I’m thankful for the feedback I’m receiving in various places from folks. I hope this means the manuscript is headed in the right direction. I have been thinking about how to incorporate “less poetic” narratives in with the more easily identifiable poetic diction, because of what I’d previously written about similar stories being told in different languages. This manuscript has been, for the most part, enjoyable. Writing poems again! Lots! Being crafty! Letting it be both intense and fun.
I also really like having the space, so many pages (and volumes) to tell these stories; I know my tendency when I was much younger was to try to be as sweeping and inclusive, to rush and cram everything — Everything! Centuries of colonialism and resistance into a single poem. And for me, that made some clunky, muddled, and didactic work. I guess at the time, I just never knew if I would be able to write another poem worth mention and performance. I also felt everything had to hit you in the face. These days, I prefer the creeping uneasiness, the lingering disturbed feeling, the images and words that won’t leave your mind, long after you’re heard or read the poem(s).
Anyway. Thanks for reading, following me through this process. I’m self-conscious that I’m talking about the work I’m doing again (those of you who don’t know me personally must get the impression I’m inflexibly single-minded), though this is better than talking about the work I mean to do later, soon, some time. So then, more excerpts:
How do you love? With sunken belly, we erupt This is a hard question – With stretch marks, we span Formerly doting, overworked, With blistered mouth, we spill I have been absent a lot, With callused knees, we give Forgetful, and with regret.
How do you love? With razorblade eyes With too much water With animal teeth We sometimes kill With splintered hands With too much life With ribcage unlocked We wither your roots
Who is your mother? She has had terrible taste in lovers – I love her, They have left her, they have beat her, I hate her, They have beat me. There are scars. I love her, For her deadbeat husbands, her children, I wish Her cousins, her maids, she spends I could be Everything, until there is nothing left. More grateful.
What is the song of your home? We bought it with winnings from keno, These are Sorrowful Mysteries – My illegitimate brothers tried to sue. The Agony in the Garden, My mother and her gambling whims; To scourge, to crown, She claimed property as the best way, To carry, and to crucify. To play as if living a Monopoly game, To bear trial, to pardon injury To boast her American Dream attained. These are Spiritual Fruits.
Again it strikes me how well the various threads of this hold together and make coherent movement. This even while there are clearly multiple voices and viewpoints moving among each other, speaking one and another in turn. Becoming a multiple dialogue, which (as I’m understanding it, though I’m not quite remembering if you’ve quite said this explicitly in the blogposts here) is clearly one of the things you’re intending in the overall work.
In one of your previous posts you mentioned that you’d heard Saul Williams is about to come out with a book titled Chorus, and you were wondering about possibly changing the title of your own book in light of that. Thinking about that just now, it occurred to me that Choruses, just making it plural, might work as well as a title. I mention this here since it apparently floated up out of the mist as I’m sitting here typing this.
What you said here about — when you were younger — having felt a tendency to try to put everything into a single poem, the history, the colonialism, the resistance, etc., brought to mind something I read once years ago in an interview with Bob Dylan. He was talking about his song “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” and he said that he wrote the song in October 1962 during the awful days of military staredown between the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union over the presence of nuclear missiles in Cuba, when much of the world was holding its breath wondering if the confrontation would go over the brink and the unforgettable fire would incinerate the world.
Dylan said that as he was writing the song, he kept having the feeling that every line he wrote might be the last one, could be the last moment of his life and of every life on earth (and during those days that wasn’t an exaggeration). So he tried to put as much into every line as he possibly could, to try to say everything in every single line.
Might not work as a general approach to writing all poems, though Dylan did write a pretty good song…