Reading Details

For Reading:
Lucille Clifton: Mulberry Fields
LLesenia Bolorin: Dear L, (From my Opening Doors Project)
5 Word Bio: They said, so I say.

When history meets the present in Clifton's work

The Mulberry fields was such a beautiful poem. I found myself reading it over and over again. Going deeper and deeper every time. I could feel myself spiraling into the graves those markers used to hold the place of. I felt myself grabbing hold of the nameless, displaced, and rising them up from the ground so that everyone will know now. Everyone can see, see the truth. Clifton does this in her poetry, she gives voice to what has passed and places significance so that it may enter our present and bring change at the very least awareness to our futures. She is very intent-ful in her poetry. In Mulberry fields I knew their was a very specific story and so I searched... I found out in Maryland there was a plantation called Mulberry fields and it holds a graveyard. A slave graveyard. These graveyards very often have no markings or name holders but this one had large rocks and stones used as markers. The stones had strange symbols and markings on them. These stones were moved from the graveyard to make a wall for the main house and suddenly the beautiful/religious/or symbolic language on the stones became nothing more than slaves "attempting to create a language". With Clifton uprooting theses fallacies she plants such deep seeds of substance and history, I can see the Mulberry Fields and those who said goodbye to their loved ones and marked them with the faith and culture that originated with them, in them, and could not be translated by those who felt slaves had nothing of those two (faith&culture). Clifton's poem are so large in concept and memory I feel her poetry exceeds the space on the page. Clifton plays with poetry and pursues a line of inquiry through her poetry. 

They thought the field was wasting

I say the stones marked an old tongue and it was called eternity

They thought, I say, this dialogue creates this binary or reinforces one that already exists. It also gives Clifton room, she can now create narrative move around her poem. Move us back and forth, between them and us, what is told what I believe, what is seen with ordinary vision and what can be seen through the eyes of something much larger.

crops refused to grow 

wild berries warm a field of bones

It's amazing how I can see these things through both lenses, the history of those who own the field of bones, and those whose bones are buried beneath the ground they themselves tilled. 

Knight and Brooks

Etheridge Knight spoke poetry in The Essential Etheridge Knight! I mean he grasps those intangible moments and blows sound into them, like the poet he references in his poem "The Sun Came", Gwendolyn Brooks. Both writers tackle an otherwise non tangible yet, a very real force of nature/nurture, the desire to know the truth, what that is, how it differs for you and I and what does it do to me if you don't believe my truth...  you can't deny wanting to physically remove the blind folds off whether it was on you or someone else, after reading these poems. My favorite line in "Truth" by Gwendolyn Brooks is also one that I think best resonates with Knight and his sessions in the shade and the light as I read it, with struggle, imprisonment, empowerment, injustice:
"A session with shade" 
- from Gwendolyn Brooks, "Truth" -->Below

And if sun comes

How shall we greet him?

Shall we not dread him,

Shall we not fear him

After so lengthy a

Session with shade?

Though we have wept for him,

Though we have prayed

All through the night-years--

What if we wake one shimmering morning to

Hear the fierce hammering

Of his firm knuckles

Hard on the door?

Shall we not shudder?--

Shall we not flee

Into the shelter, the dear thick shelter

Of the familiar

Propitious haze?

Sweet is it, sweet is it

To sleep in the coolness

Of snug unawareness.

The dark hangs heavily

 Over the eyes.

I admire the skill in these words.
In "The Sun Came" Knight is calling back his mentor's work and history at the same time.  The truth or sun, depending on which poem you're reading has come, it's out, the miracle happened and now it's gone, passed us by, came and found us not worthy, not aware, not awake...
What lay in-between is distraction and destruction.
And now the Sun has gone, has bled red,

Weeping behind the hills.
Again the night shadows form.
But beneath the placid face a storm rages.
The rays of Red have pierced the deep, have struck The core. We cannot sleep.
The shadows sing: Malcolm, Malcolm, Malcolm. The darkness ain't like before. 

Knight does this playful thing with structures, it seems a theatrical type of poetry, a moving poem. Malcolm, Malcolm, Malcolm, deep core sleep--shadows sing, all of this makes me want to perform his poetry in my family room, no one home of course. 


The Sun came, Miss Brooks.
And we goofed the whole thing.
I think.
(Though ain't no vision visited my cell.) 

This real high emotional stanza filled with despair is like one I found in Knight's "A Fable". 

And so they argued, and to this day they are still in their prison cells, their stomachs / trembling with fear. 

The telling of such large concepts, the coming of the "Truth" and the debate on how to obtain Freedom, being done in 2 or 3 phrases is an amazing work of poetry on the mind. I'm taken so many places in so little words.  

DIWATA

Diwata
There were sentences in this book I will never forget. Diwata is one of those collections that when you are all done you still need to go back to see if what you saw is really there. Could she have deconstructed all the walls literature and life has so structurally placed around us. In Diwata, Reyes claims language as her own, yields it as a sword and takes legend for herself. Genesis, meaning beginning was addressed to human kind as a way of explaining where we come from, who created us, in Diwata Genesis explains the beginning of WE of two, of relationship, of interaction, giving and receiving, loss and remorse, it redefines creation and the things that happened right after...  it was amazing that in 3 pages the beginning of something so large can be explored sufficiently. I was satisfied in a way that the Bible's Adam and Eve wasn't able to give me.
The beginning is so well explored and given to us...

-these stories I give you, I swear they are the truth.

On the seventh day, my love, I surrendered. 

Some say thunder, child of the earth, calls to lightning, child of the sky, because they are twin, split in two by their spirit father. 

Before this time, sky was high as a tent. Children poked clouds with bamboo sticks. 

This beautiful imagery is weaved into each poem, the language is a lullaby that doesn't let you sleep. Barbara Jane Reyes pokes and prods at you with her relentless visual storytelling. You can find curse words and a subtle deconstruction of American history as it has been shoved down peoples throats initially.


His arms are sturdy from hewing down many of my kin, and his body smells of the animals whose lives he takes.

As for their sons, their bodies come slipping deep into my home. Hands and feet, bound. Salvaged bodies full of soldiers' bullets.

Reyes moves the reader so far past traditional history, traditional storytelling, even traditional religion or mythology is shaken to it's core in this collection.You can find yourself soaking wet in the water imagery. Water connects the pages and allows the poet and the reader to be free in their pursuit to explore  dreams and a personal (universal) truth that sways from real to imaginary so easily you can barely decipher the difference, and maybe that's because there isn't much of one. Reyes allows for interpretation as she begins with Others say, or the old ones say, or I've heard it said.... this makes the ground the reader is on such a viable place for growth, the soil is ready for creation. You feel no restrictions on what you are about to hear, believe or resist.

Something about the water who appears as a woman before you.

In a daydream, she closes her eyes, and the warm wave pulls at her shoulders. Slowly she submerges her swollen body, and this is how my mother's womb becomes the sea.

As a reader I am provoked to dream bigger, to lose myself in the water that I am, that surrounds me, that I cannot escape. As a reader I am motivated to think large to think creatively to think freely. The way I came into this world should be poetry, should resemble the motion of water. It should tell of movement and history, emotion and nature. Our human existence should not be told in rigid constructions of the dominant story teller but a collection of stories, all flexible and fierce like the one's I found in Diwata.

Measure

• Only half a man
• used a ruler to show the tumor 
• back at half again, in this case, your chance of living
• 1 opaque streak vanishing from the transparency
• because you didn't want any measure of pity 
• 3 opaque streaks growing back into the transparency 
• 2 bites, 2 sparrows
• 1 branch
• a single pine cone falling

Measure is a beautiful poem. Following the insane measurement that takes place in the middle of tragedy. How we analyze every morsel of experience when it feels as if there is not enough. Enough left, enough to go around, we count and everything is the last and the greatest, it is what everything will be measured against. The numbers theme counts out the days after a diagnosis, one that makes his uncle half a man, 50% is where we begin. A ruler that measures a tumor also is measuring the rest of some one's life, it tells us the size of the bomb that is living under his uncle's skin. Transparencies and opaque play a beautiful part in showing the duality of life and death something transcendent that dies. Repeatedly Dempster uses the image to tell us about the tumor, opaque streaks vanish and then grow back three times worse... this is reflected on a transparency, it is clear... it is cancer.

What his uncle watches out side his window while eating his last bites of a tuna fish sandwich are 2 sparrows on 1 branch and a single pine cone falling. This nature scene brings a lot to my attention, I think of Adam and Eve (beginning stories, there are two and then a fall...) I think about  the full circle the young man who is writing about his uncle has lead us on. In the way of numbers something visually  may not seem natural, yet in ways it leads us to the most natural of things and that's measurement... how long, how much... Even when a pine cone falls to the floor it still has purpose: The condition of fallen pine cones is a crude indication of the forest floor's moisture content, which is an important indication of wildfire risk. Closed cones indicate damp conditions while open cones indicate the forest floor is dry.

This poem is all about measurement the size of a tumor, and the size of one's life effecting another. The size of a battle and the size of the will power of the person on the front line. The size of hope and the size of a life line. This poems begins and ends i think at the same place, with half a man, whether in the beginning we are talking about his uncle and in the end we are talking about the nephew, or another scenario the poem is always counting and in the end is still doing that, or observing that relationship. Its embodiment of things natural circular and infinite contrasts creatively with counting, measuring and finite. 

My favorite part (and this may be a very important part being it's the only time the title is reflected) is:
Our 1 hour tennis match, the score 6-3 because you didn't want any measure of pity
This is what's not allowed to be measured or observed by either person in the poem, no pity.
LLesenia

The Last Poets

What an amazing raw form of so many forms of music and poetry. These voices of power and revolution rap, rhyme, write like it's a weapon. They used their voices to speak for an awakening and a definite change in the course of the African American experience.

The wind you hear is the birth of memory
when the moment hatches in time's womb
there will be no art talk. The only poem
you will hear will be the spearpoint pivoted
in the punctured marrow of the villain; the
timeless native son dancing like crazy to
the retrieved rhythms of desire
fading
in-
to
memory

Last stanza from: TOWARDS A WALK IN THE SUN
by Keroapetse Kgositsile

This poem will influence the name and hearts of The Last Poets. These last stanza insights a world without poetry, "there will be no art talk". Keroapetse Kgositsile wrote the poem believing he was in the last generation where poetry was written, before poetry would be replaced by guns. The Last Poets were born on Malcolm X's birthday in 1968; they created something that wasn't poetry at least not in its original form. The beat is a new rhythm, the message much more urgent. The rage is something not seen before in this form at this time. Albums created that speak against the plight of the black man, the unforgiving, jolted message of pain and upheaval. There's nothing comfortable about this poetry.

I know we've discussed a lot about audience and it is a running debate if a poet writes for themselves or for a particular group of people or purpose. Do we care if it falls alone in the forest for no one to hear it, or if it drops into the hands of three men who then develop hundreds more that ends up inspiring a whole music genre?

Hip Hop has a history and a purpose which was to replace the gun. This artistic release provided and allowed for black rage/ human rage to be explored creatively instead of violently, it was an alternative. This may not have remained as the case, music and violence do intersect today. However, The Last Poets weren't the last, so we are progressing. As long as there is art talk we will be heading in the right direction as a species.

Najarro writes SENSEational time capsules.  Her ability to speak in the different voices to tell a number of stories is a fantastic skill. Najarro uses details as markers of place and time and even circumstance. Details that explore class, immigration, language, culture. Moments like the one of Najarro’s father selling tamales using his bicycle, takes us on a journey that resembles a family slide show. However, the unique part of this strategy is how she creates images that open a door into your own personal images. The work of Najarro has made me question my strong resolve not to pursue graduate school.
She does a great job at creating a structure for you to walk into. Najarro successfully weaves accessible scenery of rich cultures meshing together. At times these cultures or generations mentioned in her poetry collide into one another. Immigration perspectives from second and third generations are explored deeply in her poetry. 
What a joy it is to find jewels like the word hinged wrapped in between words and rhythm and meaning more than one thing.  To show the connection between the farmers the farmers children and the children who will never farm the way their ancestors did. The lineage of family and culture are the most prevalent in Najarro’s poetry.
I’m sorry this has been a hard weekend, week and semester for me. So my thoughts are more scattered than ever.

I do appreciate the way the specific poets we've been reading truly find ways to identify with a larger meaning. Poets like the one's we read in this course, those who break rules and make new ones, who bring to the surface those things we aren't supposed to talk about.

Najarro helps me distract myself from the haunting realities of my mentor’s third tango with breast cancer, the heart wrenching conversations of mastectomies, and the ugly business of the end of things.
She helps me travel back in time to the beginning.
Her words put me under a spell,
Spell reminiscing.
Without judgments only observations live on.
Only the details make it in, the things that can join a universe together in recollection.
Najarro finds my accent and returns it to me
The one I lost when my mother migrated past the comfortable stoop of Brooklyn far from the eyes of her mother in Puerto Rico far from ties and obligations and rituals.
Najarro helps me remember my voice and all the voices that live inside of me, because of me, before me.

My mentor asked me to write her poem, I said what kind, she said one that tells my story.
That's it, that's what connects us all. The need to tell, to listen, to know one's story. The details, the moments that make us and broke us. For some human reason writing down one's history is a right of passage. When we get to a point in our lives when we feel we've conquered Goliath there's this pull to tell other's about your strategy, your fear of the giant and in doing that connect to other's who wrestled with things larger than themselves.