just a thought

Poetry has become a type of reward. I do my work. I work hard and well. I maintain focus, though it is at times like pulling teeth. Becoming a critic is an interesting thing, especially considering that, as a poet, I have only ever wanted to appreciate. The effort is there. The writing is getting better, tighter. The effects can be seen in the lines. Let me say to you or to me, I mean, this is my blog, that my relationship with poetry is the most sincere, most intimate, and perhaps the most sacrificing I have ever been in. Forrest Hamer, my sweet friend and mentor, he knows well of this. Apparently, it's normal. But I'm running here. I just touch keys to say that I am smiling inside. There is a poem behind this screen and freelance articles to be revised. I am a working writer who knows well of love. It is learning to maintain it, in all of its moods and colors, that I still must learn to know better.

Lizz Wright's The Orchard gets prose poetry out the wannabe critic

Being moved by good music is like being loved by a good man. I should know. My man is love, is music. And when my man’s words love me, ain’t no sound more better, more like life. I hold my breath sometimes just to hear them, feel them, feel him better. I do the same thing when it comes to good music. Cuz ain’t nothing between me and these songs but the same kinda distance that’s between my man and me, so I hold to these songs, their words like I hold to the smell of him, like without it, I just, I just fold in on myself, curl my body around the memory of him cuz he was once in the this very space and in this very space I didn’t really curl my body around him right, enough. I just get moved by good music, by Lizz singing those sexy come-lay-with-me blues: I wanna make love to you/when the lights are low/scream to you babe/just to let you know/all I want/is just a little touch from you/just a little bit attention/you know is gonna see me through . . . . and I smile cuz I got a good man lovin me whose good lovin hands I’ll be fillin soon. I smile. I smile and I manage to keep myself together as her blues become mine and mine never mind the feelins. They get a voice so good, my lips part as the music steps out of me to sing words I can hold on to.

Podcast: Full Moon of Sonia

. . . Because I'm still on Sonia, a podcast reviewing her spoken work cd, Full Moon of Sonia. It's an amazing performance collection and a reminder that poetry, always meant to be read aloud, can, when read by the right person, jump into our ears and move our souls to better.

An article about a concert of the cd in NYC from Dec. 2004
http://reviews.aalbc.com/fullmoon.htm

An article about the cd, with track samples

http://cdbaby.com/cd/soniasanchez

Sonia Sanchez at AWP this year

Prose Is Poetry

Sonia Sanchez’s 1984 poetry collection Homegirls and Handgrenades won an American Book Award the next year, though these years aren’t especially vivid for me. I was born in ‘83. Nonetheless, I read the collection with a degree of familiarity bubbling over in my mind, leaving my cheeks damp with tears. She is telling me about myself, about my experience and the people of and in this experience, this black experience. The content of Homegirls and Handgrenades is so familiar that this year’s reprint, its first, couldn’t be more appropriate.

In 88 pages, Sanchez lays out what Langston Hughes, in his essay “The Negro and the Racial Mountain,” would call our “beautiful, and ugly too”—meaning that a black artist must be comfortable with all truths of black life. That as a people, we are both beautiful and ugly, and expressing this should not be feared or cause shame.

Sanchez’s smiling face covers Homegirls and Handgrenades. Beyond the cover is her range as a writer, displayed through poetic blues and haiku forms, free verse, and prose that is similar in sound to memoir. These literary mediums form the strong tie of the poet’s purpose; however, it is her prose that best illuminates the worlds of black love and life and the struggle to maintain the two.

Her prose is more than just words to associate with. There’s no sign that Sanchez has fallen into the all-too-common trap of being too poetic (fluff over meaning). She simply writes of people, people that have laughs and ways, have lived and have lessons. The ugly of it is how or where their living took them, and beautiful are the lessons, and joy even, in their living at all.

In the story “Just Don’t Never Give Up on Love,” Sanchez records her own vulnerability as a woman wanting to find love. She meets the 84-year-old Ms. Rosalie Johnson in a park. Ms. Johnson speaks to Sanchez about love, pretty men, and her second husband, William (she “wuz christen’ with his love”). Before the story ends, Sanchez is crying for herself and “all the women who ever stretched their bodies out anticipating civilization and finding ruins.”

It is the beautiful construction and ugly truth of lines like that one that evoke a reader’s emotions. Her word choice is exceptional and unwavering; it is the result of what many poetry professor’s see as poetry’s number one rule: No images except in things.

She addresses teenage pregnancy through “Norma,” a girl from her childhood who was the brain in especially Algebra and French. Norma “laughed only with her teeth,” but with an education full of teachers lacking control over their students, her story is just as prevalent now as it was in the '80s. Idle hands and body: Norma, mother of four.

And there’s “Bubba,” the hustler, who Sanchez believes “gave his genius up to the times.” I could only read “Bubba” once initially; his story was too real. I closed my eyes and Sanchez’s words projected him onto the backs of my eyelids—yet another young black man caught up in the hustle, planting himself on a corner of the concrete jungle just to get ahead of his world, his ugly world.

But Homegirls and Handgrenades is not without hope, another reason its reprint is timely. In “A Letter to Dr. Martin Luther King,” Sanchez’s voice as a believer in all the beauty and ugly of her people shows through as vivid as a dream in color: “It was black in the universe before the sun; it was black in the mind before we opened our eyes; it was black in the womb of our mother; black is the beginning, and if we are the beginning we will be forever.” Her prose is poetry.

"Freedom Sings" and mourns and rejoices

As a poet, I am certain that words often fail. It is a sheer love of them that keeps a poet writing--love of words, craft and purpose. Poets are people that have something to say, and what is especially a joy is when poetry is the muse for other arts. Words may fail but often only because they cannot be the only justice a purpose or a people receive.

I say this because attending "Freedom Sings" last week, I am more than proud to call myself a poet. The concert, a 2-hour exploration of banned music throughout America's history, is a call (and reminder) to action. We have a right to speak, to sing, to express--as Dudley Randall did in 1965, two years after the 16th Street Church bombing in Birmingham that killed four beautiful little black girls.

"Ballad of Birmingham": http://www.ctadams.com/dudleyrandall4.html

His poem reads as it should. Solemn. And with much importance. It was for the little girls, Addie Mae Collins (14), Cynthia Wesley (14), Denise McNair (11), and Carole Robertson (14). It is for the girls and in their remembrance. But I think it is important also to note that poetry is not an expressive medium often chosen by the masses (here I send thanks to the heavens) but music is. And if done correctly, for craft's sake, the two together are hard not to hear.

The song: http://www.balladofbirmingham.org/

Randall's "Ballad of Birmingham" was set to music in 2004 by three students at Tennessee State University. The poem is given only a piano and the voices of two women. The piano is quiet, never in the way of the interpretation and never too loud to hear and understand every word. When poetry and music occupy the same realm, affect is inevitable.

And of "Freedom Sings," well, yes it does. It also mourns and it also rejoices. God bless the souls of those little girls who maybe knew too much of their time, who wanted freedom as much as the grown folk around them. May God continue to hold them and their spirits, as well as all our fallen, in the palm of His hand. . .

Nashville Public Radio talks to the TSU students behind the song "Ballad of Birmingham": http://faculty.tnstate.edu/hmaddux/balladofbirmingham/Nashville%20Public%20Radio%20-%20Welcome.htm