Quickley, Pardon, and Tolliver select poems in Voices in Leimert Park share cascading movements in voice and crescendos, which overpower you and pull you into a complex portrait of many Los Angelenos, and the subjects in their poems paint that complexity, reveal that contradictory Los Angeleno in ambivalent ways, and make the waterfall-like movements in these poems unnerving and wonderful and immensely addicting.
They've taught me so much about line breaks and beat. Here are a few stanzas I loved:
From Calcium Rings by Quickley
"They shipped his remains home to the family
in a box
the size of a small suitcase
too small to possibly
hold his memory
or the landslides he left behind
or the pints of whiskey
his father began to swallow
to keep from breaking"
From Smoke and Mirrors
"it's a culture slide under a microscope
24 hours no commercials
except when you have to breathe
it's a science lab with cable television
it's a vender machine and
mostly you don't have any change
Los Angeles
Pico Aliso
Pico Union
Sunset Blvd.
Alta Vista
Sierra Vista
La Cienega
Vista Del mar
it's a Rubik's cube
in the hands of a blind man"
From Spanglish and Spikanese
"I am the one-breasted
Amazon Archer:
the rite of passage
the rain forest surgeon
the jive-talking Jamaican cousin
draped in gold arrogance
& history"
From Mudcloth by Imani Tolliver
"i had been calling you
you had been calling me
feeling call, spirit call
the way old lovers communicate
when phones are complicated, forbidden"
These staccato, 'jive-talking' lines vividly paint the speaker in these poems, and when I read them, I couldn't help but picture in my mind the different people who walk the streets in Union Station or down Vermont Street, or those who gather at Pershing Square. These poems are concern themselves with the body, too. The remains of a cousin, and the search of finding oneself. Los Angeles becomes a Rubix's cube "in the hands of a blind man." Padron paints the life of Los Angeles in quick, self-contained images and stanzas "I am collard greens / Chinese laundries & / steamy summer subways" and Tolliver breathes into her poem a love song, mixing it with dirt and a bodily, lusty affirmation and calling.
How is difference made distinct here? In this portrait of Los Angeles? I think it's grounded in the voice of these poems, and it's how they connect via the body and the city they live and breathe in.
How do we connect these writings to the revolution, to the Lost Poets? I think they share the same referentiality--"their eyes are grenades," and "death is their prize."
When we look at Quickley's poem, we see that framework. That indirect rending of a cop's assumptions, of society's assumptions, of those who work the infrastructure and control the race constructs, "it must have been a drug deal gone bad." How do these poems fit in "the revolution?" How is poetry a revolution? To read poetry, to read literature, is against the highest directive: "writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seems, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them," Edwidge Danticat. You carry ideas in these poems, you carry characters, portraits of people, whose existence is in an acute war with the single-story constructs that govern mainstream culture. That's why I loved the crescendos in these poems. They pull you in, build you up, and take you face-to-face to the Angeleno you'd call a gangster, a crip, a "drug deal gone wrong," a Spanglish-Spikanese biracial product of the hood, a brown dike whose lover wears elaborate African fabric to carry her babe. They strip away the single-story constructs--whose "eyes are grenades" and "death is their prize." It's hard to configure these images without placing them against the consequential effects of poverty and classism, but literally, these poems carry those whose bodies carry the weight of the past--slavery, aboriginal massacre/manifest destiny, and how the community deals with the deaths in-between--and transmute them into congregated voices.
"they strip away the single-story constructs" yes, yes, yes. what i found so powerful about these poems, too, is how much they carried. how much the bodies carry even while they might not want to and even when that carrying makes their bodies disappear. the physicality of these poems was a physicality of the multiplicity of identities, experiences, places, histories of each of these bodies. and all the while holding these many things at once, the voices were clear and present and deeply, deeply embodied.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Tessa, that's where i epiphanized in your blog: It's hard to configure these images without placing them against the consequential effects of poverty and classism, but literally, these poems carry those whose bodies carry the weight of the past--slavery, aboriginal massacre/manifest destiny, and how the community deals with the deaths in-between--and transmute them into congregated voices.
ReplyDeleteAnd how you make the connection to each other, to the city and to the larger transcendent themes (here we are again!)
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The way you articulate how the staccato, 'jive-talking' lines paint vivid pictures of so many varied personalities and lives is something I experienced while reading these works myself. This imagery is something I'm so familiar with that I began to envision people I personally know who connect themselves and find support in the foundation of where they grew up. And the point you make about the crescendos? Spot. On!
ReplyDeleteTo read poetry, to read literature, is against the highest directive: "writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seems, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them," Edwidge Danticat. You carry ideas in these poems, you carry characters, portraits of people, whose existence is in an acute war with the single-story constructs that govern mainstream culture.
ReplyDeletego OFF melissa!! all of the words on these pages seem anything but trivial, as we all are able to be touched and inspired beyond the confines of time. we are combatting the mainstream, every time we put pen to page.
i was also gonna quote your last statement, but Elmaz beat me to it (once AGAIN):
"It's hard to configure these images without placing them against the consequential effects of poverty and classism, but literally, these poems carry those whose bodies carry the weight of the past--slavery, aboriginal massacre/manifest destiny, and how the community deals with the deaths in-between--and transmute them into congregated voices.
there really is no examining of these without simultaneously looking at what is carried, and what we subconsciously carry, based on our histories and that inherited memory...