By Diamond Forde, PhD

I haven’t written a poem in two years. Though I’ve tried, bumbled often through the gray light of an early morning tryna squeeze a poem from the dulcet notes of wren song. Before the bustle. Before the lesson plans and half-assed plans for brunch. Before job crises, student crises, and family crises, too. Before touch-hungry dogs and love-hungry partners. During co-writing hangouts, huddled over a tablet, determined, just to give up and bottom them sad scraps of lyric into a Google folder to never be seen again. Most of my mornings stay looped like this: sitting down at my writing desk, blanket hoodie bunching at my hips, coffee mug of Mountain Dew teetering in my right hand, sloshing, then, like clockwork, the question finds me, who am I writing for—and I remember that no one is waiting, so I close the document, turn off my computer, and tend to the rest of my day.

Truth is, I’ve been afraid to write. Afraid that I’m the wrong one writing—that there are better voices to be listening to, and that there is more than listening to be doing, when, this morning alone, more than 50 Palestinians have been murdered or gone missing in another airstrike, and the Trump administration is blocking international students from Harvard, and the ACLU is tracking more than 575 anti-LGBTQ bills under consideration in the United States right now. What can poetry do to stop all of this, I wonder? What can my writing do to save us?

To be clear, I’m not so egotistical as to believe that I’m capable of saving anybody. But I like to think that poetry is as much a crafted expression of Self-interest as it is an expression of We-interest. There is always an us, a we, in poetry. Nearly sixteen years since my first poetry workshop, sixteen years since the first time I was ushered in by Rita Dove, Patricia Smith, Elizabeth Alexander, and Ai [the poet], since the first time I found permission to pen my boldest, Blackest problems on the white ass page, and every navigation of the relationship between me and poetry since has been defining the space between me and we. An amendment: there is always an us, a we, in Black poetry.

In the introduction to Renegade Poetics, Evie Shockley makes visible the intangible “we” defining Black aesthetic movements. She outlines the (male) heavy-hitters defining Black literary criticism and canonization during the Black Arts Movement, explaining how their interests in a Black aesthetic defined Black poetry’s presupposed aspirations towards musicality, spirituality, speech, and allusion, and that the supposition delineated the parameters of what is or is not Black poetry, even in the Black avant garde. But beyond the affirmations of canon—when we define “we” through the subjectively correlated hallmarks of an aesthetic considered (solely) “Black” (under what authority? under whose framework?), we perpetuate the dichotomies of “us v. them” intra-racially. As Shockley writes, “We think we know, even though there is hardly a ‘we’ we could delimit”[i].Who exists in the margins of “we”?

If Evie Shockley’s suddenly we should be an answer, then the answer lies in Black women. Shockley’s book is an archival project dependent on the collective acknowledgement of Black creators and their contribution to art and its study. It is a book entirely aware of its own trajectory, dependent on the aforementioned archive but also on a personal, historical, and cultural exploration of we. Shockley conjures in this book a (Black girl) magic threaded through the intersections of lineage, experimentation, diaspora, wonder, and time. This collection is, in every iteration, a “wake” book[ii] tracing the arc (ark) of the slave ship’s waves through history. The simultaneity of past-now-future throughout this book tasks us, knowingly, with asking what is, or ever could be, “sudden”—when the lost track of time[iii]. that is currently shaping our lives is-has-been-and-will-be, like a record, spinning its loop.

We is in this loop.

But who is we? I turn to the first poem of Shockley’s book, a stunning introduction looping tighter on the possibility of “we.” In the first section of the poem “alma’s arkestral vision (or, farther out),” Shockley explores “we” in concrete. A calligram spelling out the word “we”—the poem composed entirely out of 44 pronouns, 43 repeated utterances of “you” and a single utterance of “me”—makes that me so small, so seemingly insignificant, that it is almost quiet enough to miss. Who is left in the margins of “we”? 

If Evie Shockley’s suddenly we should be an answer, then the answer is Mabbie. The first time I read Gwendolyn Brooks, I was in grad school (I know, I know), in my first ever Black literature course (I know, I know), when I startled across this poem called, “The Ballad of Chocolate Mabbie”[iv]. Mabbie, a dark-skinned Black girl in grade school, is smitten with a boy named Willie Boone. She waits for Willie outside the school gates—excited, I imagined, to walk home together, maybe giggle over lunchtime gossip or bemoan the math homework—whatever girls like her (me/we[v]) would do back then. But then Mabbie sees Willie Boone leaving the school with a “lemon-hued lynx” on his arm, and all her dreams deflate. The poem ends in its final quatrain:

Brooks’ ballad found/finds me through simultaneity—that it was/is, at once and always, inseparably raced, classed, and gendered—as I/we, too, are now/have been, inseparably raced, classed, and gendered. It is a poem constructed in past and prophecy, a lineage of Mabbies, like her/me, finding kinship in the wound of we. This is, I think, what Shockley’s “me” within the “we” means most in the calligram; not the fallacy of American individualism but the recognition that you, me, and we are constructs constructing. That you and me create we, and we creates you and me, too. We belong to each other, and sometimes that belonging comes from the hurt we feel, but sometimes that belonging can come from the want we have to heal each other, too. We are most ourselves when we are me and you. 

And this is what is tricky about we, Shockley’s calligram reminds us. If there is more than one way to read the singular “me” in the arkestral, then there is more than one way to read “we,” too. If we is community, is diaspora, and as I hope there is more than one you that will find this essay, then there might be more than one we that can find us, too. As Shockley explains in an interview with Poets House:

“Community” is a term that stands in for a lot: common interests and diversity of opinion; sometimes nurture and sometimes constraint; collectivity that might be to some degree voluntary and to some degree imposed; a base of both social and political relations. I’ve been lucky to have been a part of many different kinds of communities in my life.”

Let us parse we at its dichotomous nature. Let us position we at its communal poles. If the dichotomy potentially defining community is nurture and constraint, then the parameters defining “we,” defining the diasporic limits of Black poetry, which has been defined with all good intention to nurture, to survive, might also exist at its polar limits to constrain, at least, depictions of me for the collectivity of we to prosper. To contextualize that through a previously mentioned example, one could argue (wrongly) that “The Ballad of Chocolate Mabbie” is not (yet) a Black poem. Even Brooks described herself pre-1967 as “a ‘new negro’ becoming black”[vi]. Writing from the position of this interim Blackness, Brooks presumably couldn’t actualize her “Blackness” until she became conscious of herself as an African poet, “or better yet a conscious African woman in America who chose poetry as her major craft”[vii].

I want to parse the syntax of that sentence—how its use of relative and prepositional clauses turn each descriptor toward the conditional, as if it is the condition of the African to be woman, to be poet, as if these identities are just circumstances that can inconsequentially happen, as if each identifier proceeding the word “African” aligns through the tight control of grammar to its place in the hierarchy. For the collectivity of Blackness, it seems to suggest, womanness is secondary. For the collectivity of Blackness, it seems to suggest, poetry is secondary. Americanness, secondary (though I have never known another home / to cut me[viii] as deep). For Black-woman-American-poets surviving the collectivity of we might mean piecemealing herself and her history. For example, while we might not consider the ballad a “black form,” to suggest that “The Ballad of Chocolate Mabbie” is any less Black because of its form ignores the history of enslavement that has brought the ballad to our doorstep; it also ignores what Evie Shockley points out in her analysis of Gwendolyn Brooks’ “The Anniad”, and how Brooks was tasked with creating a black aesthetic “highly attuned to the interplay between race, gender, and class”[ix]. So when the Brooks/Shockley/me/we of Black women writers are tasked with achieving a black aesthetic through erasure, we have to seriously consider how the demand to reposition Self-interest as subordinate to We-Interest might inadvertently mean to harm us. If the Self is secondary to the needs of the diasporic we, then what can my writing do to save us?

But again, as Shockley’s calligram reminds us, if there is never a “me” in “we” then the “we” stays incomplete. “The Ballad of Chocolate Mabbie” is Black (or should be) because it is the product of a distinctly Black American experience, a collection of Black American experiences produced through centuries of enslavement, rape, and miscegenation laws that have guided the intricacies of colorism, passing, and the paper bag test into being. To suggest that this poem is less Black because it relies on a European form, again, tries to ahistoricize white supremacy, while making invisible the experiences of Black American women then and now. This is why, when Audre Lorde writes that “poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless,[x]” I have to imagine that she didn’t mean just ideas. Who or what is the nameless kept behind every poem? Who is the reader, the influence, the archive, the history? Who is the poet made nameless through canonization’s culling? How do we name and nurture the “me” and the “you” who makes the “we” possible?    

And this is what makes Shockley’s suddenly we so necessary—a voice against the erasures of we as constraint; this book makes malleable the we through linguistic-and-linear slippage. Organized into four sections, suddenly we continuously severs and tethers the linkages between Black American communities through time. In the book’s first section, for example. “we:: becoming and going”, Shockley embodies the “becoming” of a diasporic community simultaneously connected and disconnected through the legacies of transatlantic enslavement. In the poem, “the beauties: third dimension,” for instance, Shockley unravels a poem in eleven parts: Lula Bell, Carolina, Dot, Savannah, Matti Lee, Rose, Fannie Mae, Sarah, Zeddie, Mammy, and Queen. The invocation of these names is purposeful; accompanied by images of the previously named slave ships, “the beauties” speaks to and away from that history, coming and going between past and present, embodiment and disembodiment, and taking the reader along through that shift. What does it mean that in a poetic section named “Carolina,” I am at once asked to consider a woman’s name, a pair of states (North Carolina, where Shockley and I have both taught), and the 47 slave ships that all shared the same name[xi]? How does the invocation of those possibilities speak towards the possibilities of Black embodiment, of we? As Shockley writes in the opening lines of “Lula Bell”:

What does it mean that the body we are referring to is the hull of a slave ship? What does it mean when the ship has had more embodiment, more humanity, than the supposed cargo it carried, and that this ship is the vehicle, the tangible connection that outlives the human body to (with)hold both memory and history? How does that hierarchy of embodiment influence Black embodiment even now? Where does the slave ship exist in the collectivity of we?  

In an effort to build community in a temporal and physical landscape that has and would deny me me, how does community work to return me to me (as I work to return we to we, too)? After all, we can be beautifully symbiotic; we is the only means we have to surviving. Me and you need we. Which is why there is no coincidence that suddenly we is composed with over twenty dedications and epigraphs aftered after Black artists and literary figures—Willie Cole, Allison Saar, Nikky Finney, and Cheryl A. Wall, to name a few. Shockley’s poem, “blues-elegy for cheryl” pays loving homage to Wall’s contribution as a mother—to the field of Black literature (“she weeded our mothers’ gardens with tender loving care / tended hurston and cade and morrison (&&&!) all with loving care) and to the love she had for her own daughter (“if you wanted to see her glow, call her daughter’s name / o, she beamed brightest at the sound of her daughter’s name”) Shockley illustrates how, for Cheryl Wall, We-work and Self-work can be linked by through nurture and love.

I mean “love” in the legacy of bell hooks’ philosophical exploration All About Love: New Visions, in which hooks quotes M. Scott Peck in The Road Less Traveled, to define love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth”; I would like to believe that Shockley’s suddenly we amends that definition, changes the “or” to “and”—so that we is the love we will to nurture ourselves and our community, especially in those moments we need each other most.

Which brings me to the ghost of time haunting the periphery of this collection—this is a pandemic book, with poems like “the lost track of time” presumably written in the middle of the 2020 lockdown. I mention this marker of time as a reminder of what profound isolation can do to one’s relationship with both Self and community. We are still struggling to understand how much we need community, how much community needs us. The pandemic is still happening, but it’s our own insistence on the individual needs of you and me that keeps us now from asking who we become when our days are no longer defined by time nor community. In “fruitful,” Shockley opens, “you grow my garden, no, you are / the whole of it” and in so doing, reminds me of the necessity of community to the self’s self-interest, purpose, and wonder. But the poem also expands the possibility of we to include the non-human, too, to expand the multiplicitous definitions of “we” even toward the boundaries that I have overlooked in the unpacking of the limitations of a Black aesthetic while writing this. (Who is left on the margins of “we”?—the pines, the peach orchards, the parsnips and the parsley.)

This is what is so constraining about the parameters of “we”; that in the very nature of delineating “Black poetry,” we corner the possibilities; we askew environment and history and self (“&&&!”). We compartmentalize. We limit. As Elizabeth Alexander writes, when “we name the experimental, as we name any quality, moment, school, or movement in literature” we are doing so “in large part from the vantage point of today”[xii]. (What is, or ever could be, “sudden”?)

I want to be clear that I am not criticizing the act of naming our borders (because within those borders, we construct the means through which our communities survive). I mean to question the materiality of the borders we made/make/will make; what materials we have used/use/will use to shape our borders, and where those materials came/come/will come from. Is it truly possible to imagine borders as multi-lectical expressions of a community that was-is-and-will-be changing? I can’t say (alone). But as “poetry’s ev(ie)angelist” writes, “language has baggage—but the good news is art can renew / and resee it” [xiii].

Then let us renew/resee it—the we we bring to poetry.

And I want to be honest, I still haven’t written a poem[xiv]. Maybe the conundrum of we is a question my art still ain’t ready for, but me is malleable, ever-changing, and Evie Shockley’s suddenly we is the kind of book that makes me believe that the effort of re-defining, or returning to the inane loop of the page, makes a future for me/for you/for the nurturing we still possible, and maybe like suddenly we, the right project can/has/and will start when the nurturing we we need has found us[xv].

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[i] See page two of the “Introduction: Renegade Poetics (Or, Would Black Aesthetics by An[y] Other Name Be More Innovative?)” from Evie Shockley’s Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry.  

[ii] I am referencing Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being.

[iii] This is a reference to a poem of the same name in Shockley’s suddenly we. I will return to this poem later.

[iv] From A Street in Bronzeville (1945)

[v] I want to be clear that I am aware there are readers for which the “we” might not apply, and that is part of the conundrum of “we.” We can find some of us, but not all of us, which means the “we” in this essay is built on both fact and fiction, simultaneously. 

[vi] I am quoting Haki R. Madhubuti’s Preface to Gwendolyn Brooks’ biography, Report from Part One, specifically pages 14-17 throughout this paragraph.  

[vii] Again, this quote is from Madhubuti’s Preface to Report from Part One.

[viii] I should make note that there are multiple but simultaneous variations of the I/Me that exists within this essay; there are several dissonances that I/ you/ we as readers have to navigate between the Self that exists in space (embodied Self v. page Self—which other, better writers have written about before me), the Self that exists in time—(the version of Diamond who wrote this essay v. the version of Diamond who edits, for instance), and the Self constructed in intention (that the “I” that I have written here hopes that you might see me in yourself). The latter suggesting that the “I” can and does perform as a collectivity sometimes is important because it further complicates the question of we in this essay.

Of course, I mention this because the conundrum of “I” is exactly what Shockley is invested in exploring in her book—as in this essay, the “I” in suddenly we is multiplicious. Consider, for instance, what Shockley says about the “I” in her poem, “Perched” in an interview on Electric Literature:

“One of my main interests in the book is how our understanding of ourselves as individuals interacts with, informs, limits, or opens up the ways we imagine ourselves in relation to others—groups of others. The poem “perched” is an important one for signaling this interest, if quietly, in ways that are suggestive for lots of other poems in the book. Like so many poems in the African American tradition, it uses what some have called “the i that means we,” which allows an individual experience to stand in for a widely shared or generic Black experience. The poem is ekphrastic, thus its i is plural in a more specific sense: it is the young girl figured in the sculpture, “Blue Bird”; it is something I imagine or sense in the experience or emotional repertoire of the sculptor, Alison Saar; and it’s some aspect of myself.”

To contend fully with the conundrum of we in this essay andits engagement with Shockley’s work, “we” must understand how the seemingly singular “I” might also function as a marker of we, too. Shockley’s “I” ushers a larger participating community into the fold (the young girl in “Blue Bird”, Alison Saar), which means that an argument of “I” cannot depend on a singular idea of the Self, either.

And there are interesting conundrums abound in the opening of a multiplicious “I.” Some affirm the importance of the same questions I’ve implementing around “we” like, what are the parameters of participation in the “I”? What does it say that the “I”s between the “I” in Shockley’s poem perched have been linked through emotional reciprocity and an act of creation—does this say something about the potential shape of community in black writing, or could it be a nod to the simultaneously me-you-we-affirming principles of a nurturing we, or is it just one more valuable reminder that we/me/you need each other. What is Self-work if we can acknowledge that the self is we, too?

But these questions exist just off-script, an aside someone somewhere is having.

[ix] The quote is from page 31 on the first chapter of Shockley’s Renegade Poetics, “Changing the Subject: Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Anniad,” in which Shockley points out the conflicting audiences and expectations Brooks was forced to navigate in the creation of her aesthetic. 

[x] The quotation is from Poetry is not a Luxury.  

[xi] From the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade – Database on slavevoyages.org

[xii] This is the opening sentence from “New Ideas about Black Experimental Poetry.”

[xiii] From the final lines of Shockley’s poem “prefixed” (p. 73) in suddenly we.

[xiv] Two days after completing this essay, I wrote my first poem draft in two years.

[xv] Following the acknowledgements of suddenly we, Shockley writes that the poems from the project were written only because she was asked to do so: “To those who reached out with warm invitations and gentle requests, whether they led to poems or not, I offer gratitude.”

And to the ones who found me, who made me write and want to write this essay—thank you. You brought poetry back to me—let’s keep writing.

Read more in this issue: Interview | Poems | Writing Prompt

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Dr. Diamond Forde is the author of two poetry collections, Mother Body (Saturnalia Books, 2021) and The Book of Alice (Scribner Books, 2026). She has received a Doctorate in Creative Writing at Florida State University (with a specialization in African American poetics and fat studies), and an MFA in Creative Writing at The University of Alabama. Forde has received nomination and recognition in the Furious Flower Poetry Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery award, and as a Ruth Lily Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellow. Her work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Obsidian, Callaloo, and elsewhere. Forde serves as the “Interviews” Editor with Honey Literary, as an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina Asheville, and as an avid lover of colorful dresses. Find out more at her website: http://www.diamondforde.com