By Meta DuEwa Jones, PhD

Letter #1: An Introduction^[i]

Dear _______________
In this space, in this time, I am a writer, a researcher, a scholar engaged in black study, guiding us through Erica Hunt’s poetics and prose.

Let’s journey together, on this word-train: “Where I am the Sunday / company / glad to be a passenger.”^[ii]

A life-long journaler, Erica Hunt’s practice spans more than a half-century.^[iii] A graduate of San Francisco State University and Bennington College, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts, Hunt’s creative endeavors include poetry, essays, editing, inter-artistic collaboration, and literary and cultural theory. Her renovative poetics evinces radical practices in Black avant-garde traditions.^[iv] Hunt has worked as a philanthropic foundation leader, a community activist, a juror for literary prizes, and a thought leader.

Across the country, she has been awarded distinguished fellowships from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Djerassi Foundation, among others; and she has taught at several universities, including Duke, Wesleyan, Temple, and Brown. Hunt has nourished, and been nurtured by, a range of intellectuals, creatives, and activists engaged in literary and cultural organizations, feminist art communities, and writing institutes such as the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University, Cave Canem, and the Kelly Writer’s House at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been a consistent collaborator with Black visual artists such as Allison Saar, creative intellectuals such as Saidiya Hartman, fellow poetic innovators such as Harryette Mullen, and composers and performers such as JJJJJerome Ellis.

Hunthas authored seven books: Local History, Arcade, Piece Logic, Time Slips Right Before Your Eyes, A Day and Its Approximates, Veronica: A Suite in X Parts, and Jump the Clock.^[v] A wide range of contemporary journals, prestigious literary magazines and anthologies have also featured her work, including: BOMB, Boundary 2, FENCE, Hambone, The Los Angeles Review of Books; In the American Tree, Gathering Ground, and Seeding the Future.

Through dissonant sounds, arch allusions, and deliberate use of silence, Hunt’s poetry strategically tightropes “the verge of legibility.”^[vi]  Her “oppositional writing” practice incorporates “unrecognizable speech” patterns to counter discursive domination through mainstream literary cultures co-optation of insurgent aesthetics.^[vii] This aesthetics of dissidence advances disparate forms of “black avant gardism”^[viii] and continues the innovative liberatory praxis of many writers of the Black Arts Movement. With poet Dawn Lundy Martin, Hunt’s visionary assemblage in Letters to the Future: Black Women / Radical Writing, buttressed the visibility and indelible impact of female and genderqueer artists. She platforms artists “committed to a radical practice of literary work, necessary alchemists in the word.”^[ix] Likewise, she works to “set boundaries anew” by “estranging familiar forms” like the “letter and diary.”^[x]

Let’s reset the boundaries for critical essays on Erica Hunt.^[xi]

To assay her treasure in word-wealth, I think with, and write in, the letter mode. I follow an African American literary and cultural tradition of letter-writing.^[xii] This epistolary form reflects creative style as intellectual practice. My formal cue comes from Hunt’s career; her prose poetic epistles transform the relationship between intimacy, erudition, and the public sphere.

Yours, truly in public,
—M.

* * *

Postcard #1: An Invitation
Dear Public One:

I write to you, by the blacklight of poet June Jordan: these
letters are things that I do in the dark—and the dawn—
reaching for you.^[xiii] In some form, these letters are love
poems—but not in a sentimental mood.^[xiv] My invitation: Do
your thing, or ya thang! I’d love to read from you once
you’ve read Lauren K. Alleyne’s interview and Hunt’s work:^[xv]
How do you engage Hunt’s (epistolary) practice?  What do
you encounter in your own letter-writing journey?       

                                                                                 Reaching
                                                                                 for you,    

                                                                                 —M.

* * *

Letter #2 Against Flatness: An Encounter

Dear E:
It’s been decades since I first encountered your work. I met your writing-mind—and you—the poet-philosopher in-the-flesh at nearly the same time.

From a region in my place memory, I still see the table-top lectern where you placed the cream and carmine jacket for your newest book (at the time): Arcade.^[xvi] You were the “Black woman at the podium . . .” bringing “a treasury of rhetorical wealth;” rewriting “ a radically different text for female empowerment.^[xvii]” Once upon a time, the slanted podium you spoke from lived as a tree. Oak? Mahogany? I can’t see the grain, but I remember the wood, stained. I remember grasping the thick sides of the slick square before introducing you for a campus reading.

Arcade’s jacket design featured your name, and your collaborator, the sculptor and printmaker, Alison Saar’s name, too. The words:
“POEMS” and “WOODCUTS”
in bold, at the bottom, in two ecru rectangles. The rectangles’ edges were serrated. Each bolt resembled a strip of paper or unbleached linen; the beige blocks contrasted the surrounding geometric tiles.^[xviii] And I remember a pun about Alison’s artwork: weren’t the book’s pages made of cut, pulped, wood? I thought, but did not ask, this question. It seemed too clever by half. 

Now, as I type this letter in bytes, I remember my first encounter with Arcade . . . .
The touch of vellum parchment.
The thrill of cerebral play.
The feel of my index finger pressing on words from your verse, tracing Alison’s lines.
Tactile reading.
Your poem, “First Words,” curtailed behind—peeking through—Alison’s drawing. ^[xix]
Her printmaking and your wordmaking process, together, “fighting flatness.” ^[xx] 
Breaking and bending and baring and blurring boundaries, below . . . 

See how Alison carves a thick curtain, encircled by color and light? See the curved figure, in full fetal position?

I see a world; I see a womb; I see a red moon.

See how the dark lines of your poem hover between translucence and opacity?

“We have this in common: art and life, children, daughters named Maddy,”^[xxi] you and Alison wrote. Your collaboration renovates the visual-verbal architecture of Black maternal aesthetics.^[xxii]

I read a few words from your “First Words;” you reference:
what’s under stones or understates
the tension of what’s concealed
and what’s shown.

Your riff on “words that return in the face / the face of the familiar” and your penchant for parataxis repeats phrases presenting a surface feel of the familiar. Your deft syntactical shifts from noun and verb catch my eye and ear.

You shadow box with syntax.

“The past tense of read is read,” you wrote.^[xxiii] I read Arcade, presently, and what hovers in my ear-mind? Your assertion in the essay “Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde”:
“The world is in the text and the text is in the world.”^[xxiv]

I echo your chiasmus with my own:
The womb is in the text and the text is in the womb.

The carved lines of Alison’s woodcuts create a harbor, a word-womb in wine red, eggshell, and burnt umber. Tricolor enchantment.

Arcade transforms apperceptive possibility. I call this a form of black alchemy.^[xxv]

P.S. Do you see what I see?
—M.

* * *

Letter #2B Introduced: Another Story

Dear E:
You said “[s]tories . . . are repeated to someone who wasn’t involved, to get your side of the story told.” ^[xxvi] Well, this story involves you. My side of this story “tells and forgets.”^[xxvii]

Not one, but two of my professors introduced me to you during my first year in graduate school. ^[xxviii]

‘Introduced’ is not quite the right verb.

In “Personal” you wrote: “grammar—a cause.”^[xxix] Your continual creative parsing of grammar prods more precision.^[xxx] “Tailored,” a denominal verb, better suits the occasion that shaped our first encounter. Two university garments, teaching and mentoring, shaped my enduring engagement with your work.

I don’t remember which came first: reading your widely influential essay, “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics,” in a grad theory seminar, or, being invited to introduce you at a reading. Memory’s mechanics fray the seams; the time slips.

You ask, “[h]ow does she keep the stories apart, from falling into one another?” ^[xxxi]

I do remember exiting through the side doors of Margaret Jacks Hall, then walking straight across the Quad to the beige and red-tiled building (ironically) called Green Library on Stanford’s campus. I researched the history of Kelsey Street Press, the feminist, experimental-arts press that published Arcade. I scoured the stacks to locate, and read—any, and—everything I could find written by and about you. I scanned the grayish blur on the microfilm—or was it microfiche?— machine so I could access an archived news-page from an early book review from the Village Voice Literary Supplement.

The reviewer began their engaged encounter with Local History by asking: 
“What might draw a reader into an author’s first book?”

The question, was, of course, rhetorical. The answer was:
“Hunt’s opening line was enough to do the trick:
‘I was thinking that if the ceiling were mirrored we would have to watch what we say
about how we feel.’
Local History holds enough cleverly built dislocations to catch . . . readers
unaware and force them to go back over that sentence to see if it meant to say
what it said.”^[xxxii] (13, VLS).

The epistolary, like a book review, is a form of encounter. When the epistle, to use an old-fashioned, clerical term, is enclosed in—or as—an essay, a poem, or a book—as many of your letters have been—the dialogic encounter between writer-and-reader is drawn out across time. The possibility for direct response is deflected into other modes like reviews.

The reviewer’s question emphasizes authorial time, the order of your story. Your first book.

My questions follow a sequence, too: Do you read reviews of your work? Do you ever shift the terms of the encounter by writing a letter to your reviewer?

Until I can read your side of the story, 
—M.

* * *

Letter #4: Marking Time: Between Enclosure and Boundlessness

Dear E:
When you said, “every statement of poetics bears the mark of its time,”^[xxxiii] you included your own. Likewise, when you wrote “every artistic practice is imprinted with its particular tensions of audience, time, and place,” you wrote in a public space.^[xxxiv] 

Place: a Boston Review forum. Time: Spring, 2015. Audience: “known and unknown readers”^[xxxv]

The attention to “race” and “the poetic avant-garde” are the forum’s foci.^[xxxvi] But the stylistic innovations of your work—aesthetic strategies that include “fragmented voice, disjunctive logic, and paratactic lines”—are not bound by race, language-centered writing or time.

From Local History (1994) to Jump the Clock (2020), your poetic method addresses the reader—and (fictional) recipients—through the forms of enclosure^[xxxvii]the epistolary provides. Letters to the Future includes both visual art created in-and-as a letter form, as well as written letters by you and others, from conceptual artist Adrian Piper’s 2013 “Imagine” postcard, to your correspondence with playwright Adrienne Kennedy. I marveled at how you and Dawn choreographed a call and response to cohere each artist’s unique aesthetic expressivity. Your editorial and epistolary practices engage Black aesthetic practices, plural. ^[xxxviii]  E., the friend~ship you and D. share operates as a verb: it breathes air into the sails of Letters; it buoys all 453 pages; it anchors the book’s radical artistic journey.

You said your poetry is “a rehearsal space.” The Black feminist sense of Caribbean rehearsal is evident in your staging of the epistolary as a site for expressive experimentalism. ^[xxxix] Letters is replete with multiple prologues, forewords, introductions, afterwords and closing words. Within these curtailed forms, you create a sense of aesthetic boundlessness.

But (say) what about “the mark of its time”?

Letters to the Future took protracted time, labor, and yes, love. The need for relation and connection was great, and grave. You observed “the time of this collection, 2015-2017, was marked by an inflection in the world’s deteriorating economic and political relations.”^[xl]  You invested three years to curate and cohere creative community. Letters anticipated the particular tensions of Pandemic Time, it Jump[ed] the Clock. You struck that clock at the janus hour when you reflected that 2020 “will be marked as a portal or an abyss or both.”^[xli]

P.S. What made you shift from an anticipatory temporal mode in Letters to the Future to a “poetics of the present” in Jump the Clock?”^[xlii]

                  marking time until your future reply,  
—M.

* * *

Letter #5: Notes on Notes: The Temporal, The Oppositional & The Ordinary

Dear E:
Did you receive my letter last month? A few weeks ago, I watched the livestream of your conversation with Saidiya Hartman and JJJJJerome Ellis.^[xliii] For some time now, I’ve been mulling over your talk, “Language in the Ruins,” and your rehearsal of temporality as a poetic, political and philosophical practice. You commended Saidiya’s “way of reading the past” as a survival practice, a strategic “present tool.”

It was poetic heaven, or at the very least, a haven, to hear you delineate Gwendolyn Brooks’ sonnet, “my dreams, my works must wait till after hell.” (Forgive the sentimentalism of my pun). Your renovative attention to Brooks’ gendered poetics of time in off-rhyme pairs such as “incomplete” and “wait” was spot-on. Your reading of lines like “I am very hungry. I am incomplete” and “No man can give me any word but Wait.” brought Brooks’ lyric to bear on our contemporary moment. ^[xliv]  

“We wait, we wait, are told wait,” you lamented.

“We hold our breaths. I can’t breathe,” you added to this refrain. “How can we wait?”

You work through the wound of “waiting;” you turn the key on “its temporal lock.”^[xlv]
Thank you for opening the door to “hope” despite justice delayed, justice denied.
Your critique of the politics of “patience” tends towards what the scholar Julius Fleming coined as Afro-presentism.

Your focus on the political function of parts of speech in Brooks reflects your investment in examining “the politics of poetic form”^[xlvi] in your widely influential essay, “Notes for Oppositional Poetics.” “Notes” elucidates the strategies for “oppositional writing” in two novels: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi.^[xlvii] E, at first, I wondered why your excellent explication of novels was published in a collection theorizing poetics. But your essay indicates that distinct conceptions of genres, like grammar, are politically and discursively constructed. I first learned from your “Notes” to think critically about the atemporal structure of Toni Morrison’s Beloved.  You indexed the “extremely violent conditions” that Black mothers endured within “slave society” as marked by Sethe’s disavowal of “official historical time. ”^[xlviii]  And violence, specifically the “submerged, disconnected and violent character of contemporary life,” compelled you to change your essay’s original title.^[xlix] You replaced “Possibility” with “Notes.” 

Possibility connotes promise; Notes suggests preservation.

Possibility points to the future; Notes records, and becomes a record of, the past.

I think, here and now, of Cristina Sharpe’s newest book, Ordinary Notes.^[l]  Cristina’s distilled, condensed writing on quotidian encounters with antiblack violence and misogynoir indict and unsettle. Have you read it, yet E? What do you think of it, how may you think with it?

In possibility,
—M.

* * *

Letter #8 Touching: On Legibility

Dear E:
Even if “Correspondence Theory” didn’t hint, I would still feel called to respond; desire to engage your theory and practice; your avant-garde practice as theory.

Not too much time, say, around A Day And Its Approximates^[li] after reading your poem, “Reader we were meant to meet,” I caught a snag in the net of your writing-mind. 

You have often invoked the strategic power of illegibility in formal innovation, especially for oppressed communities. Imagine my surprise when I arrived at these lines: “Reader, you were meant to be legible / even in the failure to communicate.” ^[lii]  The slippage—between the intention, or the capacity, to be clearly understood, and the inevitable disconnect—piques. The (un)decipherable code beckons and vexes.

I am touched by the tactile in your poem~theory, too. You declared:
Touch, reader, we were meant to touch
to exchange definitions and feed the pulse of
language. I promise if you step in [ . . . ]^[liii]
I step outside of the poem to step into the poem’s promise: the subjunctive “if.” “Were meant to” can also mean “but have not yet;” it can also mean “we might not.”

Does this yearning to connect, this reaching towards the reader, animate your letters?  
Does the proximal play with proximity, and distance, in your letters delight or rattle?
Does the epistolary make a promise it (knows it) can’t keep? 

feeling the pulse of (your) language,
                                             —M. 

* * *

Letter #13: How We Get Free: Don’t Skip. Jump! Fly!

Dear E.
You titled your new and selected poems, Jump The Clock. “Jump” is an imperative; “clock” serves as a noun.  Let’s make a jump cut, a chiasmic shift.

Let’s clock the jump.

A recent review suggests your phrase could signify “jumping out of clock-time altogether—out of mechanized, monetized time. . . ”^[liv]

• Does your call to “jump” urge readers to quickly move beyond time’s frame or time frames?
• Does your “jump” diddle with the line from the nursery rhyme: “the cow jumps over the moon”?
• Does your pun on the cliché “time flies” seek freedom through propulsive flight?

I realize the answer could be “yes” to one, all, or none of these questions.

We connect, and disconnect, across temporal movements and their measurements. Your work indexes the (im)possibility of accurately taking time’s true temperature—even as the impulse to measure, to mark, time’s passage endures. Time blindsides sight. The day shifts from slip to jump. Your poem, “Octavio Paz’ Calendar,” where the phrase, “to jump the clock” appears, underscores this.  Your reference to the celestial world, the world of “the sun,” slips into a mathematical one, a world of (dual) calculation. You wrote:
the sun pours into pools of heat
the same sun you round up to 584 days
I tab at 365 and change not keeping score.^[lv]

We correspond on differential planes and zones of time.
Jumping involves kinetic movement; to jump the clock is to seek flight.

Let’s make
a jump cut.

* * *

E., have you read Toni Cade Bambara’s short story, the Education of a Storyteller?
Jump the Clock provides a theory of time, space, and flight. So, too, does “Education.”

To make a short story shorter, Bambara begins with a black girlchild, Peaches, in conversation with her Grandma Dorothy. She learns how our African ancestors did the thing that needed to be done. How rest was won. Not despite, but to spite the arresting chain-hold by those European (sea) captains of captivity during that murderous Middle Passage.

Some of us did not die, June Jordan reminds us.^[lvi] None of us willingly chose to take the “voyage through death / to life upon these shores” that Robert Hayden chronicled.^[lvii]

Some of us skipped the shore. Nah, we didn’t skip. This weren’t no skippity-zippity, “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah,” Song of the South, Disney-movie version; romancing slavery; serving our subjugation on a prettified plantation platter.

Bambara’s narrator tells of “that terrible time when we were kidnapped, herded in ships, and brought here in chains as enslaved labor [ . . . .] when the boat brought the Africans from the big ships to the shore . . .”^[lviii]

Some of us walked.

The order of the story goes:
“[T]hose Africans stepped out onto the land, took a look around, and with deep-sight vison saw what the European further had in store for them, whereupon they turned right around and walked all the way home, all the way home to the motherland.”^[lix]

Some of us flew.

Another side of the story goes:
“And there on the deck, we looked to shore, and saw what was further in store and we flew away to Guinea.”^[lx]

Some of us jumped!
out of the boat                         into the plane of wet              across the plane of air

Later, we learned to tell these storied lessons in liberation.
“Of course we know how to walk on the water, of course we know how to fly,” Grandma Dorothy tells Peaches. ^[lxi]

Your storied lesson on liberation appears in the Author’s Note in Jump the Clock. You said your poems “were and are a rehearsal space for emancipated knowing, thinking and feeling; the open space of hope. . .”^[lxii]

I, your reader, respond here—rehearse in the open space beside you:
jumping through the open       surrendering to the air             not succumbing to the sea
your emancipated knowing:   how we get free

    taking flight

—M.

* * *

---

^[i] I dedicate this epistolary essay, in memoriam, to Althea Tait, an influential writer, professor and scholar of Black feminist literature, children’s literature and poetry and poetics. Althea: “pink-think” theorist of Magenta! Althea, come from spirit-strong faith, family and friendship. Althea, who made writer family breaking bread with we Wintergreen Women Writers Collective. Althea’s sudden passing changed the arc of these letters towards time-slippage.

^[ii] Erica Hunt and Alison Saar. “First Words,” Arcade, (Berkeley: Kelsey Street Press, 1996.) p. 9.

^[iii] Hunt frames her introduction into poetic practice through journaling, “for more than 52 years . . . since I was a girl. . . and writing poems much of the time.” (Hunt 00:12:15-12:38). Hunt, Erica. Furious Flower Facebook Live Reading Series Presents Erica Hunt, YouTube, uploaded by Furious Flower Poetry Center, 4 Oct. 2021, https://youtu.be/mG7w1lRcUtQ?si=EJyeZGKaT-VGpOWH&t=730.

^[iv] I see Hunt working within a Black avant-garde tradition whose formal innovation includes an investment in historical forebears, identified as “contemporary renovative poetics.” Jones, Meta DuEwa, “The String of Grace: Renovating New Rhythms in the Present-Future of Black Poetry and Music,” Furious Flower: Seeding The Future of African American Poetry, Edited by Joanne V. Gabbin and Lauren K. Alleyne, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2020, pp. 213-230.

^[v] Hunt, Erica. Local History, New York: Roof Books, 1994; Arcade, with Alison Saar, Berkeley: Kelsey Street Press, 1996, Piece Logic, Durham: Carolina Wren Press, 2002; Time Slips Right Before Your Eyes, New York: Belladona Press, 2006 (Reissue 2015);  A Day and Its Approximates, Tucson: Chax Press, 2013; Veronica: A Suite in X Parts, Chicago: Selva Oscura Press, 2019; and Jump the Clock: New and Selected Poems, New York: Nightboat Books, 2020.

^[vi] “Erica Hunt,” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/erica-hunt.

^[vii] “Erica Hunt,” “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics,” The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy, Edited by Charles Bernstein, New York: Roof Books, 1990, 197, p. 203-204.

^[viii]“Black avant-gardism” is a theoretical concept coined by the scholar Keith Leonard. Unpublished manuscript, See synopsis of this project. “Abstract,” ACLS Fellow Grantees;

^[ix]Hunt, “Introduction: Angle, Defy Gravity, Land Unpredictably,” Letters to the Future: Black Women / Radical Writing, Edited by Erica Hunt and Dawn Lundy Martin, Tucson: Kore Press, 2018. p. 15.

^[x] “Erica Hunt,” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/erica-hunt; Harryette Mullen, “Description,” Blurb, Local History, https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/0937804533/Local-History.aspx

^[xi] For excellent scholarship on Erica Hunt, see: Kinnahan, Linda, “Bodies written off”: Economies of Race and Gender in the Visual/Verbal Collaborative Clash of Erica Hunt’s and Alison Saar’s Arcade,” We Who Love To Be Astonished : Experimental Women’s Writing And Performance Poetics, Edited by Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002; Cummings, Allison, “Public Subjects: Race and the Critical Reception of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. 26a; 3-36; Schultz, Kathy Lou. “Rock and a Hard Place: Erica Hunt and the Poetics of African-American Post-modernity.” How2 1.5 (2001): n. page. Web 21 Sept. 2015. Book-length treatments have trended in the direction of emphasizing the connections between Hunt’s challenges to standardized language practices and conceptualization of political functions of grammatical orders in relationship to Black Arts / Black Aesthetics movement(s) and their relationship to experiments and innovation in (oft unacknowledged) parallels and tributaries with other avant-garde practices. See, Evie Shockley, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry, Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2011, pp. 9-12, 14 and 85; Anthony Reed, Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2016, pp. 1-2, 100, 106.

^[xii] Examples of black epistolary practice in poetry, fiction and non-fiction, and scholarship abound. Some of the most well-known literary letters include: James Baldwin,  Letter to My Nephew, The Progressive,  1 Dec, 1962, Alice Walker, The Color Purple, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015;  Letters by Hunt’s contemporaries in formally innovative, renovative poetics include Nathaniel Mackey, Volume #1, From A Broken Bottle, Traces of Perfume Still Emanate: Bedouin Hornbook; Lexington, University of Kentucky Press, 1987; Barbara Henning, Looking Up Harryette Mullen: Interviews on Sleeping with the Dictionary and Other Works, New York: Belladonna, 2011, Evie Shockley, The New Black, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2012. Recent theological scholarship in black study, and blackqueer studies, comprised in serial letters scholarship see Ashon Crawley, The Lonely Letters, Duke University Press, 2020.

^[xiii] Jordan, June “These Poems,” Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan, Foreword by Adrienne Rich, Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2007. p. 3.

^[xiv] I’m inspired by Damaris B. Hill’s address, where she writes “the legacy of these women’s lives chase me like a strong wind. This book is a love letter to women. . .” “Preface,” A Bound Woman Is A Dangerous Thing: The Incarceration of African American Women from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019, xviii.

^[xv] I’m serious about this letter-play. Email a response letter to: metadj@email.unc.edu. Please put the name Erica Hunt in the subject header of your email.

^[xvi] Hunt and Saar, Arcade, Berkeley, Kelsey Street Press, 1996.

^[xvii] Hortense Spillers, “Mamas’ Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Black, White and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2003, pp. 203, 229. I was introduced to Spillers’ thinking, and her in person, by Professor Sharon Holland during that same semester. Spillers was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.

^[xviii] The book was designed by Poulson/Gluck.

^[xix] Hunt and Saar, “First Words,” Arcade, p. 3.

^[xx] Saar states she’s “always been interested in pushing those boundaries to combat the medium’s [printmaking’s] inherent flatness.” p. 95.  Saar, Alison. “Fighting Flatness,” Mirror, Mirror: The Prints of Alison Saar: From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation, New York, Printed in Italy, Distributed by D.A.P. See for an excellent review of Saar’s aesthetic practice, see Cristina Sharpe, “Alison Saar, the Alchemist” Alison Saar: Of Aether and Earthe, Pomona, Benton Museum of Art, 2021.

^[xxi] Hunt and Saar, “Collaborative Statement,” Arcade, p. 53.

^[xxii] Jennifer Nash’s Birthing Black Mothers, Durham, Duke University Press, pp. 103-31.

^[xxiii] Hunt, “City,” Jump the Clock, p. 20.

^[xxiv] Hunt, “Response to Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde,” 10 Mar., 2015, Boston Review, https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/erica-hunt-forum-response-race-avant-garde/

^[xxv] These letters are excerpted from a chapter from my current unpublished book manuscript, “Black Alchemy.”

^[xxvi] Hunt, “Chapter 5: Going Home,” The Time Slips Right Before the Eyes, New York: Belladonna, 2006, p. 17.

^[xxvii] Hunt, “The Time Slips Before Right Before Your Eyes,” The Time Slips, p.12.

^[xxviii] Gratitude to Marjorie Perloff, Professor Emeritus, Stanford University, and, in memoriam, the late Professor Diane Wood Middlebrook, Professor Emeritus, Stanford University.

^[xxix] Hunt, “Personal,” Arcade, p. 35.

^[xxx] Hunt, “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics,” pp. 197-212.

^[xxxi] Hunt, “Chapter 2: Back-Home,” The Time Slips, p. 14.

^[xxxii] Review of Erica Hunt, Local History, Voice Literary Supplement, Village Voice, Apr. 1994. p. 13. 

^[xxxiii] Hunt, “Statement of Poetics,” Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, Edited by Joanne V. Gabbin and Lauren K. Alleyne, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2020, pp. 337-38.

^[xxxiv] Hunt, “Response to Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde,” n.p.

^[xxxv] Harryette Mullen, “Imagining the Unimagined Reader: Writing to the Unborn and Including the Excluded,” The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012. P. 3. Mullen and Hunt share what poet and critic Julian Sphar observes is an “attention to reading . . . rooted in the intersection between language writing’s pursuit of wild reading and autonomy—and identity-centered poetries’ concerns with community building and alliance.” Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001, p. 115.

^[xxxvi] Hunt, “Response to Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde,” n.p.

^[xxxvii] Meta DuEwa, Jones, “Reframing Exposure: Natasha Trethewey’s Forms Of Enclosure,” ELH: English Literary History, Vol. 82, No. 2, Summer 2015, p. 411.

^[xxxviii] Evie Shockley, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry, Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2011, p. 9.

^[xxxix] Hunt, “Author’s Note & Acknowledgements,” Jump the Clock, p. 194.; Tanya Shields, Bodies and Bones: Feminist Rehearsals and Imagining Caribbean Belonging, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014.

^[xl] Hunt, “Introduction: Angle, Defy Gravity, Land Unpredictably,” p. 15.

^[xli] Hunt, “Author’s Note,” p. 193.

^[xlii] Hunt, Author’s Note,” p. 193.

^[xliii] “JJJJJerome Ellis, Saidiya Hartman, and Erica Hunt, CAAPP, Streamed live on Sep 29, 2020. YouTube.  https://www.youtube.com/live/2bSu_ysGzVQ?si=qUti2tBbUnLf32I0

^[xliv] Gwendolyn Brooks, “Gay Chaps at the Bar: ‘my dreams, my works must wait till after hell’”, Selected Poems of Gwendolyn Brooks, New York: Harper Perennial, 2006, p. 23; Hunt, “Language in the Ruins: (Hunt: 00:53:53:-53:47) https://www.youtube.com/live/2bSu_ysGzVQ?si=qUti2tBbUnLf32I0

^[xlv] Hunt, “Looking for Language in the Ruins,” (Hunt: 00:53:53:-53:47) https://www.youtube.com/live/2bSu_ysGzVQ?si=qUti2tBbUnLf32I0

^[xlvi] Hunt, “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics,” pp. 197-212.

^[xlvii] Hunt, “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics” pp. 197, 208-12.

^[xlviii] Hunt, “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics” pp. 197-204.

^[xlix] Hunt, “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics,” pp. 197-200.

^[l] Cristina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes, New York: FSG, 2023.

^[li] Hunt, A Day And It’s Approximates, CHAX Press, 2013; Jump The Clock, 109.

^[lii] Hunt, “Reader we were meant to meet,” Jump The Clock, 109.

^[liii] Hunt, “Reader” 109.

^[liv] Ben Lerner, Review. Jump The Clock. 25 Feb.  2021. The New York Review of Books. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/02/25/erica-hunt-past-imperfect/

^[lv] Hunt, “Octavio Paz’ Calendar, Jump The Clock, p. 117.

^[lvi] Jordan, June, Some Of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays, New York: Civitas Books, 2003.

^[lvii] Hayden, Robert, “Middle Passage,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43076/middle-passage

^[lviii] Toni Cade Bambara, “The Education of a Storyteller,” Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays and Conversations, Edited by Toni Morrison, New York: Pantheon, 1996, p. 253.

^[lix] Bambara, “The Education of a Storyteller,” p. 253.

^[lix] Bambara, “The Education of a Storyteller,” p. 254.

^[lx] Bambara, “The Education of a Storyteller,” pp. 253-254.

^[lxi] Bambara, “The Education of a Storyteller,” pp. 255.

^[lxii] Hunt, “Author’s Note & Acknowledgements,” Jump the Clock, p. 194.

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

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Meta DuEwa Jones is a creative scholar, and Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She authored The Muse Is Music (Illinois, 2011), which was awarded honorable mention for the MLA William Sanders Scarborough Prize. Jones’s current monograph in progress, “Black Alchemy,” is a hybrid genre work of poetry, theory, and memoir that both explores–and participates in–collaborations between poets, writers of autobiography/memoir, and visual artists.  How do Black Diasporic creatives attend to the legacy of slavery and global migration and its impact on notions of community, kinship and freedom? “Black Alchemy” seeks to answer that question through research, autobiographical vignettes and close-analysis that considers the points of origin and affiliation of diverse contemporary artists who travel along waterways and byways, trains and trails in sites such as Eritrea, Ghana, Jamaica, South Africa and the United States.  Jones’s creative scholarship, focused on African-American poetry and inter-arts, has been published in diverse venues. Jones’s research and writing has been supported by fellowships from the National Humanities Center; the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University; the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University; the Rockefeller, Woodrow Wilson, and Mellon Foundations; the Stanford Humanities Center; and the Carter G. Woodson Institute.

 

By Ronald Cummings, PhD

I brought you to see where we   
started from, the undeniable beauty,   
the eyes that still smile and remind you   
this is who they were.   

-Mervyn Taylor, “The Years” 

The lines above appear in the final stanza of Mervyn Taylor’s poem “The Years.” We might read them as a statement of poetic purpose, a reflection on the possibility of poems to take us on journeys. Taylor’s phrase “where we / started from” is notably about the dynamics of time and place and both of these inform his poetic mappings as journeys (8). Taylor has also talked about his poems as shaped by a sense of “rediscovery.”¹ Here the notion of “rediscovery” runs counter to that infamous tale of colonial “discovery” or what the writer and philosopher Sylvia Wynter in her essay “1492: A New World View” has called the “first poetics of the Propter Nos” of 1492 that sought to define the Caribbean, to parcel territories and borders, and to govern the ways in which the region and its peoples might be named and known (20). According to Wynter, “that world-fateful day in October 1492” inaugurated “representation systems and categorical models” (49, 41) that have continued to structure terms of imagining and narration. In the poem “The Mountains Warned Us of Your Coming,” Taylor invokes “the rumbling, the new ships heard” as another way of referencing that violence of colonial military encounter (9). By contrast, Taylor’s “rediscovery” articulates the Caribbean in terms of multiplicity and an unfolding sense of astonishment and unknowing. He remains attuned to the surprise of the Caribbean as it might be revealed in the folds of different years² or on a corner of Pacific Avenue in Brooklyn or “in the hills above the Bay Area” (67).³ Taylor (re)articulates the Caribbean as a question. He ends the poem “The Years” with the inviting query, “Would you / like to hear all their stories?” (8).  

Taylor’s notion of “rediscovery” is both a philosophy of poetry and a rumination on the experience of reading and writing. In the blog “Mervyn Taylor: A Strong sense of home, of rediscovery,” he asserts:  

Taylor’s poems then might be read in invitational terms and also as epistemologies of Caribbean re-encounter.⁴ Readers are asked to grapple and engage with the repeating and restructured materialities of Caribbean culture and experience as they are evidenced in the everyday. These are poems as vignettes in the long history of time. We see Taylor’s concern with time, history, and place in his titling of the sections of his most recent book The Last Train (Broadstone Books 2023). The first of the three sections of the volume, for instance, is titled “Where we began” while the last is titled “What became of us.” Speaking specifically about the poems that appear in this volume, Taylor has noted that: 

Rather than engaging grand narratives of history, Taylor’s sense of place and time is filtered through an attention to everyday life, its cyclical shifts and returns. It is little wonder therefore that his work attends to how Caribbean people keep time: births, deaths, market, rainfall, floods, the rise and fall of tides, changes in address, migrations, music. These all become the substance of his poems. Taylor’s poetry constructs what I read as a Caribbean collective cultural commons or what he calls in the poem “The Last Island,” “a common place” (26)—a space in which we might all rediscover and reencounter each other as well as ourselves with a view to understanding and thinking together about “where we / started from” and moving towards “a further understanding of the life we live.”  

In the discussion which follows, I reflect on Taylor’s most recent volume The Last Train as one text through which we might engage his poetic practice and think about his vision of the Caribbean. I turn to this volume because here we see a poet at the height of his creative talent reflecting on questions of life, art, mortality, and community. I also read this work in line with Myra Malkin who argues in a review of this book, which places it in the wider context of his writing, that: “The more I read him, the more I feel that his whole body of work is really … a single, richly variegated poem” (Malkin, 2023). I suggest that we might read this work in representative terms while also noting distinctions, revisions, and returns in relation to the rest of his oeuvre.⁵  

Mervyn Taylor’s The Last Train is undoubtedly a book of remembering. In keeping with his attention to time, the author offers an indexing of the meaning of the term “last” in the elegiac poem, “My Father’s Last Night” and the book’s title poem, “The Last Train.” These poems mourn the death of the father. They also situate the poet-persona in relation to family, genealogy, and legacy. In the first of these poems, death and mourning are rendered in private terms through the powerful image of the presence of the “women, / my mother among them, [who] stood round, / stirring the night air, while his hands / on the bedspread waited to be still” (Taylor 6). In “The Last Train,” this death is traced in a more public sense through the referencing of the father’s work on the railway. Here the body of the departed is attended to in ways that resonate with “My Father’s Last Night,” but which also extend that portrait. While the father’s hands are a point of focus for the observer in “My Father’s Last Night” in “The Last Train,” it is the uniform of the father, “the blue of his jacket,” his “bright brass” uniform pin and his “cap still dark” that are meant to hold the reader’s attention (25). They become quotidian items weighted with a life’s significance.  

We should not read this solely in terms of finality. Rather, in keeping with Taylor’s concern with cycles and Caribbean vernacular measures of time and movement, the title’s (the book and the poem’s) use of the term “last” comes to signal a previously departed train and or to refer to a prior journey. It becomes a marker of that which precedes the present. In this way, the phrase creates its own simultaneous sense of temporal order and opening. It invites us as readers to think about a before and after. We are left to contend with what it means for us to live in the wake of departed loved ones. 

The poet meaningfully situates himself in the father’s legacy in “The Poem as Train.” That this poem, with its attention to questions of inheritance and succession, appears immediately before “The Last Train” unsettles a total sense of the finality of the departure, (though not the intensity of feeling) that is depicted. Taylor crafts a sense of tradition that resonates, for instance, with Robert Hayden’s well-known poem “Those Winter Sundays” in which the reader is ultimately left thinking about heritage, duty, and succession. In Taylor’s verse, the train as symbol, with its architecture of interlinked carriages, not only connects Taylor to his father, but also comes to hold a larger intergenerational history of labor, migration, movement, death, heritage, and inheritance.⁶ 

While a number of the poems in this volume reflect on death and on the father, the book notably begins with birth and with the figure of the mother. Taylor’s choreography of temporality is complexly balanced from the very beginning. In the opening poem, “Arjun’s Prediction,” the poet is prefigured as prophecy. And is also, at once, a figure out of time. The opening stanza muses on the idea “[t]hat a boy like you would be / born to a woman thinking / herself beyond conceiving” (3). The prophecy of the poet’s coming is presented at once as special and mundane within the flows of local community life. After the mother allows Arjun, the bearer of the prophecy, to “live / under our house for the rest // of his life,” they are left to wonder, “what else he would be right / about; // some revelation to be made / real, however long it took” (3). The singularity of this prophetic utterance is also linked with a sense of a Messianic figuring of the child through the stories of “Miss Ina across / the ravine” and Aunt Marie who “would bring that terror dog / Nazi to stand guard” (3). These wise women, summoned by the baby’s cries, come to visit “to see what allyuh doing the child? (3). The poet figure then is from birth ushered into a community not only concerned with his well-being but who become narrative relations.  

We know that poets are well-known for conceiving their own mythologies. (We might think here of Derek Walcott’s Another Life or Kamau Brathwaite’s Sun Poem or Lorna Goodison’s I am Becoming My Mother, among others). Taylor’s poems, particularly those associated with childhood, are not simply nostalgic; they are carefully constructed temporal signposts of a journey. They conjure a considered yet intimate feeling of place and remembered lives and times. In some instances, they are historical reckonings, such as in “War Days” where childhood memories coalesce with a quotidian accounting of some the incongruities of war-time life in Trinidad.   

This poem is but one example of the historical recalling that is a feature of Taylor’s work. The poem itself becomes a form of memorialization, much like the Flanders poppy and the aunt’s song that Taylor references in the poem. In lieu of physical monuments, commemorating the “Trinidadian boys who died / in the war,” these small things, a poppy, a song, a poem, become keepsakes of memory (Taylor 5). In his own memorializing practice, Taylor remains attuned to how family stories and songs can hold histories. He also offers glimpses of how local narratives and oral tellings can potentially recuperate and remember what might be rendered quiet in national and colonial narratives.  

We can read Taylor’s The Last Train in relation to texts of poetic memoir in the Caribbean tradition such as some of those mentioned above (Walcott, Brathwaite, Goodison). However, Taylor’s practice of narrative rememory is also connected to the broader Caribbean memoir tradition. Consider how the lines above replay and recall episodes from Austin Clarke’s memoir of Barbadian childhood, Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack. In Clarke’s memoir, he writes of the impact of the second world war in Barbados: 

Sandra Pouchet-Paquet has argued in her crucial study, Caribbean Autobiography: Cultural Identity and Self-Representation, that Caribbean autobiographical practice offers “a linked nationalist-internationalist discourse [which] articulates specific local and global attachments” (10). Some of these attachments are inter-island interlinkings and relations as seen in the connections and echoes between Taylor’s and Clarke’s narratives of war time in Trinidad and Barbados respectively. Other attachments stretch across different diasporic and global spaces. In “War Days,” the interconnections of Empire that link the Caribbean and Britain are underlined. In the poem “The Last Island,” the geographic closeness of Trinidad and Venezuela is referenced to bear witness to how “[t]oday, a refugee / might ride that current to find // a village, and join the singing” (26).  

Elsewhere, Taylor usefully maps Caribbean connections to North American cultural, political, and artistic life and histories. “When We Were West Indian” offers brief poetic vignettes of how Caribbean culture and people have reshaped New York since the 1920s.  

The poet also locates himself in this history and geography of Caribbean New York:  

Although he remains interested in offering us the narration of a life, Taylor is not focused on giving us a singular portrait of self. Instead, throughout his work, we encounter the writer-poet always situated in relation to a complex matrix of Caribbean life that is intergenerational and integral.  

The book also records what we might understand as a community of the word. Throughout the collection, we see the poet in the company of other writers (including some mentors and friends now departed).  “I wander into your poem” is how Taylor begins “Afield (with Derek W)” (15). We might read this poem as a dialogue with Derek Walcott’s verse and as a companion piece to “The Poem as Train.”  However, if in “The Poem as Train,” the poet is represented as taking passengers on a journey, in “Afield (with Derek W),” the poet stops to “wonder how the poem can go / anywhere it wants in the world / without the poet” (15). Two poems, “Reading Outdoors” and “Reading in Bars,” might also usefully be read as companion poems. In each of these, the poet humorously reflects on the challenges of sharing one’s verse in unusual venues where disruptions and distractions abound. In “Reading in Bars,” we also see the poet in the company of Amiri Baraka, another poet he has identified as an influence:  

In the recollection of these moments, we come to understand this book as one concerned with poetry as practice, not just on the page but also shared interpersonally and communally.   

Part two of the volume remembers and recalls the late Jamaican poet Anthony McNeill to whom the book is dedicated. McNeill (1941-1996) was known for his experimental verse and was a contemporary of Mervyn Taylor’s, emerging on the Caribbean literary scene alongside other poets like Mervyn Morris, Dennis Scott, and Wayne Brown (the last two listed now deceased). In Section 2 titled, “A Bus Called Blue Danube (Jamaica Suite),” we witness the poet as travelling and writing companion with McNeill. Taylor conjures a space where Tony, the poet and the man, might be invoked and remembered again. “Bluefields” evokes “Tony’s poem / about defecating on a neighbor’s porch” (42). The poem can be read in relation to Taylor’s epistolary note, “Letter to Anthony McNeill, poet, 9/22/2016,” written on the occasion of McNeil’s birthday seven years ago, in which Taylor humorously reminiscences about McNeil’s advice on how one should deal with one’s enemies: “Shit on their porch,” you said, “as I believe you actually did one time”⁷ Taylor deliberately and disruptively refuses a past temporality, Tony’s poem, he suggests, “repeats its scatology in my ear” (42). In “Red Caps” we see Taylor writing a poem about McNeill writing a poem. The returns charted are temporal as well as spatial. The section offers what is in effect a travel itinerary with several poems named after places they travelled to together: Negril, Montego Bay, Hellshire, Linstead, Bluefields, Liguanea, Nine Miles, Goshen.  

While Taylor is best known for his writing of the cultural geographies of Trinidad and Tobago and of New York, in which Brooklyn becomes rendered as a northern Caribbean metropolis, (these locations also appear in Parts one and three of this book), his attention to Jamaica in Part two, is offered with an intimacy, fondness, and an eye for small details that makes these poems rewarding to read. Taylor assumes the position of an observer who is not a native of the island but is also at the same time not a tourist. His relation to the place, much like his relation to Tony McNeill, is resolutely fraternal. Jamaica is observed with an astute curiosity and poetic generosity. This offers moments when he is able to leverage insightful critiques. We see this, for example, in the poem “Rundown” which offers keen reflections on the intimacies and complications of Jamaican class politics.   

We also see in these poems about Jamaica, as well as elsewhere in this volume, a theory of the Caribbean as repeating islands (to borrow a term from the Cuban writer and theorist Antonio Benítez-Rojo). In some instances, this sense of repetition is prompted through the observation of spatial and geographic details. Bluefields, for instance, sparks a note of recognition. Taylor writes, it “[r]eminds me of the town I come from / in Trinidad, lanes and little houses. (42). In other instances, this sense of repetition is prompted by a realization of the cycles through which we experience Caribbean time and history and the challenge that this offers for postcolonial narratives of progress. The poem “Liguanea” ends with the line, “Ruins of plantations loom again” (34).   

The final poem of the book, “Three Chains,” is one that also invokes this sense of history. This time the repeating temporality of the islands is charted through the rise and receding of waves. The poet brings us “down to the water’s edge where/the foam retreats to become/ wave again” (89). “Three Chains” focuses on questions of property as a way of thinking about the complexities of Caribbean belonging and explores “Beachfront property” as another terrain in the long, ongoing story of Caribbean land conquest. The poet reminds us of a collective imperative and what is at stake in terms of people’s sense of place when he writes:  

That the “water’s edge” should remain the terrain of “we the people” is a matter of the flow and tides of history (89). This politic of place is what is actively being claimed through the remembrances as poems and the poems as remembrances gifted to us in this work. This is a history from below, marked by a poetics of accumulation, by ocean water sediments, and time as tide. This is how we “see where we / started from” (8). 

Notes

1. See “Mervyn Taylor: A Strong sense of home, of rediscovery” https://opalpalmeradisa.com/2021/04/09/mervyn-taylor-a-strong-sense-of-home-of-rediscovery/.
   See “Mervyn Taylor: A Strong sense of home, of rediscovery” https://opalpalmeradisa.com/2021/04/09/mervyn-taylor-a-strong-sense-of-home-of-rediscovery/. ↩︎
2. See for example Taylor’s poems “The Years”, “The Year of Hungry”, “The Year of No Carnival”, and “The Year No One Died”, which can be read as a sequence of poems in the volume The Last Trian (2023). ↩︎
3. See Taylor’s mappings of Caribbean space in North America in poems such as “Nostrand Avenue” and “Three from the Garment District” in Voices Carry (2017), the section titled “Overstayed” in The Waving Gallery (2014), and the poems “Brownstones” and “Train on a String” in Gone Away (2006). ↩︎
4. My use of the phrase “epistemologies of Caribbean re-encounter” builds on the centrality of understanding to the poetics that Taylor outlines. ↩︎
5. It is useful to note that a few poems are republished in this volume that previously appeared in Taylor’s first book An Island of His Own (1992). ↩︎
6. I am interested in the narrative return to the figure of the Black Railroad worker in the current historical moment. We might think of a number of recent Black cultural texts that have taken up the railroad as a site of Black historical formation. We might consider, for instance, the Barbadian writer Cecil Foster’s book They Call Me George: The Untold Story of Black Train Porters and the Birth of Modern Canada (2019), Suzette Mayr’s The Sleeping Car Porter (2022), a winner of the 2022 Giller Award, or the television series The Porter (2022). ↩︎
7. See Mervyn Taylor “Letter to Anthony McNeill, poet, 9/22/2016” https://mervyntaylorcom.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/mcneill.pdf ↩︎

 

Works Cited  

Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.  

Brathwaite, Kamau, Sun Poem. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.  

Clarke, Austin. Growing up Stupid Under the Union Jack: A Memoir. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2005.  

Foster, Cecil. They Call Me George: The Untold Story of Black Train Porters and the Birth of Modern Canada. Windsor, Ontario: Biblioasis, 2019.  

Goodison, Lorna. I Am Becoming My Mother. London: New Beacon, 1986.  

Hayden, Robert. A Ballad of Remembrance. Paul Breman: London, 1962 

Malkin, Myra. “Review of The Last Train by Mervyn Taylor.” Tinderbox Poetry Journal, vol. 8, no.1, March 2023. Retrieved from https://tinderboxpoetry.com/review-of-the-last-train-by-mervyn-taylor

Mayr, Suzette. The Sleeping Car Porter. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2022.  

Pouchet-Paquet, Sandra. Caribbean Autobiography: Cultural Identity and Self-Representation. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002.  

Taylor, Mervyn. The Last Train. Frankfort, Kentucky: Broadstone, 2023.  

—. “Mervyn Taylor: A Strong sense of home, of rediscovery,” April 9, 2021. Retrieved from https://opalpalmeradisa.com/2021/04/09/mervyn-taylor-a-strong-sense-of-home-of-rediscovery/ 

—. Voices Carry. Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2017.  

—. “Derek Walcott, Man of Faith.” Retrieved from https://mervyntaylorcom.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/derek-walcott.pdf 

—. “Letter to Anthony McNeill, poet, 9/22/2016.” Retrieved from https://mervyntaylorcom.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/mcneill.pdf 

—. The Waving Gallery. Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2014.  

—. Gone Away, New York: Junction Press, 2006.  

Walcott, Another Life. London: Jonathan Cape, 1972. 

Wynter, Sylvia. “1492: A New World View”. In Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas, edited by Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995, pp. 5–57. 

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

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Ronald Cummings is an associate Professor of Caribbean Literature and Black Diaspora Studies in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. His work focuses on questions of gender and sexuality and Black cultural resistance. His work has been published in various journals and he is the editor of four critical volumes including Caribbean Literatures in Transition 1970-2020, co-edited with Alison Donnell (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and Harriet’s Legacies: Race, Historical memory and Futures in Canada, co-edited with Natalee Caple (McGill Queens University Press, 2022). Harriet’s Legacies was the winner of Canadian Studies Network Book Award for Best edited collection (2023). Cummings is also the editor of Make the World New: The Poetry of Lillian Allen (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2021). He is an affiliated member of the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender, and Class (RGC) at the University of Johannesburg. 

By Samantha Stephens

“Consider, for a moment,           

the silence — 

this terrible white          

space;

all the things                

we never say, 

and why?” 

— Kei Miller, Things I Have Withheld  

“I feel most colored when thrown against a sharp white background.” 
— Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”  

A thin book wrapped thickly in black ink, Kei Miller’s In Nearby Bushes utilizes and subverts our expectations of color and legibility. The confrontation and experimentation with the legibility of Blackness is made overt in the cover design of his most recent collection, though it is present throughout his oeuvre. In a visual poem that opens his award-winning essay collection, Things I Have Withheld, Miller connects the abstract operations of silence and silencing with its material formations of blank, specifically “white // space” (xi). In doing so, he addresses the politics of Black legibility and physical place/lessness. Covered in columns of newspaper clippings, In Nearby Bushes subverts the sharp white background of the page, as the poet imagines and images the terrible white space of the newspaper reporting the deaths of innumerable people “in nearby bushes.” If you were to tune into the evening news in Jamaica any day of the week, you would certainly hear reports of any number of criminal activities in nearby bushes. Unsettling a trite, commonplace phrase in Jamaican popular culture, Miller’s meditation on the concept of the bush highlights the unseen, silenced, marginalized bodies located in this placeless place.

The book’s cover introduces the subversive poetics of inverted views, where each iteration of “in nearby bushes” is literally highlighted in yellow, highly contrasting the black background. Furthermore, most of the cover displays white text, causing a phenomenon known as halation—a visual fuzzing effect. This choice literally requires the eyes to open wider to absorb more light to see the text in this fashion. Defying, subverting, and resisting the optimal legibility of the traditional black text against a white background, the cover displays the inverse —transforming Zora Neale Hurston’s imagery of Black life in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” referenced in the epigraph. Miller’s engagement with Black death in Jamaica resembles the negatives in photography, a color reversal. What happens when we look through this lens? Miller offers alternative, otherwise, and imaginative ways of seeing the shape of a place by rupturing how we move through language, landscapes, people, (hi)stories and silences.

Mirroring the inverted expectations of the page on the book cover, the poetic form on the white pages within replicates the play with legibility through the typographic treatment of the newspaper entries. First captured in full, and in black ink, a February 2018 newspaper clipping report of the discovery of the “decomposed body” of a young woman “in [Hanover’s] nearby bushes” begins the “In Nearby Bushes” poetic sequence. On the four pages that follow, the report is reproduced with varied typographic presentations. The poet selects a few letters, words, and phrases from the 17-line newspaper report to present in traditional black ink and casts the rest in a light grey that almost blends into the white background of the page. These greyscale pieces gesture to the work of redaction as Miller plays with visibility and silence, creating poems out of the brief and troubled histories documented in the Jamaica Star. This move is in conversation with the concepts of Black annotation and Black redaction discussed in Christina Sharpe’s book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Positioning herself in the wake of slavery, Sharpe offers anti-colonial methods of ethical viewing practices, or as she writes: “toward seeing and reading otherwise, toward reading and seeing something in excess of what is in the frame” (117). This “otherwise” is a kind of refusal, a practice which tackles the assaults on Black life and counters the legacy of antiblackness. While we may be accustomed to the practice of redaction concerning government documents, Black redaction exploits and celebrates visibility with silence, making alternative viewpoints public instead of obscuring them.  

I argue that Miller’s typographic choices work at the interstices of silence, or redaction, and visibility, or annotation, to rupture our view. With each repetition of the story in the titular sequence, fewer and fewer selections are highlighted, progressively obscuring the original text. The final poem reads, “Here where Blossoms the night”—beginning by borrowing the “H” and “er” in “Hanover” and ending using the “ght” from the “fighting dogs.” A new narrative is created from identical source material with each selection transforming history and journalism into visual poetry. A riff on the visual poem opening his essay collection, these newspaper-poems are markedly thinking about space. However, instead of experimenting with textual size and space, their focus is color and its absence. With Miller’s meditationon silences and white space, publications such as Jamaica Star, Jamaica Supreme Court Criminal Appeal, McKoy’s News, Loop Jamaica, and Radio Jamaica News and their iterations, become visual poetry. And these newspaper-poems take up the silences subsumed by the nearby bushes and retell these stories. Adding emphasis and blurring select details, I see the work as poetic instead of purely historical, providing a referent and so making “some— / thing torn // and new” (Brathwaite 270). This kind of writing aligns with Kamau Brathwaite’s poetics, not only in its play with textual space but also in its interest in Caribbean placemaking in the wake of slavery. While Brathwaite notably composes this image to metaphorize the process of creolization, blending and weaving old roots with new traditions, what happens when this simultaneous tearing/destruction and production/generation is manifested materially? 

Miller’s work does not seek to physically shred newspapers, but it is an invitation to ponder white spaces, textually and otherwise. Considering Miller’s meditation on “the silence— // this terrible white // space” in Things I Have Withheld, a fascinating detail is that these newspaper-poem redactions cannot be found in the table of contents. These silences function as an enactment of placeless-ness—that is, an indeterminable space or location, an almost there or ‘round the corner, and otherwise, etc. These poems and histories are—especially in the case of the first five pages of the “In Nearby Bushes” sequence—in a silence, in a white space, echoing things that have been withheld.

The management of identity and visibility is an overt way Miller engages Black death. A nod to Black redaction is made on the very first page of the poem series, insofar as the name of the victim is literally redacted with the use of six successive lowercase x’s: “xxxxxx” (Miller 43). Yet a deeper look reveals that “x” both marks and conceals. This usage works to show respect and offer dignity to the woman discarded in the real and symbolic bushes: “What is it called — the nameless space between, as if nothing / important happened here. As if no one important happened here” (Miller 36). In this way, her legacy is shifted from the placeless place of the nearby bushes to an otherwise, richly unsilenced space in the x’s. This richness lends itself to Miller’s textual reimagining and re-imaging of the newspaper’s report. His newspaper-poems refuse the detached journalistic voice with the text itself—using color gradations to produce various versions of the story and a different lens with which to view Black life and death.

We might consider the typographical play with the newspapers as redaction and the work of (re)defining as annotation. A striking and relevant intervention Miller offers in this stead is his meditation on the word “autoclaps,” which appears in his 2016 novel, Augustown. Miller’s novel weaves a tragically triumphant story of the community of August Town, centered around the acclaimed and enigmatic spiritual leader, Alexander Bedward, and following the reverberations of his radical sociopolitical ruptures from 1920 to the 1980s. Augustown opens with the promise of “the terrible thing,” a thing that becomes synonymous with the term “autoclaps” (Miller 5). The narrator supplies the reader with definitions and reflections on this Jamaican word: “A strange word, autoclaps … It’s not the kind of word you will find the Oxford dictionary. But maybe if you were lucky enough to find a dictionary that has in it blackpeople’s words, then the entry for autoclaps would read something like this …” (Miller 103). With a disputed etymology, “autoclaps” is layered with many meanings, versions, and intentions. From calamity to heartache with inflections of Greek, German, and Jamaican language, the multiplicity of the word is reflected even in the form it is defined. The imagined dictionary definitions of this slippery term appearin Miller’s novel as:

The repeated revision of the term, shifting with each definition, plays on and with the very act of defining by annotating the “original” with new versions and variations. This technique of defining and redefining is markedly creative; it invokes dialogue, simile, rhetorical questions, and repetition. These annotations cause ’ruption as they fracture the impact of “sharp white backgrounds” (Hurston 153).

The imagined dictionary which defines words like “autoclaps” ruptures and collapses the knowledge systems and logics of the Oxford dictionaries, archives, and newspapers. All of Miller’s dictionary entries are like an autoclaps; in fact, “autoclaps” is annotation and redaction working together. This iteration of autoclaps is not from an apocalyptic destruction or even the collapse of one’s heart, but we might understand it more generously by reading it alongside Black annotation and redaction. “Autoclaps” is mobilized in a productive way, towards a destruction of ideas and ideals that harm Black life and living and foreground the silence. For Miller, this practice is intimately linked to place and landscape and is not limited to this novel but is also found quite prominently in Miller’s poetry collection, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (2014).

The main narrative interspersed throughout The Cartographer in a 27-poem sequence is an extended dialogue between a cartographer and a Rastaman, who each have different ideological stances to mapping. Yet between these conversations appear another sequence focused on the Jamaican landscape aptly called “Place Names.” The Place Name sequence addresses the peculiar histories of places named and renamed in response to colonial and postcolonial moments. Miller creatively locates “Me-No-Sen-You-No-Come” in the tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. The speaker of the poem draws parallels between the circumstances of the naming of “Me-No-Sen-You-No-Come” and its implications with the intrusion of Goldilocks into the “house of bears,” that is: “In plain english: do not enter without invitation” (Miller 26). The format of the “Place Name” sequence is presented as dictionary entries, implying a definitive meaning, but subverting and mocking the format of (Western) epistemology—in effect, redefining and rewriting the Jamaican landscape. The poem ends with a qualifying statement: “just know that this ground, these / bushes, these trees observe you with suspicion many / centuries deep” (my emphasis) (Miller 26). In this poetic imagination, time is collapsed and condensed, and Goldilocks’ presence not only impacts the landscape of “Me-No-Sen”, but the landscape redefines her as “rude pickney” and recasts the ostensibly innocent blonde girl in the position of the colonizer.

Miller’s poetics of inverted views, thus, illustrates how the bushes can produce alternatives as they are personified, observing the trespassers, rather than being relegated to a passive place inscribed with violence. What is unique about this iteration is this place is not quite a place, insofar as it is a space of “refuge that evade[s] the colonial order” (Goffe 10). In her article “Unmapping the Caribbean,” Goffe supplements the toponymic history: “This now-extinct village settlement was established and named by runaways fleeing enslavement on plantations in the parish of Trelawny in 1812.” Now absorbed into the more recognizable Aberdeen area of Trelawny, the archetypal cartographer, Rastaman, and even Goldilocks enter and are made visible in this landscape through the suspicion of the bushes—a practice of autoclaps/afterclap, a rupture of colonial and plantation logic where the Black background is foregrounded.

Miller’s reference to bushes extends the “Place Names” sequence from Cartographer to “Place Name: Oracabessa –”, part of the poetic sequence entitled ‘Sometimes I Consider the Names of Places,’ in the collection In Nearby Bushes. The mock dictionary entry opens with a caveat: “origins disputed but most likely leave-over from the / Spanish” (Miller 34). A much longer form than the autoclaps/afterclap and “Me-No-Sen-You-No-Come,” this meditation on Oracabessa thinks multilingually and speculatively about origins. From the whimsical wanderings of Goldilocks to the linguistic and etymological layers of Christopher Columbus’ search for gold in “Oracabessa –”, Miller’s work is interested in annotating and redacting the “completeness of genocide” on several planes (Miller 34). The poet disputes the silences and erasures located in the white (golden) spaces, inverting them to illuminate the Black background for those willing to open their eyes wider. Places like Me-No-Sen-You-No-Come and Oracabessa are multivalent in their localities, retaining histories and memories otherwise rendered invisible. Playing with color, legibility and identity, Miller showcases an alternative layer of the Jamaican landscape.

“In nearby bushes” transforms from a trite, commonplace term too often heard on Jamaican evening news to a richly dense landscape that embeds theoretical and material practices of decolonial praxis. Considering how place and placemaking can be a violence, even apocalyptic, Miller scars the sharp white background of the page and visualizes Black life and Black death through alternative lenses. Negotiating Blackness with the ink on the page, his work illustrates how the textual becomes political. Miller’s body of work showcases a careful, critical engagement with legibility, identity, landscape and (hi)stories in Caribbean poetry and poetics, bringing a nuanced meaning to “something torn and new.”    

                                     

Works Cited

Brathwaite, Kamau. “Jou’vert,” The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy. Oxford University Press, 1973, pp. 267-270.
Goffe, Tao Leigh. “Unmapping the Caribbean: Toward a Digital Praxis of Archipelagic Sounding.” archipelagoes 5, December 2020, pp. 1-23.
Hurston, Zora Neale. “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” I Love Myself When I Am Laughing…: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, Feminist Press, 1979, pp. 152–5.
Miller, Kei. Augustown: A Novel. Pantheon Books, 2017.
Miller, Kei. The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion. Carcanet Press Ltd., 2014.
Miller, Kei. In Nearby Bushes. Carcanet Press Ltd., 2019.
Miller, Kei. Things I Have Withheld: Essays. Canongate Books Ltd., 2021.
Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016.

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

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Samantha Stephens is a PhD candidate in English and a Doctoral Fellow in Caribbean Literatures, Arts and Cultures at the University of Virginia. Working in the fields of Caribbean Studies and Digital Humanities, her research focuses on Caribbean poetry and poetics with attention to visual experimentation in the digital age. She has published on the typographic innovations of Kei Miller and Olive Senior’s poetry in the Journal of West Indian Literature. Her interest in Black feminist technologies and Caribbean digital archival methods propel her current project, in which she blends literary and artistic practices to reimagine Black Caribbean pasts and futures.

 

By Keisha Allan, PhD

Malika Booker, an “ex/isle” writer of diasporic literature,  interrogates colonial inheritances that have historically dispossessed Black women in the Caribbean. Booker’s first collection of poetry, Pepper Seed, explores the marginalization and vulnerability of women confronted with colonial legacies of violence. Booker verbalizes the pain and trauma of intergenerational wounds inflicted on women’s bodies and psyches. Tragic, brutalized, and wounded female figures testify to the lineage of psychological, emotional, and physical violence perpetrated against the Black female body.  Although Booker’s collection explores the pain of Black womanhood, her poetry also abounds with depictions of female personas as heroines, survivors, interlocutors, and visionaries. Booker’s collection moves beyond legacies of pain and trauma towards narratives of resistance and survival. In Pepper Seed, Bookerenvisions Black womanhood anew, using the Black female body as a site of anticolonial resistance.

Pepper Seed reflects Frantz Fanon’s description of the psychological impact of colonial violence on the colonized subject. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon posits that colonial rule is “the bringer of violence into the home and into the mind of the native” (38). Commenting on the impact of colonization on the colonized, Fanon insists that the colonial subject is brutalized by the sadistic practices of the colonizer to such an extent that it “turns him into an animal” (42). The colonizer deploys violence to force the colonized body into submission. Consequently, post-colonial societies that emerge from legacies of violence repeat the former colonizer’s brutal practices.

 In Pepper Seed, Booker links colonialism to the endemic violence in the Caribbean. Booker traces a lineage of pain from the colonial to post-colonial era through vivid depictions of domestic violence in the Caribbean, which allows readers to bear witness to the violence that afflicts the lives of Black women. Pepper Seed interrogates the ways in which colonial violence is resisted, reproduced, and appropriated in familial, personal, and intimate relationships in the postcolonial societies.

 Black women perpetuate colonial violence through their disciplinary practices, using the maternal whip to correct deviant behavior. The poem, “Pepper Sauce,” depicts a grandmother’s vicious assault in response to her granddaughter’s theft of money from her purse. Reflective of the colonizer/colonized relationship, the grandmother exploits her position of authority in her granddaughter’s life and uses corporal punishment to cultivate an atmosphere of fear and submission in the household. The poem begins with the grandmother diligently grinding peppers marked for corporal punishment:

These peppers have been specially prepared to inflict pain on the body of her granddaughter, Anne. The granddaughter assists with the preparations, oblivious to her grandmother’s violent intentions. The grandmother ties her granddaughter to the bedposts, rendering her powerless and vulnerable to insurmountable torture:

The image of Anne naked, defenseless, and tied to the bedposts, mirrors the cruelties enslaved women suffered at the hands of the slave masters. The grandmother’s rampage of torture culminates with sexual violence. The pepper sauce burns Anne’s genitalia, scorching her skin, inflicting brutal torture. The pain is so excruciating that she screams incessantly, emitting sharp, piercing cries that resound throughout the house. The grandmother ignores her granddaughter’s cries, subjecting Anne to relentless torment. Granny inflicts vicious punishment beyond the bounds of “moderate correction”—akin to the malicious and sadistic practices of the slave master who imposed excessive punishment for minor infractions. Anne’s physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her grandmotherlingers in the mind long after the poem has been read, leaving the reader with the bitter taste of the raw, hot pepper seed of pain.

 “Red Ants Bite,” depicts another grandmother-granddaughter relationship fraught with violence. The speaker is tormented with memories of her verbally abusive deceased grandmother who constantly unleashed a barrage of vitriolic attacks. The poem begins with the speaker’s recollection of her grandmother’s abusive rants:

Here, Granny perpetuates colonial perceptions of Black women as “promiscuous” and “untamed” which provided the moral justification for the control and abuse of the Black female body. The grandmother’s incessant use of violent language inflicts emotional and psychological distress:

Her grandmother’s venomous words “took skin off her bones” and “made her bleed,” leaving scars hidden beneath the skin. The speaker yearns for her grandmother’s love even though she suffers under the weight of her acerbic recrimination. Emotionally battered by her grandmother’s vitriolic attacks, the speaker regresses—emotionally and mentally—to a “tiny rocking foetus,” retreating to a protective space, impervious to her grandmother’s verbal assaults. Here, the speaker describes the psychological impact of colonial inheritances of violence on women’s bodies and psyches.

Connecting the personal to the political, the speaker illustrates how Granny’s viciousness is born out of her own past oppression under the brutal conditions of Caribbean plantocracy. In the final section of the poem, the speaker gives voice to her deceased grandmother’s personal story of sexual abuse:

Conceived through the violent act of rape, “a slave baby mixed with plantation white,” (13)Granny’s body was burdened by the trauma of sexual violence. Brutalized, commodified, and appropriated, Granny was exploited to satisfy the desires of the white slave masters and, in a vicious cycle, the violence of plantocracy shaped Granny’s disciplinary practices with her grandchildren. Emotionally, physically, and sexually assaulted under the brutal conditions of slavery, the speaker’s grandmother repeats the violent practices of the colonizer.

The perpetuation of violence continues in intimate relationships where male partners wield their power over women’s bodies. In “After Liming in the Local Rum Shop on Diamond Street,” the speaker exposes the wanton violence to which women are subjected by abusive male partners:

Here, the female persona is subjected to relentless violence, rendering her permanently crippled. Yet, the woman’s posture of resignation illustrates how violence is intimately connected to social and cultural norms in the Caribbean.

The poems in Pepper Seed juxtapose the paradoxical combination of pain and violence with enduring depictions of feminine resistance and survival. In addition to the tragic, brutalized, or moribund female figures that permeate Booker’s collection, the poems also portray female personas as heroines, survivors, and visionaries who use their bodies as sites of anticolonial resistance. In “Death of an Overseer,” Booker depicts the jubilation that erupts on the plantation when the brutal overseer meets his death. The death of the tyrant inspires“women to raise up they red petticoats and dance, trampling he grave, while machetes pound stone, lips drown rum and burn on highwine” (16) in an act of anticolonial resistance.

Booker’s collection illustrates how Black women adapt, revise and appropriate the colonizer’s violent practices to protect their bodies from gendered violence. While the female personas learn violent behaviors from their grandmothers, strategies of survival are also passed down from grandmothers to granddaughters. This links both legacies of violence and resistance to matrilineal family structures. In “Warning,” the speaker recalls her grandmother’s stern advice on how to respond to abusive male partners. The grandmother encourages her granddaughter to castrate her male abuser, stripping him of his manhood, rendering him powerless and submissive:

The poem illustrates how colonial inheritances of violence incite women to imagine ways to shield their bodies from abusive male partners. Drawing inspiration from the colonizer’s barbaric practices of corporeal mutilation, Black women devise violent strategies of resistance against patriarchal repression. The speaker foregrounds the Black female subject’s survival rather than her oppression at the hands of men. Ultimately, the speaker heeds her grandmother’s warning when she invites an inebriated male friend to sleep over:

Here, the survival strategies shared within generations and across different generations of women empower the female speaker to confront and fight back against threats of gendered violence.

In Booker’s work, we see a relentless preoccupation with dismantling colonial inheritances that have been used to regulate Black female bodies. Booker’s female characters also deploy their erotic power to strike back against the societal censure of female sexuality. Audre Lorde describes the erotic as a resource of feminine power that can be deployed by women to resist social and patriarchal oppression. She posits that “the erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feelings” (53). In “Sweet Liquor,” Booker’s speaker embraces her sexuality and eroticism, which Audre Lorde characterizes as “the lifeforce of women” (55). The narrator of this poem describes a fete scene in which she indulges in carnal pleasure:

The speaker indulges in “a host of unruly joy,” transgressing gendered mores of female propriety. She assumes the role of a voyeur, disrupting a practice that is accorded to men. Here, the male body is objectified and sexualized under the female panoptic gaze. In “Sweet Liquor,” the speaker is endowed with agency, allowing her to create her own alternative world of female desire.

Similarly, in “Notting Hill,” the Black female body is deployed as the central site of resistance against colonial mores of female propriety. The speaker catalogues carnal delight through pleasures of the flesh. Meanwhile, the speaker’s aunt sinks into eroticism, using her body for her own personal fulfillment. She joyfully indulges in Notting Hill carnival celebrations, gyrating her body to the sounds of the soca music:

The speaker repeats the lines, “You are no church girl,” illustrating how her aunt experiences carnal delight by engaging in forbidden acts of pleasure. Commenting on the nexus between Black female sexuality and empowerment, Myriam Chancy notes that, “our bodies have been the source of our commodification in art, the site of physical and sexual abuse under slavery and neocolonial “domestic schemes,” it stands to reason that it would be through the body that we might regain a palpable sense of our own identities” (123). In Booker’s poem, the speaker illustrates how women’s bodies provide avenues of liberation from colonial mores of female propriety.

In the poem “Prayer,” corporeal resistance against colonial violence is enacted through the womb of the Black woman “whose exploited sexuality fueled the economies of slavery and colonialism through forced reproduction and labour” (Hobson 101).The speaker renounces the maternal role ascribed to women, using her body for carnal pleasure. She “danced through life,” “deaf” to familial and sociocultural constraints that confine women to motherhood, liberatingherself from colonial legacies of forced reproduction.

Throughout her collection, Booker illustrates how anticolonial resistance can be both real and imagined. In “Sin Visits Me,” bodily resistance is enacted through erotic fantasies, invoking unbridled acts of carnal delight. Under the influence of moonshine, the speaker dialogues with a female specter, reminiscent of the La Diablesse, a shape-shifting she-devil who seduces her admirers. The speaker describes the dead woman as a “sensual woman” who indulges in the pleasures of the flesh: “You chew chilies raw, laugh, and spit the seeds, then tell me of the joys/ of sitting on a big stone under Concord waterfall/ watching the near naked boys leap off moss-green cliff” (55). In a symbolic act of anticolonial resistance, the dead woman “chews” the bitter chili peppers of pain synonymous with Black womanhood and “spits” out the seeds of oppression. Booker’s Pepper Seed enacts the pain and trauma of intergenerational wounds, deeply rooted in gender norms and power dynamics. Booker’s female figures testify to the lineage of psychological, emotional, and physical violence inflicted on the Black female body. Yet, Booker’s collection offers possibilities for resistance against colonial legacies of violence through corporeal acts of rebellion. Booker’s poetry also depicts women who break free from colonial inheritances that have historically dispossessed Black women in the Caribbean. Booker’s heroines create themselves anew, deploying their erotic power to disrupt social and cultural norms that restrict their freedom. Through her poetic portraits and narratives, Booker imagines alternative futures for women—far away from masculinist monolithic definitions that impose constraints on women’s bodies—and envisions a new generation of women who break the cycle of violence inscribed on Black female bodies.

Works Cited

Booker, Malika. Pepper Seed. Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2013.

Chancy, Myriam J.A. Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963.

Hobson, Janell. “The “Batty” Politic: Towards an Aesthetic of the Black Female Body.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy. 18(4), 87-105.

Lorde, Audre. “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider. California: Crossing Press, 1984.

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

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Dr. Keisha Allan is an Assistant Professor at Baruch College. She graduated with a Ph.D. from the department of English at the University of Maryland and her broad area of interest is twentieth-century Caribbean literature. Within this field, she examines Caribbean literature by women writers who critique social and political inequities in their societies. She examines how selected female authors from the Caribbean create fictional worlds that have the effect of subverting patriarchal perspectives and paradigms in their postcolonial societies. She interrogates society and artistic responsibility, with women presented as creatively engaged in revolutionary activities aimed at reshaping ideas and perspectives in the national imaginary.

By dawn lonsinger, PhD

In Khadijah Queen’s Anodyne, we encounter the irreducible inextricability of point-blank pain and layered love, language threaded on the filament of lines so perfectly that it sings and stings. The poems therein are a warning and a wish, a reckoning and reclamation, ode and erasure. It is a boldly constructed collection about the heartbreaks and body-breaks of life in late-stage capitalism, amid grind culture, war, the endless wake of white supremacy, patriarchy, malady, the everyday losses and consonant sadness, etc., but also about the sharp-yet-sating ache of desire, kinship, herbaria, family, art, and relationships. The gutting and gathering power of the poems often emerges from their ability to hold these many realities at once, showing us how contrasting spheres of being intersect our lives and bodies. Queen indicts our cultural and individual “avoiding / evidence of suffering at all costs” yet also keens for an expansiveness within which she could “stop the false / fight for my humanity, en masse, [is] allowed to share / a history of anything but suffering” (2, 14). Anodyne is full of what I’d like to call a Poetics of Exhaustion and a Poetics of Relationality, wherein the poet is tired of (and tired out by) the unrelenting violence and strains of this, our, world – “what severs / the head of connection in the time of least” – and its attendant losses. Nonetheless, she seeks out cracks in what is through which another way of imagining ourselves and our relationship to each other might emerge (25). It’s an aria of “ands” and caesura, tracing the intractable distances and intimacies of now. These are vibrant-yet-harrowing poems full of touch and terror, abduction and desire, beauty and domination, entrapment and escape.

We enter into a landscape replete with “common miracles” but also “endless / sentences about oppression,” and throughout, we learn how inextricable these are from each other, often contained in the same form or instance as in “chrysanthemums the rust of blood” (Queen 71, 76, 49). It is, in part, these entanglements of beauty and harm that is exhausting to navigate. These poems glow with a devotion to the particularity of lived experience, but this is amplified and unsettled by the elegiac – a brother lost to murder, a mother declining from dementia, the depression and suicidal ideation of a son “whose brilliance / isn’t understood yet,” who wonders “Why can’t I be myself in this world” (68, 3). In these poems, we encounter the human as the perimeter between what roils inside and what roils outside. One’s body is a kind of em dash, mote, hatchet, net, and, when lucky, a site of pleasure, reprieve, and connection. Queen explores the body as a site of contention for all the forces and dogmata of the world, and also as a source of irreverence and imagination, the “body ever in revolt, a red centimeter of a mouth / asking what else” (6).

We learn early in the book that the speaker is tired, but cannot sleep; as we move through the layers of experience and accreting chasms between self and outcome in subsequent poems, that tiredness grows colossal and endless, the speaker ever-calibrated to “what might exhaust this [her] brittle form” (68). Loss haunts and contemporary life threatens, and restlessness ensues and ensues. It’s literal restlessness and figurative restlessness – the restlessness of the unresolved, the revenant, the used, the misused, the used up, the vulnerable.  In a formally startling poem, “Synesthesia,” parentheses mirror the wounds of loss and make space for the ghost of the murdered brother to speak in a language we do not understand but can hear/see:

The self is riven with sorrow, not distinguishable from what injures it. The space between lines and the many caesuras within the lines, like the faults in logic or sense-making, serve to replicate how grief perforates and how navigating that loss in language might allow for a painful but paradoxically satisfying kind of coherence. Inherent in the wish to sleep, is the wish to reconcile with and transform one’s helplessness by dreaming of alternative endings, wherein the speaker “sang hush to a wounded man // (          ) // (          ) // gunshots, my brother                       (          )            and he lived” (31).

Likewise, in the later poem, “NJ Transit Passenger Ode,” the speaker confesses, “I want to sleep at night” perchance to dream “my family all lived // in the same place / long enough to grow daffodils & safe babies” (66). The final poem of the collection – an anaphoric litany of all the places and ways that the speaker has, in fact, slept – promises to offer some resolve or relief from the earlier disquiet, but the sleep, too, is punctuated by the harsh details of an exacting world – “a steel bunk in Illinois winter next to military / strangers,” “with a view of an abandoned lot overgrown with weeds & drug trash,” “in a bathtub dispossessed,” “with love & treated myself to unkindness,” [listening to] “nameless strays killing what they eat,” “with a man who hated himself,” wrapped “in a crochet blanket & / sorrow,” “in senescent lake muck,” “in my car on the side of Fountain Street at dawn,” “in a world I forgot to love sometimes,” “& more than once I didn’t close my eyes” (81-83). Queen is not interested in suggesting we have reached resolution or solace. There is, however, amid the long lines of troubled sleep, an instance of grace: “I slept inside a song with a Blacker voice than mine which meant I slept good” […] “I slept in a place of brilliant bones & the future of Blackness / I slept in a system outside of every law but one […] I slept in a simple way / I slept in a place just for us / I slept where I could see it” (82-83). Queen ends not on a simplistic note of hope, but on the edge of everything that currently is, where she can glimpse and presage an alternative world where Blackness has its own music and space.

* * *

In calling this book Anodyne, Queen is asking us to think about what might allay or soothe the many pains of contemporary life, which are often lessened or amplified according to the body you inhabit, the betrayals that come from the inside (as with chronic pain), and those that come from the outside (as with the supremacist ideologies and actions that compel Black Americans to “only ask     that you not kill us”) (25). Thanks to Queen’s deft experimentation with and handling of form and recurring motifs, we glimpse the ways these inside and outside betrayals have something to do with each other.

The word “anodyne” also brings to mind all the analgesic forms people use to render painful experiences less so by dulling their senses, as in Kendrick Lamar’s “twilight” used as epigraph; think nightshade, opium, camphor, Vicodin, saffron, wine, consumerism, etc. These poems honor that desire for the absence of pain, but also suggest that a heightening of ones senses, “a spirit of play” (as broadcast in the Anne Carson epigraph), attention, care, and deep engagement might offer a brighter balm, an antidote. So, this book woefully admits the need for constant painkillers and the longing for the anodyne to end anodynes (to be free from “made-up valor or resilience”), but also offers itself up as anodyne (1). To read these poems is to feel as if you have entered the many abysses of modern life and the ways histories of harm enter the body and home and mouth, but also as if you have been offered a amulet of protection in Queen’s conjuring attention and susurrant words, sung “sharp as blades” (2). We are given not just “repositories of beauty,” but the Ariadne-like string that might help to lead us out of the labyrinths of loss and cultural misappropriations, wherein we find that just beyond simple loveliness is the “untidy, untended, loveliness of the forsaken, / of dirt-studded & mold-streaked / treasures that no longer belong to anyone / alive, overrunning” (1). Despite having felt the pain of being made “smooth from pain,” one’s “interior [made] to hold the ruin,” the speaker of these poems is still on the lookout for “a good atonement” and “how to live exuberant with settle,” “stretch[ing her] insides / across pages until [her] pain is upside down” (Queen 51, 20, 17, 13).

* * *

Like the lemon added “to the cool / water in a faceted glass” from the poem, “Declination,” about desire and its acquittals, Queen’s writing is sharply, vividly, refreshingly investigative, arriving in versatile multifaceted forms with unconventional cadences. It pushes language to its limits in order to articulate the intimate specifics of daily defense against onslaught, and how one does this without losing one’s openness to intimacy (43). Queen clearly loves language – its heft and sound, texture and malleability – but also wants us to remember that language is limited and fails us all the time – “the violence of language in every space / I enter & think I am losing everything but my mind” (79). Thus, Queen goes to extreme measures to say the unsayable, using potent imagery, the page as a field of experimentation, surprising syntax, the invention of words, juxtaposition, etc. These poems go to the edges of language, emotion, experience, and artistic tactics, connecting unlike things to get closer to that third interstitial entity. Her poetic techniques multiply the meaning of words to go beyond the literal, giving readers an impression of an idea or feeling, an experience one can’t quite put into words but knows is real. There’s a figurative radiance here, sun-like in that it’s at moments life-giving and illuminating, and, at others, hard to look at, full of risk.

Narrative is one of the ways we catalogue or think of or experience our lives. But it is not the only way. Queen’s poems invite us to ask hard questions about how our experience of the world is mediated or transmitted. Do you experience your body as a part of a story? Do you understand “that molten underground we swim the surface of” (5)? Being so brave you almost die? A brother turned into dust? “How to use the word love, mean it” (20)? This is poetry that rearranges how you make contact with the world, is not a lesson or bit of wisdom, but something much more expansive and heterodox.

In this collection, compression and elision create an intensity that does not abbreviate; rather, it moves in the direction of complexity and multiplicity, toward not letting meaning or conclusion or dichotomizing clamp down, kill for the sake of understanding or satisfaction or a clean arc. In this way, it is foundationally deconstructive. While there are narrative threads in these poems, Queen’s poems are discernibly not tethered to narrative. Rather the lyrical provocations and pleasures of these poems are linguistic, imagistic, musical, philosophical, emotional, intellectual, formal, visceral, metaphysical, thematic, contrarian, figurative, and textural. They are sonically gorgeous and unrelenting, “boom[ing] with basalt,” and riveted with resonant insoluble questions like “Can I collect my fragments, / fragile now in the gentleness” (5, 37)? Her poems are plangent and you feel in the many forms – erasure, eclogue, grid, sestina, ode – and the tide-like lines an unruly roving attention, within which language is a depot for discovery and deliverance.

* * *

While the world keeps apprehending the speaker, across poems, through diminishing culturally constructed (but materially consequential) lenses – as woman, as Black, as professor, as ill, etc. – the personae poems in the collection try to disabuse us of this gisting error. Queen reminds us, rather, that she is only “disguised as an I (no direction),” is not a singular easily-diminishable category or self, but is of “disarray,” “flux,” made up of “opposites [that would like to be] allowed to oppose in peace” (9, 80). The personae poems reject essentializing or lessening how multiform and capacious the self, with its miraculous “starlit” and “drunk off sea liquor” origins … “our scatter / Expansion—openness, inexact song” (9, 26). They also call out all the ways that one – especially if relegated by a hierarchical culture to the margins – is abridged by and beholden to a “subaltern superstructure” and its “apparent psychological systems,” where whole populations are socially, politically, psychically, and geographically excluded and oppressed, strung out and along by “merchant discipline,” woefully “used up by the wrong power” (Queen 9-10). The personae poems remind us that we arrived differently than where and what we now find ourselves, not yet divisible and decided upon, but “via unpredictable route / via safer lacuna” to “shell the day-cold / bone-filled, language-less,” full of “varied intensity” (54). Thus the perpetual paradox and tension of living now, when “it feels strange to smile in a fascist era—grief / dammed up, ancient energy held back” (55). We are reminded we are made of greater wider various stuff, how we are drawn toward possibility, even as, when Queen writes in “Epilogue for Personae”:

The brilliance of the line break on “break” is that it suggests there is heartbreak and body ache when we come up against all that dilutes or delimits our possibility, but that if we get past that interruption we might “break toward” a further terrain of leeway and imagining.

There’s rage but it’s quiet; there’s hope, but it’s quiet. What’s not quiet is the intensity of interrogating a too common complicity, and the search for seams at the margin of harm that might be opened up into other worlds or possibilities. She calls the mercantile world and individuals out for what they have done to beauty, “trash[ing it], see[ing it] as glut, usable” (56). And in “Antediluvian,” there is a necessary inquisition of white people and their attendant gods:

* * *

But there are other everyday anodynes, which Queen underscores. Throughout the collection, nature, food, and animals are tranquilizing counterforces to cultural degradations. “Breezes peel blush and white petals from her magnolia, / lacing unruly roots in the spring grass,” seasons stretch out of shape amid “the opulence of acres,” the world continuing to make and unmake itself (23). And food is everywhere – “poblano soup & spicy / slaw on bootleg street tacos,” “fresh peaches / simmering in syrup,” “a tuna melt / cut in half,” “vegetarian gumbo,” “snapper & trout blackened on the spit” – climaxing with the grandmother’s cut potato, an old-world magic, used to cauterize injured skin: “Repeat / until it looks like nothing ever happened” (Queen 76, 78, 36, 65). Animals arrive as insight that is immune to rational understanding – “disappearing pattern— / Quarrel of sparrows // Branches beam[ing] full green” – with images that hit us at some subterranean and arterial level (71). But nature – with its ongoing aria of movement and transmutation – is also frequently formally elegiac, full of “falling star[s],” “erosion,” and “cracked bone [stitch]ing itself a whitened scar / over and over” (71, 5). But, for Queen, this natural kind of recursive dissolution or eventual death is what makes the body and mind electrically alive and present to its own inimitable being, like her own “animal glow—sacred rot” (20).

Anodyne mines the apocalypses that have long been underway, and all that might sate or save us amid them, like “resurrect[ing] the excised archive of […] relatives,” acknowledging that merely managing the aftershocks is not sustainable (20). Queen’s writing is so powerfully her own that it reminds us that we cannot replace a poem with our interpretations of it anymore than we can or should do that to others. She unseams the unseeming to figure out how to go on living. Her words make a circle around her coven. At their best, great poems give us new ways of saying, thus new ways of seeing, which ultimately suggest new ways of being. Audre Lorde wrote “Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.” Queen’s Anodyne is one such bridge, a gift from the intersections of everything. We are reminded that “no matter / Sound makes space in the throat”; to peril language is to open oneself to sustenance (68). Therein, we are fortified by the consonance and precision of the inconclusive and multivalent:

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

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dawn lonsinger is the author of Whelm, and recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, four Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes, the Utah Prize in Prose and Poetry, the Greg Grummer Poetry Prize, and Smartish Pace’s Beullah Rose Prize. Her poems and lyric essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Guernica, Los Angeles Review, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. lonsinger holds a BA in studio art and English as well as an MA in literature from Bucknell University, an MFA in poetry from Cornell University, and a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Utah. She recently finished a creative nonfiction book that tries to navigate the consanguinity and dissonance between erotics and robotics in a Tindering world, and is now working on a book of poems, The Long and Terrible Taming, which explores taming and wildness in all its manifestations. She is an Associate Professor at Muhlenberg College.

By Cherise A. Pollard, PhD

Tim Seibles’ Voodoo Libretto: New & Selected Poems (Etruscan Press, 2020) spans four highly productive decades and features work from Body Moves (1988), Hurdy-Gurdy (1992), Hammerlock (1999), Buffalo Head Solos (2004), Fast Animal (2012), One Turn Round the Sun (2017) and new poems from the manuscript, With No Hat (2020). While the text is marked by loss — the pandemic, the poet’s retirement, his parents’ recent transitions in 2019 and 2020, the speaker’s ruminations about aging and death’s eventuality, America’s dance with late-capitalist demise and the looming collapse of democracy — there’s an abundance of humor, the delights of imagination, the beauty of play, the glory of sports, the sweet promise of Black boy joy, the marvel of a woman’s legs, and the wonders of the kiss.

Seibles’ distinct perspective, the focus of his creative attention, as well as his intention to upset the status quo necessarily means that his work cannot be easily categorized on the levels of content, form, or language. Voodoo Libretto offers its readers formal diversity. There are free verse poems as well as ballads and villanelles. There are short lyric poems and long narrative poems with gorgeous turns and abstract, reflective passages. Language is dynamic in Voodoo Libretto; it is alive in the surprising ways that the poet employs figurative language and rhyme, musicality and word play, invention and highly focused description. In the preface, “Open Letter II,” Seibles makes a strong argument for an attention to craft that disrupts the status quo: “For me, poetry is the place where — if I am not intimidated — I can say the most dangerous, most tender, most mysterious things I know, where I may find the same in the work of other poets … Such crucial speech sustains my hunger to see more than the way it is — more than the way it’s been. I’m talking pure voice, the untamed voice, the voice with no rider, no bit in its mouth” (xxvi-xxvii). On the page, this desire manifests through the way that Seibles plays with language through his invention of new words and his use of vernacular expression.

Of course, themes shift, emerge and return, there are preoccupations that the poet continues to ask and answer. There is being human, and being a human that is Black, and being a human that is Black and male, and being a human that is Black and male who comes of age during the sixties with the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements and integration shifting the foundation of one’s life. Voodoo Libretto features the work of a poet who has been keenly aware of his cultural, historical, political and social contexts. Born in 1955, the year after the crucial Brown v. Board of Education (1954), a decision that made integration the law of the land, as well as the year a young Black teenager, Emmett Till was lynched in Mississippi, Seibles grows up during the Civil Rights Movement in Philadelphia. He came of age in the sixties, during a time of cultural upheaval that includes the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy (1963), Malcolm X (1965), Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1968),  and Robert F. Kennedy (1968). In the late sixties, he witnessed cultural change brought forward by the Voting Rights Act (1965), and Roe V. Wade (1973), as well as youth-driven social movements that pushed for this legislation: Black Power Movement, anti-Vietnam War Protests, Women’s Movement and the Sexual Revolution.

A child of the sixties, Seibles is truly oppositional to conservative American politics, and is deeply skeptical of organized religion. His work critiques capitalism, American militarism, political corruption, The Cold War, Reaganism, The Bushes (George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush), Desert Storm and the perpetual War on Terrorism that followed 9/11. Throughout Voodoo Libretto, readers will notice a sharpening political critique — at first it may simply be a quick mention of republicans in the poem “The Apple Cake” (Seibles 88), or a slight reference to white people who may not be as trustworthy as one imagines in “The Further Adventures of Tooter Turtle” (131),  but then one notes a shift in later work to extensive critiques of conservative politics that develops into an outright damnation of Trumpism and MAGA politics as in “MAGA Hat III Strategy ” (283).  In “Not Nearly Enough” (285). the speaker asks a rather provocative question: “Tell me, how did we let these fuckheads run the world / off the road?!” (lines 34-35). In a post-January 6^th 2022 society, it’s not clear that anyone has an answer that makes logical sense, but Seibles’ work asks the necessary questions.

Voodoo Libretto charts the transformation of a poet who becomes more comfortable with the fact that he must say what needs to be said to wake up America. Seibles explores the ways in which these historical events, cultural shifts, and politics affect the way the poet sees himself and his world. It is also work that is shaped by a poet with a unique perspective who does not shy away from introspection and imagination. Throughout Voodoo Libretto, we see the direct impact that these historical movements had on young Seibles’ life. Lost childhood innocence is a strong theme in this collection. There are several poems such as “Trying for Fire” (Seibles 11), and “Terry Moore” (163), that focus on his childhood, particularly his experience of being one of three Black fourth grade boys who integrated an elementary school in Philadelphia. His relatively happy, sheltered childhood changes abruptly.  In “The Word 1964-1981” (11), the speaker visits the school, wonders about the Herculean task placed on a boy’s small shoulders:

Integrating that school changed the community, and the little boys who grew to be men under the pressure of institutionalized racism. Often, we encounter grand integration narratives haloed by notions of heroism in the face of blatant racist actions. Here, we see a different version of that lived experience in the northeast, where institutionalized racism emerged, some might say, in a more subtle dynamic. Seibles gives us no clear-cut battles, but shows us something different in his depiction of Black boys who “have no idea how big a deal it was” (line 4) who are forced to go to a school where “the teachers didn’t want us” (line 9). The psychological, cultural and social impact of these actions was not anticipated. Those boys and their families were not prepared for the trauma either they or their community would endure. His visit to the old school grounds is bittersweet. He is reminded of some joyful memories of playing sports that seems to balance the trauma. There seems to be hope, or at least distraction from pain: “but the field is still there” (line 21). But the trauma is not mediated for long. The poem closes with “On some / of the side doors you can / still find the word Nigger” (lines 24-26) The trace of racism remains in the structure of the building, in the institution’s landscape.

In “The Hilt, Second Session” (Seibles 209) the speaker’s imagination, spurred by childhood memories, returns to the playground.  This long poem moves back and forth across the page, like “The see-saw, I remember — ” (209). The speaker revisits a memory of playing with his brother behind their church, wearing his “fake tie clipped to / my stiff, white shirt” (209). This scene rouses the speaker’s anxieties. He is not sure who he is anymore, or what he has become:

Here, the speaker understands that the experiences that he has encountered have forged him into a man who seems to be so different from his boyhood self. At this point in his life, some thirty years after the publication of Body Moves (Seibles 1988), the speaker tries to take some measure of himself. Who is he, if he is not recognizable to himself, or those who knew him, raised him? Reeling in self-doubt, the speaker seems unable to gather himself, to articulate the meaning of his life.  He sees himself, accomplishing things, participating in the world, but feels distanced:

Throughout the collection, in the later books, one notices that Seibles invents and employs the word “bizzy” to highlight the ways that the Protestant work ethic that fuels American capitalism stands diametrically opposed to any meaningful existence. He realizes that he has gone through the motions, in all of the busy-ness of daily life, he is traumatized: “the way you walk — some sign / of a lifelong shove: your mind / a shy animal, force-fed, skinned” (Seibles 210) As if in a daze, the speaker thinks,

In the section that follows, we realize that he is experiencing a trauma in the aftermath of the police shooting of Tamir Rice on a playground in Cleveland.

In the context of Seibles’ body of work, one of the themes of which is childhood nostalgia and the reckoning of masculinity, this section of the poem resonates — here is a Black man taking stock not only of his boyhood and lost innocence, but grieving for a boy who loses much more than innocence. He remembers, “I used to do that. / I’d have my football with me, a water gun in my pocket, / maybe some Sugar Babies” (211).  The speaker wonders:

The speaker’s reflection on Tamir Rice’s death echoes his own trauma in “The Word 1964 -1981” (Seibles 11) when he says that he and his friends “had no idea what a big deal it was” (line 4) when they integrated their elementary school. There is a sweetness in his boyhood memories, playing on the playground, playing with Legos in the basement, watching cartoons that does not match the terror that lurks on the margins of his life — a terror that visited Tamir Rice on the playground.

In Voodoo Libretto, play is kaleidoscopic. There are so many ways that Seibles indulges in serious play — child’s play, sports, word play, imagination, dreamtime and flirtation. For Seibles, play pushes the boundaries of our expectations, challenges us to reconsider our beliefs. From self-proclaimed class clown to adult trickster, Seibles’ imagination invites the reader into investigative distraction. In several poems, playing football and basketball is a way for the speaker to connect with his buddies, and a pathway to masculinity. In “Nothing But Football” (Seibles 22), the speaker remembers the joy, bordering on religious ecstasy, that playing football with his friends brought into his youth:

The language is alive here with the slippery consonance of “s.” The hyphenated words give us the sense of collision on the field — mimics play action.

It is also important to note the crucial aspect of fantasy and escapism that play brings into the boys’ lives. In the shadow of racism, and their parents’ watchful eye, play gives the speaker and his friends a way to be. This play is transformative, it opens up possibilities for their future — for the men they will become. Later, in “Trying for Fire” (31), Seibles admits that his NFL dreams did not come true, “I never did play pro-football, / never got to do my mad-horse, / mountain goat, happy-wolf dance / for the blaring fans at the Astrodome,” (32), but the dream makes real world survival possible; it gives the speaker and his boys something to be hopeful for beyond the rules and restrictions of their daily lives.

Ever the inventive poet, the form of the villanelle becomes a playground for Seibles. Working within its constraints, he plays with rhyme and meter in ways that lead to surprises for the reader. Several pop culture references such as Oprah, CNN, Beatles lyrics, Wonder Bread, Sponge Bob, Yoda, zombies, and the nursery rhyme “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” are either the focus or make special appearances in some of his villanelles. In “Extra Bright Blues Villanelle” (Seibles 289), the speaker humorously reflects on the idea that others might not consider him to be very smart; it is ironic because the entire poem stays true to the villanelle form and references Dylan Thomas’ classic work, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.” The combination of the literary and popular cultural references as well as the poet’s experimentation with variations and imaginative stretches that facilitate the rhyme scheme result in a villanelle that demonstrates the speaker’s brilliance. The repeated lines are found in the first stanza:

In a villanelle, the first and third lines repeat as the end lines of each of the five tercets and are the couplet at the end of the last quatrain of the poem. Seibles uses slant rhyme for the A and B rhymes: for the A rhyme, “bright,” he brings in “light,” “fight,“ ”night,” “sight,” and the slant rhyme “life.” For the B rhyme, “horse,” he substitutes “remorse,” “force,” “of course,” and “off course,” as well as slant rhymes: “for,” “door,” and “more.” The speaker’s riffing on various words and their meanings makes the poem humorous: “Really don’ know if I’ll ever get right / Been charting the stars like a Martian off course. / Sometimes they don’t think that I’m extra bright” (lines 16-18). The space theme shifts into the speaker thinking of himself as a lost Martian. By the end of the poem, the speaker binds all of the logical threads together:

Here, the speaker brings Star Wars references into his argument — with “Yoda” and “the Force”. These references ground the poem in popular culture, in effect, reinvigorating the form for contemporary audiences. These often delightful substitutions also highlight the limitations of form — that in order to stay within its bounds, Seibles must stretch the argument conceptually.

Seibles tackles racial and political issues with humor, too. In “The Further Adventures of Tooter Turtle” (131), Tooter Turtle tells Mister Wizard that he wants “to be black in America” (131). Mr. Wizard cautions against this desire, tells Tooter,

But, Tooter is drawn in by Black culture. He believes that circumstances must be improving. He says, “Well, gee, Mister Wizard, times have changed. / It might be a little rough, but I’ll be down / with the brothaz — they’ll show me the ropes” (131). Tootah wants to be Black because: “Black people are bold and resilient” (131). Well, the incredulous Mr. Wizard grants Tooter’s wish with this spell:

After ten minutes of being Black man in America, the transformed Tooter Turtle yells, “HELP, MISTER WIZARD!!!” (132). This poem is funny because it reveals the disconnect between the romance of blackness — the culture, music, the narrative of survival against the odds — verses the reality of oppression and violence. It is one thing to see it as an outsider, it is quite another to experience the crushing effects of institutional racism.

Tim Seibles’ Voodoo Libretto is a seminal text. In it, we see the power of Black interiority — the matter of Black lives — clearly. Seibles’ work chronicles the intricacies of being and becoming a Black man in the late twentieth century and the ways that masculinity shifts as the poet’s life circumstances change. One could easily say that Seibles’ influence is seen throughout contemporary African American poetry — the humor, the risk taking, the performance, the interiority — have opened up space for early twenty-first century poets to experiment in their work. Voodoo Libretto is an important text for scholars of contemporary American poetry who seek a unique perspective on craft, word play, invention, reflections on being, representations of Black boyhood and masculinity, the psychological impact of racism and integration, as well as American cultural politics and popular culture. Seibles’ voice adds an important resonance to the chorus of African American poets speaking to the diversity of Black experience.

Works Cited

Seibles, Tim. Voodoo Libretto: New &Selected Poems. Etruscan Press, 2020.

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

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Cherise A. Pollard, Ph.D., is Professor of English and Director of the Poetry Center at West Chester University of PA. where she teaches African American Literature, Creative Writing and  Composition/Rhetoric.  She earned her PhD in Cultural Studies from the University of Pittsburgh. A 2012 NEH Fellow who participated in the Summer Institute in Contemporary African American Literature, Pollard has published several articles on contemporary black women poets and novelists such as Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sapphire, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and Lucille Clifton.  A scholar who focuses on Popular Culture, African American Popular Fiction, the African American Women’s Historical Novel, and African American Poetry, her critical essays have appeared in journals and edited anthologies including Theorizing Ethnicity and Nationality in the Chick Lit Genre (edited by Erin Hurt), Black Female Sexualities (edited by Joanne Braxton and Trimiko Melancon) and Forecast. She has also published Reader’s Guides for two of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s novels, Sally Hemings and The President’s Daughter.

By Leslie Wingard, PhD

A.Van Jordan’s sardonic wordplay and technical prowess are often elided by critics and interviewers who focus solely on racial content and representation. Dorothy J. Wang argues in the preface of her book Thinking Its Presence (Stanford UP, 2015, XXII) that aesthetic forms are inseparable from social, political, and historical contexts in the writing and reception of all poetry. She questions the tendency of critics and academics alike to occlude the role of race in their discussions of the American poetic tradition and casts a harsh light on the double standard they apply in reading poems by poets who are racial minorities. Wang argues that critics should read minority poetry with the same attention to language and form that they bring to their analyses of writing by canonical white poets. Jordan’s close attention to form is consistent across his poetic production: two chapbooks, The Homesteader (Unicorn Press, 2013) and I Want To See My Skirt (Unicorn Press, 2021) and the collections, The Cineaste: Poems (Norton, 2013), Quantum Lyrics (Norton, 2007), M*A*C*N*O*L*I*A (Norton, 2005), and Rise (Tia Chucha, 2001). His commitment to the Western literary traditions in the forms of sestinas, sonnets, and the epic are met by far more modern and experimental techniques including his borrowing of cinematic narrative structures and persona poems in The Cineaste and M*A*C*N*O*L*I*A. This is all the more reason it is necessary for teachers to focus on Jordan’s artful form when introducing his poetry in their classrooms.

A vivid example of Jordan’s formal abilities is in his most recent chapbook, I Want To See My Skirt (2021), which is the result of collaboration across history and geography between the poet and two additional artists. Jordan sees collaboration as a type of translation in that, “you have to figure out the language of the other artist as you bring your language together with theirs” (Unicorn Press, 2021). He sees the poems in I Want To See My Skirt as mainly sestinas that work like a tailor’s weave in a textile to describe the texts of contemporary Black multimedia artist Cauleen Smith and the late great Malian photographer Malick Sidibe (1935-2016). Sidibé’s photographs are stylized celebrations of Malian men and women in the era of independence from French colonial rule. Jordan, Smith, and Sidibe’s genres are so well-coordinated in I Want To See My Skirt that the intricacies of form are highlighted first and foremost in the chapbook: they “come together to make a new tapestry, something agile enough to hold the past and the present close to our hearts” (3). This chapbook about the growing pains of youth also includes repeated words like “body” and descriptions of a plethora of clothes that will attract students of different ages, genders, and backgrounds; in other words, they will relate to it via its form.

In “Roka’s Parents,” Jordan imagines the parents of a young girl translating for each other their distinct yet coterminous languages for loving their child. I argue that within the six stanzas of six unrhyming lines the repetition of the words “(not a) problem” and “skirt” are especially noteworthy. I Want To See My Skirt is also the title of a 2006 film by Cauleen Smith in which Smith and Jordan play Roka’s parents. Both the poem and film center on the four-year-old daughter. Her beauty, vulnerability, and character are depicted through photographs of her in a beloved skirt from the United States. She will learn that her own body and Black skin are representations made by others as much as by herself. The father in the poem tells the mother, “Don’t forget, I too understand/the ways of the flesh and the power of the body,” and the mother responds, “Let’s not make such a big deal over a skirt./When I put it on her, it was for fun: not a problem.” The father retorts, “Yes, my dear, trust me, it’s not a problem./But a father must show concern for his daughter’s body./There’s no reason why I should skirt/around this issue: men simply want knowledge/of what a woman has to offer beneath her clothes./Always. And this both of you must understand” (9). I would ask my undergraduate students to pay attention to how, exactly, Jordan builds momentum and understanding by utilizing just the two words that stand-out most to me: “(not a) problem” and “skirt.” Indeed, Roka’s budding knowledge about her race and gender is important in this poem, and I know that my students will see that, but Jordan helps us to realize that race, gender, and form are not opposed but instead working together in the piece. 

Juan Wynn, who studied A. Van Jordan’s work in an undergraduate class I taught at the College of Wooster, sees the form of Jordan’s work as a model for his own writing just as much if not more than its content. He recently reflected on reading the poetry. Wynn bumped into the renowned poet at a bookstore in his hometown Newark, New Jersey in 2016.  “I actually had a copy of Quantum Lyrics that I had been annotating,” Wynn said, “so it was incredible that he signed it after we talked about MFA programs and writing that day.”  Quantum Lyrics is ambitious in its perplexing investigation of the human condition via jazz and R&B motifs and actual encounters with racists, the stories of comic book heroes and Albert Einstein, and the minutiae of equations and other data in the world of physics. The volume is powerful because of its form: it moves back and forth between the language of music and the language of science to question which, if any, can penetrate to the core of peoples’ experiences. Because of its complex structure, Wynn “…often returns to Quantum Lyrics. Although it is a full-length collection, the first section in particular is a vision about how to start a collection really strong, meaning in an impressionable way and showcasing formal variety[.]”

Jordan visited my Wooster classes in person and via Zoom on multiple occasions, which allowed an opportunity for them to discuss both form and content with the poet himself.  My students noted that the word “mother” comes up many times in Jordan’s poems “Orientation: Wittenberg University, 1983” and “Que Sera Sera” from the collection Rise, and that Jordan’s poetic form signals that the mother could be his own or someone else’s or everybody’s. He expressed to them after they studied “Orientation” that he wanted to make the Wittenberg University orientation experience easier on his mom, who was jolted by seeing her son and other first-generation students wholly unprepared for undergraduate life.  This culture and class shock resonated with many of my Wooster students, and it is crucial to discuss the ways in which, among other formal strategies, Jordan’s choices of when to use end-stops vs. enjambment create that feeling. One detailed example that we discussed was the additional question mark removed but still felt after the word “color” in the following lines:  But is there really a color / for ignorance when it hurts self? / I can see that I’m not ready. Astute students noted that they learned in college-level literature, Africana Studies, and sociology classes that race is a social construction, and that the enjambment here is key in showing that the speaker, just out of high school, may not yet have been able to put academic language to how their younger mind was actually querying about race and its overall effects. To put it another way, my students think the enjambment here perfectly exhibits how quickly a high schooler, after college orientation and some college courses, may move from feeling pain, or worse, shame around racist acts to questioning race itself and blaming society for inequalities that stem from it. Furthermore, they observed, the end-stop after the word “ready” indicates that this first-generation speaker feels entirely cut off from the worlds of pre-knowledge to which other students at the orientation already had access.  Some readers also thought this poem’s setting in the classroom to be one meant to relay that there exists a power battle between students and their elders (“I decide what to do before she even gives…”). While a valid analysis, Jordan’s aims concern the ethics of pedagogy: he sees the classroom as a space meant for the equal exchange of ideas from all gathered.  His mother’s sense of displacement, her disorientation by race and class at the undergraduate orientation, push the poem’s speaker to envision a disruption of long-established exclusion and power imbalances. The poem’s speaker boldly asserts that they should be “setting out” to always “make a mockery of (any divisions drawn in) class.” Likewise, Van Jordan’s form choices play with readers—to prove that society needs lessons on how not to be ruled by race, class, and other related biases, Jordan tricks them in to reading the word “class” as both social division and a course for instruction at the same time. 

In my Literary Theory class, we did a unit on Jacques Derrida, deconstruction, and the panopticon. To focus on form, the class viewed Tom Tykwer’s innovative German action film Run Lola Run (1998) as a text about life as a text: relatedly, Derrida’s famous line, “everything is a text,” reminded them that deconstruction theory relies on all things being open to multiple interpretations. We then read Jordan’s poem on the film and found that its form also simulated an unfinished puzzle, lacking only the final pieces of the reader’s/viewer’s hopes, doubts, and judgements. One student was curious about what inspired Jordan to focus on Manni and Lola’s relationship and was also interested in Jordan’s choices in poetic structure. While it is not the exact form of an English sonnet, it seemed to them to be loosely modeled after one with the separated stanzas and rhyming couplet at the end. Jordan responded that, “‘Run Lola Run’ is written as a terza rima. I wanted a form that had a system of repetition in it, but a repetition that also showed a relationship between moments that came before the present moment. I close on a couplet to show both closure and for it to represent the couple in the film.” He wanted the poem to end on a note of relationship advice and for that advice to clue into what the cycles in the film mean and to the meaning of the film as a whole. According to Jordan: “When I saw this film in the theaters in the late 90s, I just saw it as an adrenaline rush of an adventure with a brilliant structure. When I saw it again with some distance, I was able to focus on the relationship, which is really what dictates the structure of the film. The one lesson I walk away from the film with is that relationships take work, but working at them pays off. I wish I had picked up on that piece of advice sooner.” So the poet links poetic form and content to cinematic form and content and makes these connections clear to the students.

Jordan’s M*A*C*N*O*L*I*A is about 13-year-old MacNolia Cox who was the first Black winner of the Akron District Spelling Bee in 1936. Cox was thought to have lost in the final round of national competition because the Southern white judges cheated her. Jordan deploys film’s narrative conventions to tell this story of Black struggle and achievement, all the while engaging with and expanding on poetic form. Many of the poem titles come from screenplay headings, are called movie reviews, and have film directions such as “Interior/Exterior” in them. My students working in small groups in class are especially responsive to the unique form of this collection about the spelling bee. For instance, in my Religion in Black Film and Literature class, time and time again when we watch the movie The Green Pastures, and then read the poem “Green Pastures” from Jordan’s collection:  students are taken aback by this 1936 film directed by two white men which depicts stereotyped stories from the Bible as visualized by Black characters. Then, they recall that it was released during the same year that MacNolia Cox won the Bee in Akron. The personified Jim Crow who “works on the long track in hell” in Jordan’s “Green Pastures” poem resonates with them. Similarly, the way in which Jordan utilizes wordplay to compare imagined signs now reading “Negroes, Too” on water fountains in this film’s south to the strands of pearls middle-aged women wear stands out to my students. They note the irony: these imaginary signs adorning the water fountains came much too late in history, and so, as Jordan’s clever form choice highlights, they have lost any and all opportunity to hang “elegantly”:  they are forever cruel and distasteful (92).

College and university-level faculty and students would benefit from robust teaching tools and spaces which focus on not only Black poetry’s content but also its innovative form. After all, the form guides the purpose and tone of a poem. When the message and form fit together, the product is poetry that is truly powerful. Even more powerful is watching a process unfold while teaching about the form of A. Van Jordan’s texts in particular alongside film, visual art, literary theory, or music: students generate something new and we instructors see them find their way by mapping interdisciplinarity.

Works Cited

I Want to See my Skirt. Directed by Cauleen Smith, in collaboration with poet A. Van Jordan, 2006.

Jordan, A. Van. The Cineaste: Poems, New York: Norton, 2013. 

Jordan, A. Van. “College of Wooster African American Literature Student Questions.” Received by A. Van Jordan. November 15, 2020. Email Interview. Wingard, Leslie.

Jordan, A. Van. “College of Wooster Literary Theory and Research Methods Student Questions.” Received by A. Van Jordan. February 20, 2019. Email Interview. Wingard, Leslie. 

Jordan, A. Van. The Homesteader, Greensboro, Unicorn Press, 2013.

Jordan, A. Van.  M*A*C*N*O*L*I*A, New York: Norton, 2004. 

Jordan, A. Van. Quantum Lyrics, New York: Norton, 2007.

Jordan, A. Van. Rise, Symar, CA: Tia Chucha, 2001.

Jordan, A. Van and Cauleen Smith.  I Want to See my Skirt, Greensboro, Unicorn Press, 2021.

“Our Life in Poetry:  New Poets/New Poetics.”  The Philoctetes Center.  Event Program.  29 January 2008.  http://philoctetes.org/documents/New%20Poets.pdf

Rowell, Charles H. “The Poem is Smarter than the Poet: An Interview with A. Van Jordan.” Callaloo.  Volume 27, Number 4, Fall 2004. 908-919.

Tykwer, Tom. Lola Rennt: Run Lola Run. Germany: X-Filme Creative Pool Productions, 1989.

Wang, Dorothy J.  Thinking its Presence:  Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry.  Stanford UP, 2015. xxii.

Wynn, Juan. “A. Van Jordan’s Poetry.” Received by Juan Wynn, January 1, 2022. Email Interview. Wingard, Leslie.

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Leslie E. Wingard earned her BA in English from Spelman College and her PhD in English from UCLA. She is Associate Professor and Chair of English at the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio. Her articles have been published by Religion and Literature, Religion and the Arts, South: A Scholarly Journal, Christianity & Literature, and American Quarterly. Her book under contract at the University of Georgia Press is entitled The Acts and Arts of Faith: Representation and Black Christianity. Her primary research areas include African American literature, Black visual culture, and women’s and gender studies. She has been a research fellow at Haverford College, Williams College, Princeton University, and Princeton Theological Seminary. 

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By Jameela Dallis, PhD

“Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little
pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”
— Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to be Colored Me”

“we are all the poems that will not be quiet / we are all the poems waiting to sharpen our oyster knives”—
—Jaki Shelton Green, “No Poetry”

Jaki Shelton Green sharpens her oyster knife, sharpens her oyster knife, sharpens her oyster knife. These words are litany, invocation, invitation, and view into the poetic realm of Jaki Shelton Green—a poet who believes poems should be physical and immersive and that “writing is about listening.” She is a poet for whom “joy is resistance” and writing is “full of light.”[1] And it’s within such light that we form, as Audre Lorde says, “ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized” (24). Shelton Green’s poems hold, reflect, remember, and project experiences across a range of identities, ways of being, and possibilities of being.[2] Shelton Green is North Carolina’s ninth Poet Laureate—the third woman and first African American to have been appointed to the role—and she is one of my dearest friends.

March 2018, I knew she was someone I should know. In fact, a mutual friend said so. Our first meeting, following a Natasha Trethewey lecture at the Nasher Museum of Art, was brief. I was instantly enamored with Shelton Green’s style—her signature vermillion round glasses (à la Iris Apfel), her bespoke jewelry, her full head of big curls. She was approachable, asked me about myself, and mentioned a few presses to have on my radar. Later that year, fresh with the grief of a lover’s passing, and the uneasy elation of a new Visiting Assistant Professor position, I received my first assignment for a regional independent newspaper, Indy Week. Editor Brian Howe was familiar with my scholarly background and trusted me to interview Shelton Green in her new role as North Carolina’s ninth Poet Laureate. I wasn’t very familiar with Shelton Green’s work, but I googled everything I could and read as many excerpts, interviews, and poems that I could find online. Shelton Green and I met on a hot Sunday morning in September. What was meant to be an hour-long interview stretched for at least two. She graciously answered my questions. I took copious notes. We shared insights off the record and become fast friends. She invited me to her home for dinner a week later.

This essay is part love letter, part introduction to and meditation on Shelton Green’s poetry and vision. Here, I’ll spend time with selected poems from the span of Shelton Green’s career. Many of her early poems explore the richness and complexity of love in its myriad forms. But, even so, her earlier collections remind us that “history has never left us” and her later poems reveal a matured romantic love and the palpable, inscrutable grief of losing one’s child. As a documentary poet, Shelton Green’s poetry bears witness to individual, familial, and communal histories and shows us her art—her ability to “create a language for what she wants to hold without sending people running.”[3] Yet, Shelton Green uses her figurative oyster knife to agitate and open us to the beauty of reading, listening to, and being moved to act by the narratives, the images, the feelings, and the people we encounter in her poems. For poetry, as Audre Lorde says, “forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action” (25).

Dead on Arrival and conjure blues

From her debut, Shelton Green has moved freely from the personal to the historical and maintains a sense of intimacy and agency throughout. In the preface to the first edition of Dead on Arrival (1977), poet and reviewer Lance Jeffers writes, “The winged and delicate imagery of Jaki Shelton . . . may be a harbinger of poetic greatness. . . . Should this idiosyncratic development continue, she will move, I believe, into a circle of greatness” (vii). The book sold out and a second edition with new poems sold out again in 1983. The collection holds poems of understated sensuality as in “shadow,” which begins with “those white shoulders have never / locked / around / black thighs” (1-4). While “and in my old days—“ alludes to the last king of Dahomey opening with “agoliagbo! / agoliagbo!” and the speaker warns, “do not try to / renew me / I am fluid,” asserting her freedom and, perhaps, slipping from the grasp of French colonists (3-5).[4] 

The poem, “the moon is a rapist,” is bold for its time and operates on several levels as it’s hard to ignore that Roe v. Wade was decided only four years before the arrival of Dead on Arrival. The poem’s speaker asks the moon, “why do you kneel there peeing in my window / you kneeling there upon my earth / impregnating the night crawlers with glow,” and Shelton Green’s ability to anthropomorphize the celestial body into a night creeper, an exhibitionist Peeping Tom in three lines is simply astounding (1-3). The moon’s “soft yellowness penetrates” the speaker’s walls and the speaker says,

The violence of the “soft rapist” moon is the caress of its glow, its yellow urine-colored light that is only a reflection of the sun that “knocks loudly upon [the speaker’s] door” (14, 15). We see the female speaker, nude in her bed, bathed in violent light that not only impregnates the night crawlers but her as well. These “moon babies i shall abort / moon babies come out of my birth pouch” she says (12). Though we know people with uteruses have been aborting fetuses for millennia, the landmark decision provided unprecedented agency and access to safe abortions. Though the moon is a rapist, the speaker isn’t bound to birth its children.

In conjure blues (1996), Shelton Green writes several poems for her children, paints intimate moments between lovers, and conjures people living through historical events both tragic and illuminating—the essence of the Blues. Read these poems aloud. Feel their rhythm. They are meant to be experienced. One poem, “insult,” brings Carrie Mae Weems’s iconic 1990 Kitchen Table Series to mind with a woman sitting “with elbows at attention” waiting on breakfast (12). The poem begins, “bacon is burning again / overdue notices form a multicolored border / around the dresser mirror” (1-3). The speaker admires her woodworker lover’s “rich redbrown” back (5) and then “bacon is smoking the kitchen / why does he not cook it in the oven” (8-9). With those lines, we see the smoky kitchen—the bacon is doing the action—and the speaker’s question carries with it the closeness of a well-lived-in romance. We imagine the repeated suggestion that he cook the bacon in the oven for this very reason. There’s a relatability and maybe we think of someone in our lives who never takes our advice and yet we love them madly anyway. In my head, I hear Nina Simone’s version of “Suzanne” as the woman sucks on “mandarin orange slices” (13) and the final lines of the poem feel like a nod to and revision of “the moon is a rapist”:

Here the yellow is the color of the bedroom and yolk The woman is the agent of desire, but her desire isn’t for sex, but rather for the sensual experience of the viscous yolk. The “insult” is both experience and implied. There’s the implied insult of cooking advice ignored and the implied insult of being denied (undesired) intercourse. That Shelton Green paints such a scene in less than 30 lines is a testament to her poetic brilliance.

Rememory and Remembering
In several poetry collections, Shelton Green works with the concept of rememory and takes on the task of remembering historical events, putting flesh back on the bones of lost peoples, people who’ve been silenced, and people whose lives have been devalued. Toni Morrison describes rememory as “recollecting and remembering as in reassembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past” (324). One such poem in conjure blues is “tribute to the men and women who perished in the Imperial Chicken Plant fire in Hamlet, North Carolina.” The September 3, 1991 fire injured 55 and killed 25 workers trapped behind locked fire doors. Many believed racism and poor oversight contributed to the high death toll because during the processing plant’s 11 years of operation, there had never been a safety inspection. The plant never reopened.[5] The poem conjures both the Blues and those killed in the fire:

The poem moves from the present moment—that moment the speaker longs to remember their mother’s breast, a return to innocence that also acknowledges their untimely death due to racist, classist, and anti-worker practices. Shelton Green’s poem begins and ends with the same image of the mother’s bronze nipple and moves readers and listeners through a dirge that remembers the victims of this preventable tragedy.

In Feeding the Light (2014) “an eclipse of skin” is an ekphrastic poem remembering a lynching.[6] The poem tells the larger story of an enslaved man, William, whose owner accuses William of touching his wife’s apron. The poem’s entire sixth stanza is a runaway slave reward advertisement. With phrases such as “He is a / shiny black, lean built with large limbs, long fingers, he is hung / like a race horse” and “He has usually small feet for a nigga and / missing the toe next to this great toe on his left foot,” we are reminded of the dehumanization enslaved people endured and the paradox of being deemed both white men’s property and a sexual threat to white women (22-25). William is hanged for the offense. In the poem’s seventh stanza, a new speaker says, “masa hung my william” (28) and continues:

Shelton Green captures the cruel hypocrisy of a slaveowner who rapes and impregnates an enslaved woman and lynches an enslaved man who we learn in stanza five was coerced by the slaveowner’s wife. The same wife callously complains “bout how william blood gone kill / the grass” (43-44). Yet, this passage recalls the ending of Zora Neale Hurston’s short story, “Sweat,” wherein protagonist Delia Jones waits under a chinaberry tree for her abusive husband Sykes to die from a rattlesnake bite. Here the mention of the tree may suggest that retribution for William’s death is on the horizon.[7]

The poem continues:

The rapist slaveowner’s cruelty is endless reminding readers and listeners that in a society where people own other people, there is no room for sexual agency or consent but, alas, there is sometimes space for retribution. In the ninth stanza, Aunt Sue speaks to the apples, sugar, and fire—she conjures—and nature “remember[s] in all the languages / of storm” (56-58). By the eleventh stanza, the sky is black: “black like masa blood up yonder / black like missus scalp / rolling off the bed” (60-62).

In “an eclipse of skin,” Shelton Green remembers the lynched man by empowering the Black women who loved and survived him. When Aunt Sue speaks to the ingredients, she invokes the power of conjure—the power to speak a desired outcome into being. The women transmute their pain, their mistreatment, the violence done to their bodies into speech, into memory, into magic. Ultimately, the power of Black women’s voices, our imaginations, our dreams, and our poems “give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare” (Lorde 27).

Shelton Green’s most recent poetry collection, i want to undie you (2017), is a lament, a space to hold the inscrutable sorrow for her daughter, Imani Muya Shelton Green, who died in June 2009. The first five lines of the title poem, “i want to undie you,” are full of both searching and deep knowing:

Poetry becomes a space where Shelton Green can reconnect with her daughter while connecting us with a most private form of grieving. Shelton Green’s language gestures toward what can’t be fully comprehended but has still been experienced. It is this paradox of feeling that lends this collection its heartbreaking beauty.

In “i want you to un-die, come back said the mother,” the speaker lists all the ways she wants her daughter to undie—from “i want the dust of you unscattered” and “i want the grief of you un-grieved” to “i want the verb or you un-verbed” and “un-diagnose the diagnosis of you” (1, 3-4, 8, 12). It is hard to find the language to describe this poem. It is at once a poem of negation and desire, of remembering and remembering. In the final poem of this collection, “now,” the speaker says “i write books. store grief upside down on the top pantry shelf where seldom / used wedding gifts rest beside oversized serving platters the antique tea service / and those tacky fake porcelain teacups i can’t bear to toss” (1-3). The grief here is palpable, but it is also shelveable. Yet, it remains. Grief inhabits an interstitial space resting between the treasured and what we hold on to because we feel we must. Grief is like that. It’s the evidence that we loved someone—that we still remember and remember someone through poetry, conversations, and dreams.

In conversation with oyster knives

Here I return to the beginning and bring together Hurston and Shelton Green once more. The Hurston epigraph, from her renowned 1928 essay, “How it Feels to be Colored Me,” embodies Hurston’s unconventional and anachronistic approach to race and identity—in the sense that she refused to be confined by her contemporaries. Hurston’s full passage is worth reproducing here:

But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are hurt about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife. (153)

Hurston refuses to embrace a defeatist point of view or be easily categorized. She sees the world as full of potential and is bent on experiencing as much of it as possible. Arguably, Shelton Green inherited a similar spirit from her grandmother who she describes as “a wild woman” who “was always present in a very large way” and was the “first horticulturist” Shelton Green had known (Shockley 121). Her grandmother both “loved living things” and “the texture of nice things” and could be “very feminine” and “girly” (121-22). This juxtaposition, this “openness” taught Shelton Green “not to fear things that are different” and to be a “risk-taker” and, she says, “To stand outside of who you are. To widen your lens of how you view your world and how you invite other people’s perspectives into that world” (122).

“No Poetry,” on The River Speaks of Thirst is one space where I find Shelton Green and Hurston in conversation and where I’ll end this essay.[8] Shelton Green’s poem begins:

The speaker continues declaring “no poetry” for the wrongs Blacks have known past and present and then shifts, and cracks the poem open into something different. The speaker declares:

The shift is significant. The poem moves from all the spaces either bereft of or unworthy of poetry to a collective chorus of living poems, potentially dangerous poems for those who attempt to cage or silence the speakers. Then:

And finally, “we are all the poems we need to start a revolution.” And that’s what Jaki Shelton Green’s poetry is always reaching toward—a revolution of feeling, of thought, and of we acknowledge and reckon with our history, our ancestry, ourselves, and our futures.

Notes:
In the second epigraph and final section of this essay, I cite lines from Shelton Green’s 2020 poetry album, The River Speaks of Thirst. Note that although the album has been released, not all of the album’s poems have been published. Thus, line breaks are approximate and I have done my best to cite the work faithfully and have consulted with Shelton Green when necessary about language only.

I have capitalized Black when referring to people of African descent. I have not changed the capitalization of black in quoted material.

Works Cited

Green, Jaki Shelton. “an eclipse of skin.” Feeding the Light, Jacar Press, 2014, pp. 18-21.
—. “and in my old days—.“ Dead on Arrival and New Poems, reissued by Carolina Wren Press, 1996, p. 27.
—. “insult.” conjure blues, Carolina Wren Press, 1996, pp. 44-45.
—. ”i want to undie you.” i want to undie you, Jacar Press, 2017, no pagination.
—. “i want you to un-die, come back said the mother.” i want to undie you, Jacar Press, 2017, no pagination.
—. “No Poetry.” The River Speaks of Thirst, Soul City Sounds, 2020.
—. “now.” i want to undie you, Jacar Press, 2017, no pagination.
—. “shadow.” Dead on Arrival and New Poems, reissued by Carolina Wren Press, 1996, p. 47.
—. “the moon is a rapist.” Dead on Arrival and New Poems, reissued by Carolina Wren Press, 1996, p. 10.
—. “tribute to the men and women who perished in the Imperial Chicken Plant fire in Hamlet, North Carolina.” conjure blues, Carolina Wren Press, 1996, pp. 34-37.

Hurston, Zora Neale. “How It Feels to be Colored Me.” The World Tomorrow, May 1928, reprinted in I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive Paperback, CUNY Feminist Press, 1979, pp. 152-55.
—. “Sweat.” Fire!! 1926, reprinted in The Norton Anthology of American Literature: 1914-1945, 9^th ed, W. W. Norton, 2017, pp. 517-25.

Jeffers, Lance. Preface to the first edition. Dead on Arrival and New Poems, reissued by Carolina Wren Press, 1996, vii.

Morrison, Toni. “Rememory.” The Source of Self-Regard. Knoph, 2019, pp. 322-25.

Shockley, Evie. “Lifting Veils: An Interview with Jaki Shelton Green.” Obsidian 10/11 (2009/2010), pp. 121-28.

[1] Green made several remarks about her approach to writing on during a talkbalk I facilitated March 14, 2021 after the second priemere of the theatrical production of The River Speaks of Thirst, directed by Kristi V. Johnson and produced by The Justice Theater Project.  

[2] Here I use “remember” in the style of Toni Morrison’s “rememory as in recollecting and remembering as in reassembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past” (324).

[3] Quotations are from Green’s remarks on March 14, 2021. See endnote 1 above.

[4] Read one version of the last king of Dahomey’s story at Face2Face Africa.

[5] Read more about the Hamlet chicken plant fire on Wikipedia.

[6] Green says the poem “was in a collaborative exhibit called Lullaby Plantation. I offered poetic responses to the images. This poem responds to a photograph of a lynching” in a March 2, 2014 comment published on the website When Women Waken.

[7] Zora Neale Hurston is one of the several influences and beleoved writers Greens mentions in the interview “Lifting Veils: An Interview with Jaki Shelton Green” by Evie Shockley published in Obsidian 10/11 (2009/2010) pp. 121-128.

[8] On The River Speaks of Thirst, “No Poetry” is performed by Chapel Hill, North Carolina’s first Poet Laureate, CJ Suitt—a queer, Black person.

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