speaking from the mouth

I'm having a really hard time knowing how to write about this weeks selections. Lots of weeks, actually, I find it hard to figure out an entry point. With the question of who in the broader context I think I felt daunted even before beginning to read. And when I thought about it what in the question and what in the poets that we've read so far have me feeling at a loss for words, it is the idea of who. Who as in voice, as in the particular and strong voice/self/I that is found bursting through even the most painful and aching of poems.

The reason the question of who feels so hard for me to talk about is because much of my life has been a struggle with voice. I don't need to get into it, really, except to say that part of what I found of solace in writing was a place where a voice and a self could be fleeting and quieted, in ways that didn't feel possible through speech. It's why I so admire work that tells precisely from a poet's experience, that is booming and confident. It's why I adore performance poetry and feel so intimidated by trying to perform.

Thinking about these questions of who and context and voice, I read these poems - poems with such voices that are layered with self-confident power and rootedness in place, even as they talk about displacement and loss and being unrooted. Poems that, like Jerry Quickley's in particular, speak from an I that is so intimate and large and hurting and powerful. Poems that feel like that are being spoken even as I read them from the page.

And that might be it - that these poems are embodied. The way performance poetry, oral works, are poems that are simultaneously words and meaning as well as somatic expressions and visceral responses. Quickley's refrain: I will find myself. It becomes a different utterance when it is spoken. The very act of passing words through the mouth and the body is an act of finding oneself. A somatic engagement and the formulation of a response that is not external or distant, but intimate and bodily and connecting. You know how at really amazing performances you feel close to the performer, and I mean feel like in your chest and in your eyes opening and feeling like out of your head.

The somatic quality of these poems is the one that draws me to them so deeply, and the one that frightens me about them when I think about how to connect. My experience as a white woman with a family history of broken lineage and inherited abuse/inherited illness explain the difficulty in holding onto a steady and embodied voice and my cultural history of power, ownership, upward mobility and assumed "normality" explain the ability to write from a place of minimizing the I while not really being at risk of losing a self, socially speaking. The who in these poems aren't lost in themselves; they are particular and assertive voices that emerge from bodies that stand ground and walk and love and lose, but speak without a doubt, from bodies that in their existence demand acknowledgement of existence. This has everything to do with which bodies are politically, historically and socially valued.

So, when Quickley says, I am so devoid of human touch/ that a knee in my back/ is a blessing, and when Imani Tolliver says, you know you will be ready for a revolution/ when you are ready to eat rats, I feel a response in my limbs and in my chest, and I feel sensations like anger and grief and readiness, but I don't yet have the words for what else that response is.