar as it is mine    /But will

Ascribe his traits to me
in all     / Their human / Complexity
it even
pleases him to do so

I tell him // He is hopeful   / He doesn’t fear me
Because I am different from him
but because he hopes
I will become him

This week, Poetry Rocks celebrates Claudia Rankine. Rankine is a master of media and a genre-bending author of six collections of poetry, including Just Us: An American Conversation, Citizen: An American Lyric and Plot; three plays, and video collaborations. She is co-editor of anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind, and co-founder of The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII). When I saw her perform at the Hartford Public Library several years ago, it was the first time I’d heard the term “micro-aggressions.” After you read her prose poem below, perhaps you’d agree that the situations qualify as aggressions, period. There is nothing “micro” about them. And I wondered how many times, I may have committed them without knowing. The Professor of Poetry at Yale (and a resident of New Haven), Rankine has received a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship as well as Guggenheim, Lannan and NEA fellowships; her awards include the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry and the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize. Rankine often writes in the prose poem format, and in the hybrid format that my utilize line of poetry, prose, and play lines. (I apologize if Facebook formatting does not keep the original line endings here of the prose poem below.) For more information, please go to www.Claudiarankine.com.

Excerpts from Citizen: “You are in the dark, in the car…” 

© Claudia Rankine, Graywolf Press, 2014

/

You are in the dark, in the car, watching the black-tarred street being swallowed by speed; he tells you his dean is making him hire a person of color when there are so many great writers out there.
You think maybe this is an experiment and you are being tested or retroactively insulted or you have done something that communicates this is an okay conversation to be having.
Why do you feel okay saying this to me? You wish the light would turn red or a police siren would go off so you could slam on the brakes, slam into the car ahead of you, be propelled forward so quickly both your faces would suddenly be exposed to the wind.
As usual you drive straight through the moment with the expected backing off of what was previously said. It is not only that confrontation is headache producing; it is also that you have a destination that doesn’t include acting like this moment isn’t inhabitable, hasn’t happened before, and the before isn’t part of the now as the night darkens and the time shortens between where we are and where we are going.

/

When you arrive in your driveway and turn off the car, you remain behind the wheel another ten minutes. You fear the night is being locked in and coded on a cellular level and want time to function as a power wash. Sitting there staring at the closed garage door you are reminded that a friend once told you there exists a medical term — John Henryism — for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the build up of erasure. Sherman James, the researcher who came up with the term, claimed the physiological costs were high. You hope by sitting in silence you are bucking the trend.

/

A man knocked over her son in the subway. You feel your own body wince. He’s okay, but the son of a bitch kept walking. She says she grabbed the stranger’s arm and told him to apologize: I told him to look at the boy and apologize. And yes, you want it to stop, you want the black child pushed to the ground to be seen, to be helped to his feet and be brushed off, not brushed off  by the person that did not see him, has never seen him, has perhaps never seen anyone who is not a reflection of himself.
The beautiful thing is that a group of men began to stand behind me like a fleet of  bodyguards, she says, like newly found uncles and brothers.

/

The new therapist specializes in trauma counseling. You have only ever spoken on the phone. Her house has a side gate that leads to a back entrance she uses for patients. You walk down a path bordered on both sides with deer grass and rosemary to the gate, which turns out to be locked.
At the front door the bell is a small round disc that you press firmly. When the door finally opens, the woman standing there yells, at the top of her lungs, Get away from my house. What are you doing in my yard?
It’s as if a wounded Doberman pinscher or a German shepherd has gained the power of speech. And though you back up a few steps, you manage to tell her you have an appointment. You have an appointment? she spits back. Then she pauses. Everything pauses. Oh, she says, followed by, oh, yes, that’s right. I am sorry.
I am so sorry, so, so sorry.

This week, Poetry Rocks Black Voices celebrates Camille T. Dungy. I had the pleasure of hearing Ms. Dungy read at UCONN in 2015. I bought her book, Smith Blue, (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011) and the poem below has resonated with me in its continued relevance, regarding war, climate change, school shootings, and the plight of the medical professionals who must sweep up our messes. Author of four books of poems, and an essayist as well, Ms. Dungy was awarded Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019. Other awards include the American Book Award, two Northern California Book Awards, a California Book Award silver medal, two NAACP Image Award nominations, and other fellowships in both poetry and prose. She currently is a Professor in the English Department at Colorado State University. For more information about her, please go to www.camilledungy.com.

Arthritis is one thing, the hurting another

(for Adrienne Rich, 2006)
Copyright © 2011 Camille T. Dungy

The poet’s hands degenerate until her cup is too heavy.

You are not required to understand.
This is not the year for understanding.

This is the year of burning women in schoolyards
and raided homes, of tarped bodies on runways and in restaurants.

The architecture of the poet’s hands has turned upon itself.

This is not the year for palliatives. It is not the year for knowing what to do.

This is the year the planet grew smaller
and no country would consent to its defeat.

The poet’s cup is filled too full, a weight she cannot carry
from the table to her mouth, her lips, her tongue.
The poet’s hands are congenitally spoiled.

This is not one thing standing for another.

Listen, this year three ancient cities met their ruin, maybe more,
and many profited, but this is not news for the readers here.

Should I speak indirectly?
I am not the poet. Those are not my hands.

This is the year of deportations and mothers bereaved
of all of their sons. The year of third and fourth tours,
of cutting-edge weaponry and old-fashioned guns.

Last year was no better, and this year only lays the groundwork
for the years that are to come. Listen, this is a year like no other.

This is the year the doctors struck for want of aid
and schoolchildren were sent home in the morning

and lights and gas were unreliable
and, harvesters suspect, fruit had no recourse but rot.

Many are dying for want of a cure, and the poet is patient
and her hands cause the least of her pain.

If you’re looking to book a Black poet in Connecticut, I highly recommend Frederick-Douglass Knowles II, who read for my series, Poetry Rocks, last February. He prepares listeners with just the right amount of context for each poem—without giving much away. He’s an emotional and dynamic performer of his works. The first Poet Laureate of Hartford, he is Associate Professor of English at Three Rivers Community College in Norwich, known as the Black Rose City, its official flower. Knowles grew up in Norwich, and his book brings the city and its characters to life. His poems have appeared in publications including the Martin Luther King Jr. Anthology (Yale University Press), Fingernails Across the Chalkboard: AIDS Anthology (Third World Press), and Folio, the Southern CT State University Literary Magazine. He is the author of Black Rose City, and he’s completing his next book, Mentors, which contains elegies and tributes to people who have contributed to his life. Having read the nonfiction book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, I was even more deeply moved by Frederick’s poem about her, forthcoming in Mentors. In light of our coming Veteran’s Day commemoration, here’s a poem about a sacrifice that stirred Frederick’s soul. To learn more about him, please go to www.frederickdouglassknowles.com

CHI-CHI HANK: Private Raymond Keith Knowles Jr.

I gaze
into his graduation pic
grappling over lost time.
A stern figure
emits a soldier’s glare.

His solid eyes pierce
the scoping lens.
Chiseled jowls crease
at 90 degrees; no smile, focused.
His ancestral La Nubian heritage
resonates like Che
liberating the Congolese;
Zapata amalgamating
haciendas in Morelos.
 
A red-white-blue republic flag
crops a darkened background
foreshadowed
by his broad shoulder.
The legacy of a 4^th generation,
Knowles
tatts the left side of his uniform;
his code of honor flanking the right.

Chi-Chi Hank ain’t
little no more, baggy jeans
pulled to the waist side,
elongated white “T’s”
tucked below the belt,
Nike “Air-Force One’s”
marching to a stammering
commander in chief.
M-4 lock and load(ed).
Bullet-proof armor plates
Deterring shraps of hot lead.
Grenade pouches
pack atomic blasts.
30 round magazines strapped.
He’s 7 ½ lbs. stronger, deployed
in the land of mortars,
sand-dusted helmet fastened
no games on this field
—fourth and short—
human bombs
cloaked as children.

Chi-Chi Hank ain’t
my little nephew no more,
laminated photo clutched
in the palm of my hand.
His spirit, still
like a freedom-fighter totting
BlackSteelinthehourofChaos,
praying that his devout faith
will keep the shepherd’s flock
from the war-wolves
bloodthirsty for crude.

© 2011 Frederick-Douglass Knowles II. Black Rose City. Author House.

This week Poetry Rocks Black Voices celebrates Rickey Laurentiis, a young poet who led a writing workshop I took way back in 2015 at the Mark Twain House. (It was part of a Riverwood Poetry conference on racism.) The workshop was on Ekphrastic Poetry (poems inspired by art.) I felt liberated when they said that just about anything you see, touch, hear can be considered “art”. I wrote about the Christmas pot holders my mother made me make for just about every female relative! (What a message to give to a daughter!) Their first book, Boy with Thorn, was selected as the winner of the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. (Note: “Cave” rhymes with Avé). They have received many fellowships and awards, which you can see in detail at https://www.rickeylaurentiis.com

Like Rickey’s notion of “art,” the poem I’ve chosen, “Do You Feel Me?”, is a love poem.  Any experience or thing or person can inspire love. I don’t know Rickey personally to say if the poem is about coming out and loving themselves; it could easily be about the “wild lotus” or “the water” or about the speaker’s “hands” or “feet,” or about a special person they have found, especially if it’s within themselves. I’d like to hear how you interpret the poem! To read more of Rickey’s work, go to https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/rickey-laurentiis.

DO YOU FEEL ME?

First, wild lotus on the surface
of blue water, the great
blue heron striking the ways.
I need to find myself, I told myself.
To live the limits of this body.

Then, I invented “you.”
Like a bridge between two distances,
you guided me: here, fields
of the expansive, wild clover.
My hands, my feet. There,

fields of gray water. You
who increasingly made me
conscious of myself, continue.
Listen to me when I say
I will cross into Jordan.

Swamp lilies in the camplight,
the moonlight opening like a kiss.
This is what happens when
Any two things meet: some water,
a city enveloped, blue—.

How each becomes the revelation
of what the other can do.

© 2015, Rickey Laurentiis, Boy with Thorn. University of Pittsburgh Press

This week Poetry Rocks Black Voices celebrates a CT poet, Antoinette Brim Bell. I’d had the pleasure of seeing her present and read her work at the Mark Twain House several years ago, and she was one of our dramatic readers for my Witchcraft in Connecticut program last fall. I was so impressed that I booked her as featured poet in last February’s Poetry Rocks event. Do check out her YouTube readings. As you will see and hear, her voice sounds like velvet, but has a steely strength underneath. In fact, she has hosted radio and television programs. Her books include These Women You Gave Me, Icarus in Love and Psalm of the Sunflower. She is a Cavé Canem Foundation fellow, a recipient of the Walker Foundation Scholarship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. A printmaker and collage artist, Brim Bell has also been an officer on Boards of Directors of several arts organizations. She is a Professor of English at Capital Community College. Learn more about her at www.antoinettebrim.com.

Her poem below is written in a new form called the “duplex,” which was invented by Jericho Brown (see next week’s post) which he describes as a mixture of a ghazal, sonnet, and blues song.

Duplex: Black Mamas Praying

Black Mamas stay on their knees praying. Cursing
the lies folks tell ‘bout how the world don’t need you—

“The world don’t need you” is a lie folks tell themselves
when they step over blood gelled black and slick.

Folks step over black blood gelled and slick to get
on with things—don’t bring bones to the cemetery.

Bones in the cemetery, hear the prophecy:
—together, bone to bone—tendons and flesh—skin—

bone to bone—tendons and flesh—skin—together,
four winds breathe into these slain, that they may live—

—breathe, four winds, into these slain. That they may live—
Calling forth prophecy is no light work, No—

but, for Joshua, the sun stood still—the moon stopped.
Black Mamas stay on your knees praying—praying—

Copyright © 2020 by Antoinette Brim-Bell. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 11, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

POETRY ROCKS BLACK VOICES celebrates former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith, a Director and Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton. Her book, Life on Mars won the Pulitzer Prize, and her memoir, Ordinary Light, was a National Book Award finalist. She told the Princeton Alumni Weekly, that her goal as Poet Laureate was to use poetry as a bridge to small towns and underserved populations. She trekked to “Kentucky, Louisiana, South Dakota, and other states, where she visited not only libraries but also prisons, rehab centers, retirement facilities, and youth detention centers.” Her poem “Unrest in Baton Rouge” is an ekphrastic poem, meaning that it was inspired by a work of art. I’ll include a copy of Bachman’s photo below. It immediately reminded me of the young protester putting a flower into the barrel of a tank in 1989 in China’s Tiananmen Square. To learn more about Smith and read more of her work, please go to www.poetryfoundation.org.

UNREST IN BATON ROUGE

After the Pulitzer-nominated photo by Jonathan Bachman (2016)

© 2018 by Tracy K. Smith, Graywolf Press

Our bodies run with ink dark blood.
Blood pools in the pavement’s seams.

Is it strange to say love is a language
Few practice, but all, or near all speak?

Even the men in the black armor, the ones
Jangling handcuffs and keys, what else

Are they so buffered against, if not love’s blade
Sizing up the heart’s familiar meat?

We watch and we grieve. We sleep, stir, eat.
Love: the heart sliced open, gutted, clean.

Love: naked almost in the everlasting street,
Skirt lifted by a different kind of breeze.

This week, my Poetry Rocks Black Voices celebrates Terrance Hayes whose book, Lighthead, won the National Book Award in 2010. I had the delight of enjoying his generous reading at the Hill-Stead’s Sunken Garden Poetry Festival last summer. Generous because he spoke conversationally about his inspirations for particular poems, and even shared a few new drafts he hadn’t read in public before. That takes guts! Which is probably one of the reasons he is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation (“Genius”) Fellowship. Like all the other poems in the volume, this is titled after the book’s title: American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin Books, 2018, p. 81.) Hayes is also known for inventing new forms such as the “Golden Shovel” (which most creative writing students know about) in honor of Gwendolyn Brooks. More about her and the form next week! To learn more about Hayes, go to TerranceHayes.com; to see more of his work, go to https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets.

AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN

I remember my sister’s last hoorah.
She joined all the black people I’m tired of losing,
All the dead from parts of Florida, Ferguson,
Brooklyn, Charleston, Cleveland, Chicago,
Baltimore, wherever names alive are
Like the names in graves. I am someone
With a good memory & better imagination.
Can we really be friends if we don’t believe
In the same things, Assassin? Probably,
Ghosts are allergic to us. Because we are dust,
Don’t you & I share a loss, don’t we belong
Together, Brother, Sweetness, Sweetness,
Sweetness? Poor, ragged Heart, blind, savage
Heart, I’ve almost grown tired of talking to you.

This week Poetry Rocks Black Voices features Natasha Trethewey, who rose from a tragic childhood to become a two-term U.S. Poet Laureate, a winner of a Pulitzer Prize (among other prestigious awards), and a professor at Northwestern University. After having published seven books of poetry, Trethewey, who is biracial, is releasing her memoir, Memorial Drive (Ecco Press) this month. Among the topics included are the murder of her mother by Natasha’s stepfather. I wish to feature her poem, “Flounder,” this week, in which her aunt admits a painful truth that it’s easier to grow up white in America than Black. The poem also acknowledges the identification struggles of biracial children. To learn more about Natasha Trethewey, go to https://www.poetryfoundation.org/.

FLOUNDER
© Natasha Trethewey, from the book Domestic Work, Graywolf Press, 2000.

Here, she said, put this on your head.
She handed me a hat.
You ‘bout as white as your dad,
and you gone stay like that.

Aunt Sugar rolled her nylons down
around each bony ankle.
And I rolled down my white knee socks
letting my thin legs dangle

swinging them just above the water
and silver backs of minnows
flitting here and there between
the sun spots and the shadows.

This is how you grip the pole
To cast your line out straight.
Now put this work on your hook,
throw it out and wait.
 
She sat and spit tobacco juice
into a coffee cup,
hunkered down when she felt a bite,
jerked the pole straight up,

reeling and tugging hard at the fish
that wriggled and tried to fight back.
It’s a flounder, and you can tell
‘cause one of its sides is black.
 
The other side is white, she said.
It landed with a thump.
I stood there watching this fish flip-flop,
switch sides with every jump.

Welcome to Poetry Rocks Black Voices! I have the honor of knowing Marilyn Nelson since the early 1990’s when she picked my brain about getting into writing for children. Her first book for young readers, Carver: A Life in Poems (Front Street, 2001), shot her into the starscape, where she continues to inspire readers of all ages with her award-winning volumes of poetry focusing on black history. She is a three-time finalist for the National Book Award, and has won the Frost Medal, NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Poetry, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and NEA and Guggenheim fellowships. She is a professor emerita at UCONN and served as Connecticut Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2006. She has used her gifts to sponsor the development of black writers at her Soul Mountain Retreat. To know Marilyn, or even just her words on the page, is to love her. To learn more about her and read more of her work, please to: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/marilyn-nelson

On June 19, 1865, news reached Galveston, Texas that the Civil War had ended, putting the Emancipation Proclamation (issued in 1863) into effect. Slaves were finally free! June 19 has since been celebrated as “Juneteenth.” This poem, “Juneteenth,” by Marilyn Nelson, is from an early book for adult readers, The Homeplace (Louisiana State Press, 1995), in which she writes of her father, a Tuskeegee Airman.

Juneteenth

With her shiny black-patent sandals
and her Japanese parasol,
and wearing a brand-new Juneteenth dress,
Johnnie’s a living doll.

Juneteenth: when the Negro telegraph
reached the last sad slave…

It’s Boley’s second Easter;
the whole town a picnic.
Children run from one church booth
to the next, buying sandwiches,
sweet-potato pie, peach cobbler
with warm, sweating pennies.

The flame of celebration
ripples like glad news
from one mouth to the next.

These people slipped away
in the middle of the night;
arrived in Boley with nothing
but the rags on their backs.
These carpenters, contractors, cobblers.
These bankers and telephone operators.
These teachers, preachers, and clerks.
These merchants and restaurateurs.
These peanut-growing farmers,
These wives halting the advance of cotton
with flowers in front of their homes.

Johnnie’s father tugs one of her plaits,
head-shaking over politics
with the newspaper editor,
who lost his other ear
getting away from a lynch-mob.