82º feels like 87º ~ dew point 73º = soggy air, sweat on skin simply standing ~ bright sun, light breezes, some small rain yesterday, perhaps more tomorrow, all living things thrive

∞

While my website was down this week, I’ve continued to read and think about political poetry, as I mentioned in my last post.  As I’ve read essays in preparation for the class I’ll be teaching, I’m struck most by the positioning of the poets writing the political poems. I continue to ask: must I have experienced the specific oppression or violence in order to write it? This would mean writing poems about feminist, class, gun control, anti-intellectual, and environmental issues for me. It would mean a more nuanced approach to writing about racial oppression, since I am a member of the privileged group in that case. It would mean interrogating whiteness.

In terms of drafting, last night when I did my evening meditation, I added the thought, “I am going to draft a poem tomorrow.” When, I woke up, I didn’t immediately want to get out of bed, so I grabbed my phone to check email and Facebook. There I discovered the news of a shooting at a Little Rock night club. As I went about getting ready for the day, I reminded myself that I would write a poem. When I sat down, news of the shooting popped back into my head, especially these facts: 17 people shot, no fatalities, more people injured trying to get out. Something nagged at me, so I broke my taboo of using the computer at the beginning stages of a draft, and I went online to read about this violent event.

Lines began forming before I finished the article. Lines composed of fragments. Broken syntax appropriate to the situation of the poem. I began:

In the chaos. In the aftermath.

I thought I was writing a political poem about gun control in Arkansas, a state where anyone with a license can now carry a gun on my college campus, concealed no less. But, as I returned again to the article (from the conservative, right-slanted Arkansas Democrat-Gazette) what struck me was that while race was not mentioned in the article, there were many ways the language, and the omissions, conveyed race. In some cases these indications came from police and city spokespeople, and in some cases from the phrasing used by the journalist. (Later, I did watch some footage of the shooting captured on cell phone, but you’ll notice that the Dem-Gaz article only has pictures from the morning, pretty empty crime scene.) I started thinking about how spokespeople frame their statements, how journalists compose their pieces, what each group’s responsibility is, and how a privileged, white audience would read the piece. Now, I’m not saying that police & city spokespeople and journalists need to put a racial qualifier before every noun that indicates personhood. I know that these are often reserved for specific instances where race is a central part of the story. However, at the moment, I’m thinking about how language communicates cultural norms and how these norms influence how we think about those who are different than ourselves.

As the poem evolved, in short lines, in fragments, I came to this:

The facts accumulate.

Facts like the time of the incident, the placement of the club “downtown,” the name of the performer for the evening (Finese2Tymes), that the performer is from Memphis, the shooting was a result of a dispute between individuals, etc. The result of reading the article was that it was easy for me to say, “oh, that was a black club, that will never happen to me or most of the people I know. It’s terrible that people were hurt, but it’s not my main concern of the day.” Well, given my reaction to shootings on school, college, and university campuses, and given my reaction to the shooting at Pulse, I had to stop and interrogate why I was able to distance myself from this shooting. What inner, institutionalized racism still exists in me?

In terms of form marrying content, the poem came out as free verse, short lines, all in a left-justified column. (Light bulbs!) I knew I had to recast it as a newspaper column, block-justified (although, will the new generation of internet news readers recognize the roughly 2-inch column for what it is?) When I moved to the new form, there were new issues of spacing. I had to do some cutting, and some rearranging of sentences. For that, I had to really question the order of the information as presented, which involved not only how the poem created meaning, but also sound. Finally, regardless of switching to the block-justified column, I had not included a first-person speaker in the poem. While I was interrogating my own sense of race in this instance, I did so by referencing location. Most of the poem is a report on the shooting. The last 3 lines, though, refer to readers living in “The Heights” (my very white neighborhood) consuming the news of the shooting. Perhaps it is the coward’s way out to remove myself from the poem. Perhaps I’ll try to write a first-person narrative about the situation soon.

*A note on the title: updates now say 25 people shot. For now, I’m sticking with the original headline and 17.

84º (no heat index!) ~ a beauty of a day, the lawn begs mowing, enough rain and then sun to make every living thing grow

∞

The father poems seem to have slipped my grasp as I’ve been consumed with the turmoil of the world again, with Philando Castile, Charleena Lyles, the London high-rise massacre, the UPS facility shooting, the Pulse memorials, the capitalist zeal for repealing the Affordable Care Act, and so much more.  With these events heavy on my mind, I am also prepping for classes this fall, and one of those will be a special topics course on writing political poetry. We will be using Carolyn Forché’s anthology, Against Forgetting, as well as Marie Howe’s What the Living Do, Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet, Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler, and Danez Smith’s Black Movie. I am excited to teach the class, but also conscious of the fact that UCA is in no way a homogenous institution (student-wise anyway). There will be students from both political parties in the room, and students with differing religious and cultural views. I will have to work hard in the first few weeks to establish a sense of community and trust.

When thinking about political poetry, I always come back to the idea that the personal is political. Because of this, I fall in the camp of “all poetry is political.” However, for this class, I’m shifting my attention to poetry that is overtly political, something we will question and explore as a group over the semester.

All of this being said, when I sat down to write today, I was struggling with the idea of privilege, and with the question of what I can do to help right the wrongs going on all around me. Of course, my first stop was The Oxford English Dictionary database and a thorough reading of the entries for “privilege.” I was struck by the first entry, which had to do with the “privilege” one could buy in the past from the Pope, a practice I knew about thanks to having to take British Lit and having to read The Canterbury Tales. After that introduction, I found criticisms of the practice sprinkled throughout most of Western literature of the Enlightenment. And so, this line appeared in my journal and started the poem:

I purchased this privilege with my skin

Then, the two ideas, privilege and commerce came together. As the title of the poem indicates, it’s topic is shopping while white and the privilege that affords. In the poem, the speaker (yes me, but also, I hope the white reader of the poem) is allowed to browse at will and then becomes woke (again…the idea being that with privilege it is easy to “fall back to sleep” and close one’s eyes against injustice) when she sees a woman of color being harassed by the store clerks, and ends with the speaker’s white guilt for doing nothing. Yes, the poem is based on a slightly similar personal experience, but it’s highly fictionalized.

I found myself writing this poem differently than the father poems or any of my poems in the past. In this case, I had a big-picture idea hovering over it all, driving the poem down the page. Yes, I was still writing to discover my own thoughts and emotions, but it was a more-focused process. I was surprised to find elements of sound developing naturally within the lines (no form here), and I was surprised to find the poem developing into a single stanza (20 lines). Frequent readers will know that I love myself a couplet or a tercet. This poem seemed to eschew white space. It seemed to need to be connected all the way down the page. I will let it sit and reconsider the form when I return for revision, but it’s feeling pretty whole at the moment.

Here are my worries: 1) clichés seem an even bigger concern when working with political material, how do I make the language specific and new when dealing with such well-known material? 2) in writing about my own whiteness, I have included a person of color, am I further “colonizing” that person’s experience by “using” them in the poem? 3) is this poem necessary, isn’t it more necessary to have poems from people of color, people who are actually experiencing aggressions both micro- and macro-? 4) will I ever write a poem about which I have no worries?

∞

Luckily, the grass is tall and mowing = time to contemplate.

83º ~ feels like 88º ~ dew point 72º ~ we breathe in shallows

Today’s post must be quick, as I woke late and have other engagements. I fumbled about my desk and only half-assed my thoughts about drafting this morning, tho I had gone to bed with the goal of drafting on my mind. I flipped through a book on my desk and read two poems. Somehow, although not in either of those poems, my brain clicked into the word “dutiful.” Ah, I remember now, I got up to turn off the fan and was thinking about “dutiful writer syndrome” (wondering if I should let myself off the hook for drafting today) which led me to think about what it means to be a dutiful daughter.

When I got back to the desk, I knew I wanted to look into the etymology of “dutiful.” Of course, I knew it was a form of “duty,” but I wanted to read the various definitions through time. Thank the universe that UCA subscribes to the Oxford English Dictionary. (This is one of my favorite ways to get into writing a poem.). I logged in and started with “dutiful,” read on to “duty,” and then found the connection to “due” (which included debts, which ties in to a lot of what I’m exploring about my relationship to my father). I scribbled nouns & verbs, I copied quotes & definitions. Most importantly, in the “due” entry, I scrolled downward and found “to give the devil his due.” Shazam.

One of the things I’m struggling with is portraying a lot of negative things about my father. I fear the portrayal is lopsided, and the phrase “to give one their due” or “to give the devil his due” slips right in there as it means to admit something redeeming about an unfavorable person (I probably mashed that paraphrase with some quoting from the OED). So, I started thinking about how my father was not “the devil,” was not a monster, and I drafted:

I cannot give the devil his due, Father
as you were merely a broken man, no monster.

And then, I swore, for the rhymed couplet suggested form. Yet, the rhythm didn’t send me to the sonnet; it sent me to the villanelle. That common phrase “to give the devil his due” seemed to bear repeating and seemed to indicate song. With a little tinkering, these two lines morphed into the first stanza, and the refrain (lines 1 and 3, which are repeated throughout the form) became what I have here as line 1 and some additional language before “no monster.” I moved almost immediately to the computer with only the first stanza because the villanelle is regimented. I needed to put the refrains in place and write around them, all the while being willing to tweak the repeated language as the content unfolded. And then, Dear Reader, I confess it, I made a list of rhymes (hard and slant) in my journal for the father/monster end words. What have I become?

Again, the form provided me a frame to contain my difficult thoughts. In this case exploring my own complicity in my non-relationship with my father, and facing the reality that he was no devil, no person out to cause me harm on purpose. His faults are plenty, but they do not include malice. The tricky part is that when I write, “I cannot give the devil his due,” what I mean is “I cannot call you devil,” not that I can’t give you your due. So, that’s what the poem is trying to explore. We will see if it lasts on future re-reading. I’m thinking the layered meaning is getting lost. Time will tell.