oakland open mic

hi folks. the organization i work for, youth speaks, is starting a new season of under-21 open mics in both oakland in san francisco. the first one of the year is:

october 9
7pm
FREE
Oakland Art Gallery
15th & Broadway, inside the plaza


i have been to so many of these it's hard to count & they NEVER fail to surprise & inspire me. there is always a slew of young folks on the mic, many of them youth of color, & then a featured writer/poet/performer later on. you don't want to miss this, these young folks can BUST.

Family etc.

Another late ass blog ya'll, sorry.

So I had a difficult time reading and writing on this whole family thing. My sense of bloodline is very diluted at best, and the family that I know has been the one that I've created for myself, which I even hesitate to call family for all my negative connotations. My favorite poem that I read was Jannifer Traig's For My Sister in Totem. I liked it because of my own relationship with my sister, but also because there are some homo-erotic undertones and the over feel is something I could relate to. I have an older sister and I could really appreciate the progression and sense of time within this piece. The beginning being a hostile and volatile homicidal relationship:

"But the pink blob would not turn blue.
She would not die.
My tyranny had only strengthened her.
I had made her stronger than myself."
(Totems 176)

Yet, she ends the piece with a much deeper and tender love:

"I would have given it to her for nothing
for a kiss for free
we know by now
that I would do anything for her."
(Totems 177)

I could definitely relate this to family as a new concept, where relationships between familial blood alter through change and the "leave it beaver" nuclear white hetero dynamic is challenged. I feel that this poem challenges these ideas of family because of the hostility, but also because of the underlying homo'ness' of it. Not creepy incest, but the establishment of connection to her sister through physical contact and the establishment of love through a kiss. Which, I really enjoy that Traig wrote about this, I don't know why, but the context of the poem, makes kissing seem almost a way to transgress boundaries of separation. There is an adoration towards her sister for these moments.

That's all I've got for now.

sloppy posts

I hate this all of my blogs are un-profread before posted because. I am trying to get then out in time. But even more so in this post because the poem In My Father's House is to similar to my own family story and I was trying to keep distance by refering to the author as the author to stay away from assuming gender and I kept switch back to her or she.

I am really sorry that what I have contributed has been so sloppy. If a blog is the same as a one pager I am failing miserably. It just seems so different than writing a paper that is turned in. I want to maintain the freeflow of ideas or discovery but I seriously need to get it together so that you can actually read what I write. I am so embarassed that my work has been miles beneath the level of writing that you my classmates have been contributing.In the future I will get it done sooner and copy and paste it so that I can make sure its proofread and understandable. I do have dyslexia and when I am tired I atat switching stuff all over the place. So again I am so sorry. I meant to say that the word Family is too fat and heavy. Not the word only.

Is there a way to re- open your own post and correct it? If any one knows how to do that could they PLEASE pass that info along?

reading noguchi in alaska

So, I’m just gonna front with the fact that Heather already blew everything out of the water with her analysis of Noguchi’s first poem. Bam, woman. You’ve got a knack for that like whoa.


I’ve been looking at these poems while traveling this week & they’ve stuck with me, pulled at me at odd moments. I’ve read them so many times & in so many places that they’ve begun to seem like one extended narrative to me. The first three, obviously yes, but also the last two (on their own, or as a group of five). Since entering grad thesis land recently, I’ve begun thinking a lot about the shape of a book and how one constructs a book to stand on each of its individual poem-legs, but also to be able to move together as one larger animal. I was thinking about this while reading these poems; poems that Noguchi has definitely linked, but perhaps had little organizational control over in the instance of this (or any) anthology. It got me wondering about how flexible our work must be & yet how steadfast. I feel like I could spend a lifetime trying to master that balance on the page.


Back to the poems, themselves. When I read these first three poems, I see continuity physically, like a string to which each poem is clipped. They are pieces of laundry, sheets perhaps, pinned with precision to the line. Flapping in slow motion. Every time Noguchi tosses verbs around, I feel as if we are floating, dream-like, through the action. Kenji flexing his knees, diving deep into the couch cushions. I think a lot of this has to do with the veil that Heather is referencing in her post of this first poem, but also with the fact that Kenji seems to be occupying a very malleable space between young & grown. You can feel the bulge of innocence here, Noguchi makes it so full and rubbery you can practically touch Kenji’s imagination juxtaposed against the flexed nature of his body, bothered by responsibility. The line that this first poem is clipped to contains hyperbolic forces of nature that only a young boy crashing head-first into the discipline of accountability could reveal.


In the second poem, “From Rooftops, Kenji Takezo Throws Himself,” we get a better sense of this imagination, as if the poem titles are the boy’s own third-person narrator introducing his next daring act. There is less figurative curvature here and more subject-related roundness. Noguchi lets us see how Kenji has internalized the rotundity of his mind’s eye & it is his body that bounces, not the entire scene. His heart, his breath, all of these physical exchanges becomes parts of himself that he can own & learns how to own. Obviously, he’s still talking about wanting to be a surfer, but there is a shift between the first poem and the second that indicates more knowing, less hyperbole. Noguchi makes sure, especially in that last stanza, that we notice Kenji hasn’t lost any of his youthful passion, but the language has strengthened in ways that invoke confidence.


In the third poem, “The Ocean Inside Him,” I think we’ve hit transformation. Just as the poems have shortened in length, they have also tightened in control. We get to this poem and suddenly we’re not talking about waves anymore, we’re talking about all kinds of wave-like emotions. Noguchi sets us off early with the word “whitewash” in the second line, then let’s us gloss over lines like “the heavy life of the ocean,” and “it wasn’t funny, but he giggled.” Outside forces have invaded the bubble-like bliss of those earlier moments with the ironing board and I guess what I’m wondering is where is the rest of the laundry?

Family

The word only is fat and heavy to me. I thought it was interesting that so many poems in this section had numbered parts. Like, Easter:Wahiawa,1959, In My Father's House, Joshua Clark, etc. I wonder about this I don't know if it is because there is some technical poetry term for breaking a poem up in this way. I am sure there is a name for it. But I don't know it. So if any one can help me out. But, It made me think of how family is connected through the generations and chapters of lives and how family and all that the means is far to big to be contained in one poem with out chapters. I also like the idea that with chapters of family there will always be a sequel or the continuing saga. Even if a family is completely annihilated physical it continues as an entire movement that had marked the universe.

Sapphire, In My Father's House: Chapter 1. What struck me first is the use of lower case Until the use of I names, and quotes. I want to think the author took something back making the mother and father small, lower cased. The use of quotations, " She never wanted children", he explained. How the author shows the continued cycle of violence and the excuses of " barbed wire around wind." The brutal description used to expressed the rage and admission of coming so close to making the same choice of the father; attacking the weak and defenseless in the passage about the cat. The intense description ," beat skin, teeth, skull with my fists," and the couragous ownership and guilt regarding what she was about to do. The line " something stopped me."just cut deeper pronouning her shame for coming so close to switching from victim to abuser. The author makes no excuses, taking ownership of their own actions before revealing and using her father as an abuse as an
exuse.
How it changes to abstract description the words we use to distance herself from the memories that are chasing her. She dissapears in this paragraph exactly like she " disapeared 35 years ago."
Chapter 2.: how the phrases get small like the author , not expository as small as the the author that was raped.


Its too late and too hard I have to finish this when I wake up

"Homage" as defined by Merriam-Webster is the "expression of high regard". I found this to be an interesting definition in the context of this week's topic. Though this expression may not be as dangerous as we think, it often times does not come in as unguided of a manner as we may expect or anticipate. The two poets assigned from Inclined this week mirror this dichotomy. Through each of Hamza's pieces in Inclined, the reader gets a strong sense of struggle and rebellion against the traditional family on behalf of the narrator. Majaj, on the other hand, conveys a strong sense of deep-seated, long-living respect and admiration for her family. These striking differences can be detected in the the structure of the poetry as well as the language employed by the authors. Hamza, for instance, makes use of prose rather than the typical structured form of poetry. She uses no strategic line breaks to emphasize her poetry, but rather allows the lack of structure to represent a stream-of-consciousness, real-time feel to her work. In "On Eating", she writes:

We gathered around the dinner tables, my three brothers, mother, father, and me. My father cooked steak and potatoes that evening. I knew they didn't expect me to eat because for almost a year, I had stopped.

The writing is terse, unadulterated, & effective. She makes no attempt to sugar-coat or direct the reader's progression of thought. In doing so, she opens her writing up to a multiplicity of interpretations. She states the facts and leaves the conclusion an open-ended question. At the end of "On Eating" she finishes

After chewing the tenth bite, I went to the bathroom, stuck two fingers deep inside my throat, and threw up my meal. This is how I started eating again. It took a while to learn how to keep things inside.

Though superficially the narrator has nothing more than an eating disorder being addressed in the poem, the reader is left with the sensation of something deeper happening. The dynamic of the family and the eating situation causes me to see the struggle that proceeded the narrator's eventual acceptance of her family's support, traditions, and love. Through the metaphor of bulimia, the narrator illustrates her own inability to accept what her family had to offer her. The homage that she eventually experienced (as is alluded to by the line "It took a while to learn how to keep things inside") did not come easily.

The poetry by Majaj conveys a starkly different situation. Through each piece the reader picks up a strong sense of familial affection and appreciation. The narrator is constantly referring to her father's hands, his "counseled patience", and her undeniable ties (physically and emotionally) to her family. This strong familial association is not flawless (as demonstrated in the piece "Arguments"), but such events do not taint the overall feeling of her work. The pieces "In Season" and "I remember My Father's Hands" struck me the most. The imagery and adjectives that the narrators selects conjure up ideas of admiration and genuine affection. In "In Season" Majaj writes

He counseled patience,
though, dying, refused his own

advice. Today his words surround me
with the quiet intensity

of growing things, roots planted a long time ago
lacing the distances of my heart


Furthermore, Majaj writes in "I Remember My Father's Hands"

because when I look at my hands
his own speak

The contrast in the development of admiration and respect for the familial unit is especially interesting between these two poets.


-e. gutilla

If there is one thing that everyone can understand and relate to: It's family. We all have that crazy aunt, uncle, grandparent that reminds us everyday how dysfunctional our family is. But we also understand our parents. We also see the little things, from childhood to adulthood, we understand the people we love, and we understand the people who have lived and grown with us. That is family.
In Diane Di Prima's April Fool Birthday Poem for Grandpa, it talks about her Italian grandpa and thanking him for her growth, for what he taught her. Being Italian myself I understand the grandpa's passion for things, and the way he portrays his honesty. My Italian Grandparents passed away before I was born, but in this poem, I see a lot of what the grandpa teaches in my dad, and in my mother. This quote grabbed me, and reminded me of my childhood:

thank you
for honestly weeping in time to
innumerable heartbreaking
italian operas for
pulling my hair when I
pulled the leaves off the trees so I'd
know how it feels.

These lessons, are hard ones to learn without someone. Even the line: weeping in time to innumerable heartbreaking italian operas, it makes me feel like it is a lesson in passion and appreciation of human ability. Yet this all draws me within the poem to the place, this woman is speaking from the Bronx, which just in name, is conjured up to be a place with a hell of a bad rap. However, looking closer to the language she uses when ever it come up, it makes it sound beautiful. Not only does she describe the bronx as beautiful, she draws the picture of her grandpa being beautiful as well, I can't help but find a correlation between the two. When she is thanking her grandpa, it's almost like thanking him for making her world, the place that she is a better place, and we see that in the language that she uses.

I embrace
strangers in the street, filled with their love and
mine, the love you told us had to come or we
die, told them all in that bronx park, me listening
spring Bronx dust.

She then calls upon writers, philosophers, revolutionaries, immigrants, starting off all italian, then russian, then german, then french, saying "we'll do it for you." She mentions: Dante, Giordano Bruno, Carlo Tresca, Saco and Vanzetti ( Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Niccola Sacco)... on and on, mentioning these great minds. I can't help but think she is adding her grandfather into this mix. As a young child we see the ones who raise us as a just a step below god, they have all the answers and all the lessons to give. She ends the poem, after acknowledging all of these people who have come before them, all foreigners, whom the grandpa speaks of, (thunder your anarchist wisdom at us,) she ends, when saying: we will do it for them, she ends:

We do it for the stars over the Bronx
that they may look on earth
and not be ashamed.

I think this ties in very tightly with place, and people. She's trying to speak of the Bronx in an uplifting and beautiful fashion, as well as revolution, and embracing other people. This is a story of someone thanking their grandfather for teaching them to love, and embrace everything. This may seem corny, or too inconclusive, but what other, more wholesome conclusion can I arrive at? Revolution is love spelled backwards after all.


Bluey aka. Michaela C Ellis

Rick Noguchi’s poems impressed me greatly, both for their clarity of scene and narrative and for their unique subject matter and humor. The poems, particularly, “The Shirt His Father Wore That Day Was Wrinkled, Slightly,” also exhibit a fine attention to word choice that suits the poem’s intent and helps to propel the narrative forward. The poem is written in the present tense which gives us a feeling of immediacy when reading the work. We see Kenji at the very moment of his actions, feel the intensity of his daydreams. We also more effectively experience his mother’s alarm at finding her favorite ironing board destroyed. Noguchi chooses words that have to do with water, the Pacific, the act of surfing. Such words as crest, pitch, purls, diving, surfaces, and others are used to reinforce the oceanic terminology of the piece. But they also serve a larger purpose than just an evocation of the ocean and a reinforcement of the action in the poem. They also draw our attention to the deeper meaning of the poem, which has to do with the imprisonment felt by perceptions and expectations and a breaking of the standard to which one feels himself or herself held.

Japanese culture has historically paid an inordinate amount of time and energy on appearances. In the past, it was not unheard of for Japanese citizens to hire strangers to mourn at their loved ones’ funerals in order to make them appear more important than they actually were. Several years ago, Harper’s Magazine reported that sales of an artificial hymen were experiencing growing popularity in Japan where betrothed women wanted their new husbands to believe they had never been sexually active. And today, a company called Office Agents hires out guests to couples who are worried that their weddings may not be as well-attended as they would like. Those who are unemployed may hire stand-ins for a boss and co-workers for jobs that are, in actuality, non-existent. What does this have to do with Noguchi’s poem? The answer, I believe, comes in the statement, “His father needs/A shirt to impress/The same co-workers/ He sees daily.” Seen in this light, a reader can begin to understand how important appearance is in the underlying meaning of the poem. Mother tries her best to keep up the code she is used to by ironing on the broken ironing board on her hands and knees. We then return to the title where we see how important the shirt is to the poem. In the title, we are not told that Kenji wants to be a surfer, nor are we alerted to the ironing board’s place in the poem. Rather, we see that the two most important elements of the poem, Father and the shirt he wore, are peripheral to the action of the poem, yet central to the meaning. This is mirrored by the first three lines in which Kenji is transported out of his own body, watching himself perform an impetuous action. 

 It is a stunt
 Kenji Takezo finds himself
 Performing unexpectedly

See how the poet pulls the reader into Kenji’s body and then immediately back out again to watch the action? See how Noguchi pulls the shirt and the father out of the poem and inserts them peripherally, only alluding to their importance? We should not be fooled into only looking at the surface actions of this piece. When Kenji himself surfaces after his stunt (When he surfaces, / Her expression is one/ He has never seen) we must also surface. The fact that there is a surface in this poem forces us to look beneath. It is not only the ironing board that breaks, it is also the cracking of a perception that neither mother nor father wants to let go of. The imagery and wording in the third stanza parallel the prison expectations can make for us. Notice how the waves of the ocean “pitch over and enclose” Kenji. Behold how Kenji is in the “chamber” and how “the walls close in.” Other words such as escape, collapsing, and silent also evoke the feeling of claustrophobia and imprisonment. Also, it is not only the ironing board that is breaking, it is the father’s image that is threatened, the breaking of a code, a desire. 

Noguchi also cautions us not to put too much emphasis either on the surface story or other people’s perceptions of us. Just as the ironing board can not hold all of Kenji’s weight, neither can the poem. “Too much weight in front,” is a cautionary line that warns us how frail the perceptions and viewpoints of others can be. The ironing board is the objective correlative for self-image. How mother handles the breaking of her ironing board says something also about her character. One gets the feeling that she will continue trying to live up to the standards to which the outside world holds her. The foreshadowing of Kenji’s incident and the title in which the shirt is still “slightly wrinkled” seems to indicate that she will not be entirely successful. Perhaps she, too, will be overcome by that wave?

Sitting With Family

The word “family” is one of the words that I call HUGE. I mean it can denote so many things for one person and the definition can shift as we learn, grow, and mature. In my opinion, it is a word that must be broken down into pieces and shattered in order for people to understand it. That’s what the poets in this set of readings did, they broke the traditional idea of “family” into specific pieces and gave us images and narratives to connect with.

In Noguchi’s first poem, “The Shirt His Father Wore That Day…” he tells a story through extended metaphor about Kenji and his imaginary stunts as a surfer.

It is a stunt

Kenji Takezo finds himself

Performing unexpectedly.

The poem takes us through this stunt blow-by-blow and ends with Kenji’s mother ironing on her hands and knees – doing the domestic work that she does to insure that her husband’s shirts are pressed for work.

His mother on her knees

Tries to iron on the ruined table

Anyway.

I found this image the most powerful in the poem. I’ve seen mothers who do what must be done to do what must be done. They improvise.

The image we get of the father might be seen as negative – someone who cares what others think or someone who goes out of his way to impress the people he sees everyday, but could also be read as simply a snapshot of the father –a man who wears a pressed shirt to work daily. Either way, Noguchi is pointing to the shattered pieces of his idea of family to give us a closer look:

His father needs

A shirt to impress

The same co-workers

He see daily.

I appreciate how the poet brings us back to the surfing image at the end by including the mother in his metaphor. He says, In this posture, his mother’s movements / Remind Kenji of a surfer / Waxing the board she will ride.

Also, I appreciate the images of water and surfing throughout the piece: The rhythm of the Pacific in his feet (1:4), Counterbalancing the instability / Of water (2:5,6), The crest of a wave / Pitch over and enclose him (3:2,3)

Then in stanza four, the metaphor starts to blend with Kenji’s reality. The ironing table floats / the small boy / only for a moment / Too much weight in front, it purls / Nose-first, into thick / Brown shag. This gives us a small window into the home.

Another poet who touched my sense of family was Sapphire. In the poem, In My Father’s House, she takes us deep inside a family and shows us several shards that, by the end of the poem, create a powerful portrait of a journey from childhood to adult status. Immediately we are introduced to the father who “shot to his feet as The Star-Spangled Banner hailed the network’s last gleaming.”

She uses dialogue and details to guide us on this trip and does not attempt to sugar coat the moments for us. I liked the raw language and imagery. The fifth stanza is so overwhelming in both the images and the sadness I felt reading this scene. The verbs she uses really make this scene stick (cat sprang / claws gouging / I snatched / slammed / beat skin, teeth, skull with my fists / tied its legs / yanked its tail). WHOA!!! The quickness of the lines and the fact that you can’t really pause through it can only offer a sliver of what the speaker must have been feeling, yet I left this stanza with a racing heart and shortened breath.

The obvious abuse being discussed in this piece is gut wrenching, but when she mentions the bombing of the MOVE organization (families, that makes this piece a Personal As Political statement. Sapphire does not spend time on this political commentary, but mentions several other moments in black history where those in power abused their power and the results were traumatic (and in two cases, affected children).

All this and it’s only the first movement of the poem.

The other four movements share qualities with the first and all have the common thread of family through them. I loved seeing the intersections across (and through) each movement. Of the 81 poems we read for this section, this is one I will come back to and spend time with on my own because there are so many layers of family to uncover and discover.

peacelovelight

Kiala

Response to Richard Blanco

Reading this week’s poetry I kept wondering what family meant to the speaker and how he or she define family. For different people family can be and mean different things—family can be close friends, a wider community one is a part of, pets, and intermediate family. I think Richard Blanco’s poetry does a great job at showing the ambiguity of what family is or what it means for the speaker.

One of my favorite pieces was “Mexican Almuerzo in New England” because it tells a tall a mother and son relationship, particularly one who is of Latino/a decent. I looked up the word Almuerzo because I was not sure what the word meant in Spanish, so it translates to “Mexican [Lunch] in New England.”

On the surface the poem is about a mother who is visiting her son (Alfredo) in New England and preparing a traditional Mexican dinner for him. However, if one digs deeper into the piece we can perhaps see that it is a piece about the Mexican culture and the strangeness of making home away home. The speaker does a beautiful job at doing that through imagery of traditional Mexican customs.

Dish by dish she tries to recreate Mexico in her son’s New England Kitchen, taste-testing el mole from the pot, stirring everything: el chorizo-con-papas, el picadillo, el guacamole….As we eat, she apologizes: not as good as at home, pero bueno…it is the best I can do in this strange kitchen which Sele has tried to disguise with papel picadi banners of colored tissue, paper displaying our names in pinata pink, maiz yellow, and Guadalupe green.

This quotation reminded me of the times when my mom and aunts got together in the kitchen to cook for big family events, particularlymy grandma’s birthday. They would try to “re-create” their mother’s traditional Mexican recipes, but could never make it taste the same, and they ould try to decorate the house in traditional Mexican colors, so my grandmother would feel at home.


And in the quote above that is exactly what the mother (Marina) is trying to do for her son—to bring a little of her home (Mexico) to his home in New England. I find it interesting that Sele (who I assume may be the sons wife) decorated the kitchen in with items that seem as if they would be considered Mexican: “disguise with papel picadi banners of colored tissue, paper displaying our names in pinata pink, maiz yellow, and Guadalupe green. I find it interesting because it almost seems as if Sele is trying to embrace the Mexican culture when she herself may not be of Mexican decent.


I love how the poem reads, it is like a narrative, and the combination of Spanish and English works for me. In a way it shows two cultures interconnecting the sons westernized culture and the mother's mexican culture.


I also love the last line of the poem:

Home is a forgotten recipe, a spice we can find nowhere, a taste we can never reproduce.

I like this line a lot because it reminds me of the stories my mother use to tell me of when she first came to the U.S from Mexico. She would always say that California was her home, but it would never compare to the time when she was living in Guladajara. She also said that moving here, made her lose a sense of her culture because life in the U.S was different, and in a way the quote above seems to be indicating a nostalgic feeling of home and never being able to recreate it 100%.

This was by far my favorite poem because I was able to relate to it in many ways!

-Lizzie Chaidez

Family Not of Blood

There are poems in these sections that explicitly talk about family relations with parents, children, siblings, etc. but there are also many that do not make any reference to specific family relations. At first I was ready to ignore those and focus on the others but a few of them felt very powerful and still connected to the idea of family and so I started to think about the fluidity and personal nature of the definition of family. The western ideal of family that's shoved down our throats is the whole - 2 parents (one male, one female), 2.5 kids, a dog and a picket fence. But then I thought about the confluences between family and racial identity, placing that in the context of colonialism and the disruption of a traditional family support system. And when I say traditional I'm not referring to the western idea listed above but to whatever family dynamic was the structure for that particular culture and to focus in even more for that particular family. The acts of violence and oppression that accompany colonialism lead to loss of beloved family members through death; separation through slavery and indenture; and criminalizing acts of celebration that reinforce the bonds of the oppressed culture. So what does family start to mean when family can be taken away at a moments notice?

I think it leads to a more flexible definition of family, one which includes many people not at all related by blood. And it's an ideal that still continues today in many forms, personally growing up I had plenty of uncles, aunts, cousins and even a sister that I had absolutely no blood relation to. Sometimes they were people that had grown up with my mother and their children or people I met on my own and formed a connection with. And I know plenty of folks who have "play"cousins so I've always thought of family in terms of emotional connection as opposed to a commonality on the genetic level. This more diffuse idea of family can allow for a larger support system with more diversity for reliance in times of problems, one that can survive the removal of members of that system more easily because there are still plenty of people to rely on still around.

Anyway, one of the poems that triggered all of this was Richard Blanco's "What Is Not Mine". There are levels of separation in the poem itself, a separation from where the narrator was, what is his; a temporary separation from the person who leaves the note; a possibly more permanent one between the two coming; a separation between the narrator and the space he occupies with mounting levels of discomfort. The narrator, the poem, begins to feel adrift, without anchor or tether, without a support system. Something chased him from his home and to this other place where he's found refuge for two days but now he awakes to find the support gone. The language of the note left to him, in fact the first four lines hint at a strong between the narrator and the person at whose place he's staying.

I wake to find you've left, and left a note: Please
wait for me, I'll be right back scribbled over the seal
of an envelope with your key, just in case I want
to leave your home that I've borrowed two days.

The isolation of the Please points to the importance of that word, severed from the rest of the note makes it seem like a plea that trails off into oblivion before to poem returns with the rest of the note that now seems more casual because of that very disconnect. The note calls for a continuation of whatever intimacy/connection the two of them have formed, an invitation for more support if necessary. The fact that the note is scribbled on a envelope that contains the key to the place where they've been holed up speaks to a knowledge of the narrator. The writer of the note is asking (pleading?) for the narrator to stay but with the key to the place the writer admits that they know that the narrator will not stay, will not choose to wait, will instead return to whatever he was running from in the first place. But a key isn't generally required to leave someone's house, most of the time there's a way to secure at least one lock behind yourself without any key. So the key means more than knowledge it's also an invitation to return, an acknowledgment that the support, the consoling, the comfort that was sought in this space is still available. At any time the narrator may choose to return to seek this place again.

For me those four lines form the core of the poem and really connect to a more complex idea of family, one where what is exchanged in the relationship is more important than any connection on a genetic level.

-Naamen

Richard Blanco is the quintessential example of a poet paying homage to his family. His collection of poems begin about the speaker's mother who brought him into the world and end with the speaker contemplating his role in the world. The speaker's mother is respected and is regarded highly: as the queen of picking fruits in "Mother Picking Produce." Although the title is kind of superficial, Blanco reveals to the readers, not so superficial details:
I see all the folklore of your childhood, the fields.
the fruit she once picked from the very tree,
the wiry roots she pulled out of the very ground.

As his mother "moves with same instinct and skill" when she was a child, the mother's youthfulness and playful personality jumps out at the reader. The speaker chooses descriptive words, like describing his mother fingers as "slender digits" to pull the roots of her being even deeper into the poem. And Just as Blanco's father did not teach him how to shave in "Shaving", his mother does not outright share with her son, this special connection she has with the produce:
Scratches the oranges then smells the peel,
presses an avocado just enough to judge its ripeness,
polishes the Macintoshes searching for bruises.
But Blanco takes note: "and what I think is this,a new poem about her-"

Most of his poems make the reader hungry, inspired, sad and happy. I pictured pouring mouthfuls of his words into my lap, as to save them for later when I wrote my poems about my mom and dad. So, yes Blanco's poems are personal and resonant with my culture. But, nonetheless, the connection of a mother figure is significant to every writer.

"Ballade of a Boy" is written in ballad form. A ballad is a poem that tells a story with clear conflict, tension buildup and a satisfying resolution. As far as a satisfying resolution Urayoán Noel writes about a family member that he saw "one last time by the porch screen." The speaker writes from a place of in-between. Perhaps, it is about a family member who migrates back and forth from Mexico.
Lara Hamza's poems are eerie and brave. They are brave because she reveals the darker side of a family's secrets and shame. In the poem "On Eating" she chews the steak her father cooked: "I cut it into ten tiny pieces...I chewed slowly, counting to twenty-five each time. Then "I went to the bathroom, stuck two fin-
gers deep inside my throat, and threw up my meal. This is how I started
eating again. It took a while to learn how to keep things inside."
The word fingers is separated to pronounce the piece's visual of two fingers inside her throat. This is fascinating to witness on the page.

The father is the one who cooked the steak, not the mother.
This may suggest that in some way the family, although "gathered around the dinner table" sounds very happy and put together, the speaker follows with"
"I knew they didn't expect me to eat because for almost a year, I had stopped."
The father says, don't worry as if to assure not only his wife but it seems that he has been saying that about their daughter over the years. This poem is an example of a family that struggles with self-abuse, depression and hate towards one's body.


~Melissa

Wow.....................................Wild Thing by Sapphire just blew my mind. In this week's discussion of homage and family, this poem slightly confuses you on who he can pay his respects to. It reminds me of a typical psycho serial rapist killer story that we see in almost every reality cop television show. How a kid from the ghetto is initially fascinated by what is portrayed in the media: fast cars, shiny jewelry, and over-sexual females, and the media becomes his primary source of information. His mother isn't modeling good parenting or behavioral skills, instead she puts him off as a mentally challenged child just to collect extra money from the government. So the boy goes go to be negatively influenced more than ever by his peers AND the media as he turns of teenage age. The one thing that stuck out to me in this poem was the normalcy to rape. There have been many studies on how young boys if not raised with the proper respect to women, or positive role models of women, will exploit them in their lifetime. Sometimes I don't think that people consider the urgency and significance to this problem. Family as defined by dictionary.com is parents and their children; considered as a group, whether dwelling together or not. What I don't understand is when did the word FAMILY become something that should not be defined as loving, caring, responsible, charitible, or irreplaceable? I have always believed in the quote "It takes a village to raise a child" and I continue to stand by that. When a child does not have structure, s/he goes on in life not knowing how to make responsible positive decisions, or given the ability to know that there are not only two side to a story but several. . . two lines that caught my eye I EITHER WANNA BE A COP/ OR THE BIGGEST DOPE DEALER IN HARLEM. If someone states that those are the only two careers they would be looking forward to something is very wrong with our judicial system and economy in general. How can someone compare a cop to a drug dealer? I perceive this situation as a child viewing a cop as someone that can always push around a drug dealer, or be the drugs dealer's boss, due to their beig such a large population of dirty cops. If a child views these two occupations on the same playing field then what more can one say that a child may have respect to the law? NONE! . . . the last most interesting piece of the poem is towards the end. (The end of poems always rap it up for me) UGLY BIG NOSE WHITE BITCH/ BUT SHE'S BEAUTIFUL CAUSE SHE'S WHITE/ SHE'S BEAUTIFUL CAUSE SHE'S SKINNY/ SHE'S BEAUTIFUL CAUSE SHE'S GONNA DIE/ CAUSE HER DADDY'S GONNA CRY/ BITCH!....the anger instilled in these lines are astronomical. The fact that the boy views a white woman as beautiful just because she is white is problem within itself. This poem portrays as I said before how many young men of color grow up in today's society. There is an underrepresentation of positive females of color in the media, magazines, cartoons, reality shows, corporations, and so on. This poem incorporates a lifestyle that someone can immediately identify as being raised in the United States. The line SHE'S BEAUTIFUL CAUSE SHE'S GONNA DIE, is all about power and degradation of women, the lesser sex. If we are not able to speak our minds, have input on democracy and government, be financially secure, or comfortable with our bodies with no alterations, not being able to do those things are seen as beautiful, because not being able gives someone else power. If you have the upper hand in society and your counterparts don't you are strongly encouraged to see that as beautiful because it gives you POWER. So all in all this poem executed a great perspective on power, sterotypes, and reality. . .
-Dorothy

Sapphire to Suhair: Poetry on Family and Home

In the poem “In My Father’s House” Sapphire takes her insides and turns them inside out. The piece is brave and confessional. In describing her shock of violence toward another living being as an adult, she is reminded of what has been done to her by her father as a girl. The four vignettes or stories capture the pain of her childhood growing up in an abusive, patriarchal family. In the first vignette she describes how this cycle of abuse was passed on by her father’s father when she says,

“he told me his father put his foot on his neck

& beat him until his nose bled.

he left home when he was 14,

an Aries full of blind light

trying to wrap barbed wire around the wind.”

On a lighter note, I enjoyed the nostalgic, richly descriptive poems “Chilo’s Daughters Sing for Me in Cuba” and “Mexican Almuerzo in New England” by Richard Blanco in The Wind Shifts. I recently wrote a poem in a similar block style format and felt it allowed me to have a free verse in a new way. I also found it interesting that out of all of Blanco’s poems the ones that resonated the most with me were written in this way. In both these poems he is a master at using food to describe all the senses and bring the reader into his world. What I appreciate the most from “Chilo’s Daughters Sing for Me in Cuba” is Blanco’s repetition of the word “They” which gives precedence to the people he describes in Cuba who after preparing a plentiful meal begin singing in praise and gratitude for the food, history, family, and land.

In “Mexican Almuerzo in New England” Blanco paints a beautiful homage to a woman named Marina in color, scent, texture, temperature and taste. She creates “home” in a foreign place for her son, through cooking and special decorations like papel picado. Blanco writes,

“It is the best she can do in this strange kitchen which

Sele has tried to disguise with papel picado colored tissue

paper displaying our names in pinata pink, maiz yellow, and Guadalupe

green....”

These poems are very personal, nostalgic, sensual and hold cultural significance and perseverance specific to Indian and mestizo culture that I can fully relate to.

From Inclined to Speak Lisa Suhair Majaj’s poem “I remember My Father’s Hands” quietly shows another intimate kinship, but focusing on the relationship of a Palestinian father and daughter as told through the memory of a father’s hands. It was amazing how Majaj shared vivid glimpses of stories in such few words. In these nine couplets as reader we experience spirituality, death, work, childhood, love, and heritage. The rhythm held nicely together through her repetition of the word “because,” beginning each couplet.

What ties all these pieces together here is evident, family. For the good or the bad these relations have strong influence in our lives and in poetry evoke a multitude of experiences and emotions. In telling we can also often further our own personal development.

Ooo goodie, a new book! Whoa, wow. Raw new book. Aloud says New York City don't play. The Lower East Side ain't nothin to sniff at, no sugar to coat shit 'round here. There is, however, beauty. In honesty insistent on survival, deliverance from invisibility, reprieve from pain. The Nuyorican Poets Cafe seems a stage for many stories, united in determination to find voice. Poetry is greater for the effort. The family is stronger.

The two poets assigned this week grew from starkly different familial experience. Reading these poems we are forced to acknowledge the spectrum of meaning in "family." In doing so we have to ponder the source of the bond, however warped or adorned. I surely do not have an answer. It is striking that the same word applies to a connection that defies death as well as what requires death for re-connection.

Sapphire's poem, "In My Father's House," sneaks up on you burns itself behind your eyes. Ever after, you will see a face every time you look on violence. You can not be apathetic to the weight people walk around with; masks are stripped. The poem demands compassion, and not pity, for the tied-on but unknown, the secret pain. She begins the poem "together alone," giving a clue to the framework of the story that's coming, though not the depth of the pain she will reveal. With those two words, we know things are not well at home. But like many homes, which are perfect? She tricks us into camaraderie.

She presents her father's living room with the outsider's view. We enter the poem in the way the father wants to be seen - prideful, patriotic, maybe even honorable, as he stands to salute the flag. They are connected only by proximity in this stanza, though a tenderness (and maybe habit?) from the daughter/narrator/poet comes through as she calls him, "Daddy." We may be used to the stories of father's disappearing; in Sapphire's poem, the mother does. Here we think we've found the weakness, the reason for dysfunction, because the family scatters after her. "We rolled loose to corners of the room."

She begins an interesting play with language at this point in the poem. Here, and at three more points, the language shifts from concrete, physical, present, to pure metaphor. From the physical scene presented in the first stanza and a half, she shifts to, "buttoned in cold; bones of children knitting shadows in the dark." Sharp difference in word choice, tone, presentation. It startled me at first, thought maybe it was a fluke. Then in a few lines she switched back: "he told me his father put his foot on his neck." She's back to metaphor by, "Aries full of blind light," then back to physical by the time she describes her father fashioning a rubber hose weapon to beat her with. These shifts happen in the space of nine lines. The shifts are mental, representing the inner world of an abused poet fighting for recognition among physical truth and facade. A fissure in personality, a branching, the compartmentalizing the mind employs to survive.

The rest of poem 1 in the series is heavy. More heavy than I'd like to repeat. Maybe that's cowardice, but I'm not afraid to admit it. Those two tough stanzas do better than anything I can think of to relate expressions of violence, how it travels through a person, the different forms it can take. How children are often subjects of their parents, and how deeply violence is implanted for children who are subject to it. Family is a power structure, with children at the bottom. No matter how this structure and the beings in it are abused, children retain a longing for affection they do not receive. How do they know? What is this bond that, even when dishonored, still sings?

Once the secret is told, metaphor sinks to the background, becomes the framework of the poem rather than the siding. The poet stays within concrete language and physical imagery throughout the rest of the series. Perhaps the fissure is healed once she has remembered, written it down, spoken. Gave up the pain to the power of the stage, removing the power of the secret.

She doesn't stop speaking about family though. She stays with the examination of the nonsensical bond, shows the damage it has undergone, and yet it remains. After revealing that her father has raped her (hard to believe it can be said in more horrific fashion), she shows the complications of familial bond in her endearment of her father: "send me / some avocadoes / from the tree, Daddy." Stark exposure on the backdrop of so much pain. This thing that is family is not easily broken, even when it is broken. At the end of 4, she "disappeared, / like the truth / like the tree." This seems so different from the girl who beats a cat in the first poem, not knowing where the rage comes from. She is not subjugated, she is violator. But here too is the complication of family, the battling undercurrents of reciprocity and recognition inseparable as drops of wave.

From the roots

I thought it was great how some of the poets paid homage to their families as helping them become writers. How you grow up is really important to the things you value as you get older and it seemed to me that despite the problems or family issues that were expressed in these poems the poets came out with a love of writing and literature. I really enjoyed how this was presented in Garrett Hongo's Winnings.

Essentially this is just a poem about a day in a cycle of days. As I read this poem, I really got the sense that Hongo spent every Saturday afternoon "near closing time/ at the thrift store". There is a keen awareness of this everyday mundane moment: “ The register rings up its sales—$2.95, /$11.24, 26.48 for the reclaimed Frigidaire-- /and a girl…begging a few nickels for the gumball machine.” (T 132) To me this seems like something you could see essentially anywhere. The only things that distinguish it are the prices and the fact that someone purchased specifically a Frigidaire. It is this lack of description that really allows the reader to see what’s important.

What really makes this a particularly special moment is the feeling of love and happiness that comes in the second to last stanza:

“My father comes in from the Rainbow
across the street, ten hands of Jacks
or Better, five draw, a winner
with a few dollars to peel away
from grocery money and money to fix
the washer, a dollar for me to buy
four pounds of Pocket Wisdoms, Bantams,
a Dell that says Walt Whitman, Poet
of the Open Road, and hands it to me,
saying ‘We won, Boy-san! We won!’
as the final blast of sunset kicks through”

There is such ambivalence to the money won and how it was won and a real emphasis on the books that were going to be purchased. The specific titles are used here when we haven’t had any real detail up until this moment. The store is unnamed, there is no discussion of the other people in it, except the little girl, and generally, our minds are drawn to these details. We can see that the books are the most important to him. So despite the fact that this situation is in no way good for a child, after all his father leaves him to go gamble, there is still hope to be found for him in this literature and he can look past it. And use it as inspiration for the next poem.

It was interesting to me how much I really connected with a lot of the family experiences in what we read. Family is always a moment of connection for people and I always think that's kind of strange. Every family is different and has it’s own level of happiness but somehow we can all connect over family memories. In college my friends and I would always some how end up talking about punishments when we were younger. Some would say, “My mom used to use a wooden spoon…” and then it’s all over because we have to have an hour to go over how we were disciplined and then another hour to go into how we’re going to tramatize our children. Lol.

Sorry my entry is a little shorter than usual….one of those weeks.

Family

The role of food in communicating family traditions was a theme I found interesting in this week’s poems. Phillina Sun in “Untitled” says that “a kitchen is [the women’s] temple.” We see them” as “priestesses...carrying the fragrant rewards of worship.” Through their preparation in the kitchen, they are revered, and they know their responsibility is to pass on their “unwritten recipes generation to generation, from mother to daughter.” Because these recipes are unwritten, they will last in each generation’s memory along with the memory of learning the recipe directly from one’s mother or aunt. The family bond is created and maintained.

In “Last Days of a Slow Cooker” by Mursalata Muhammad, preparation of a meal by the matriarch for a large gathering of family is detailed. “[S]he knows who’s been there by what they’ve left to be cooked,” and we learn about the members of her family this way. The generations of the family “descend...wearing Muslin names like after-thoughts;” we see that by preparing and serving this meal, she is the center of their family and the keeper of their tradition.

In Chezia Thompson Cager’s “Callaloo,” however, the daughters see the passing on of recipes as “instructional tales of horror,” and the “secrets would be lost to the ages with [their mother’s] last breath.” “[T]hey never learned to cook...they didn’t see the point.” They’ve rejected the preparation of these meals. They will not do it on their own. There is a difference in priorities between the generations. What then, is the purpose of food in the family? Why did the mother care so much, but the daughters do not? They are educated women – “three doctors of Medicine, Chemistry and Robotics.” (Ironically, the fields they study relate to the nutrients, health and synthesis of things.) Are the old recipes themselves important, or was the love that went into the act of preparation the “legacy?” Or, does the food represent something else to bequeath to and maintain the family?

I loved the last lines of “Mexican Almuerzo in New England” by Richard Blanco: “home is a forgotten recipe, a spice we can find nowhere, a taste we can never reproduce, exactly.” The speaker’s mother, Marina, is doing “the best she can do” in her son’s kitchen far away from her home. He talks about a “kitchen island,” and I picture an “island kitchen.” The fragility of the family traditions is evident; they cannot always be passed on authentically. Future generations may forget how, may not care about, or may make mistakes in recreating the recipes of home and family. For me, it reflects the idea that we wander far from home, where we began, where we were raised, where we learned what the world was like. Nothing will be identical to what it was when we were growing up. Although this poem seems wistful about home and family, sometimes it’s a good thing it can’t be replicated.

Who are these people to whom we are related? If we eat the same food, if we share a meal, if we sit around the table together, does that bring us closer? And, do we want to be closer, or is rebellion and rejection an option? There are poems in the reading this week where the food sends this other message. In “On Eating” by Lara Hamza, the scene begins “[w]e gathered around the dinner table, my three brothers, mother, father, and me.” We picture the ideal, happy family until we learn that the daughter/ the speaker “[isn’t expected] to eat, because for almost a year, [she] had stopped.” Her dad won’t be able to have a piece of steak if she decides to eat at this meal because he hasn’t made enough to include her. She does; she deprives him of his piece but later throws it up. The dynamics of this family are not the nurturing, cooperative, loving ones we expect from the first line.

In Sapphire’s “In My Father’s House,” I knew not to expect a respectful, trusting dinner experience when our speaker “had to have dinner ready at 5:30pm,” but the blatant rejection when the “father had only set a place for himself & my little brother” still comes like a slap across the face or like a beating with “a piece of rubber hose.” When the cat gouges her Bob Marley album, our speaker recalls being raped by her father. The cycle of abuse is exposed; the family “tradition” of pain and cruelty continues. The father left home at 14 – “his father put his foot on his neck/& beat him until his nose bled.” Our speaker is 14 when this dinner occurs. Again, family is where we learn what the world is like.

In Sapphire’s other poem in the collection, “Wild Thing,” the mother “makes corn bread from Jiffy box mix” This small detail, that the family’s meals are not lovingly prepared from recipes passed down through the generations, fits with the rest of this disturbing poem. It shows the absence of opportunity, of education, of better living conditions, of money. The influence of family is felt in a most unsettling way. Food has a complex relationship with families. It can be seen as something that nurtures us both individually and through the generations, but it also can be the source and symbol of something destructive.

Sheila Joseph

I'm moved to explore the prompt: "Homage is not as dangerous as we think." I would not have considered homage dangerous, perhaps dull or sentimental, but not dangerous. So I looked it up. Homage is a public display of respect, or a creative reference to a person who has greatly influenced that artist. Homage can also (and perhaps more typically) be a reference to one literary work within another. The critical response seems to be that one who uses homage is amateur or unoriginal. So how does that relate to family and poetry? Homage is paying respect on the page to a family member who has influenced one's art or artistic journey--and how can a tribute to one's family be unoriginal? Perhaps the danger lies in the form. What is homage and what is tribute? A tribute is praise, historically accompanying a gift. So, homage could be tribute delivered in the artistic form of prose, picture or song.

The danger is unoriginality of form, or potential amateur status of falling back on what others have done, or what we know. And yet, homage can open so much up to the poet from these starting points. Homage inherently involves great emotion--dedication to another's craft or deep love for an individual or a shared life--and where greater place does beautiful poetry arise from, than powerful emotion? I am going to run with that concept into the poem of the week that touched me the most with its quiet beauty and pure telling: Lisa Suhair Majaj's "I Remember My Father's Hands" (Inclined, 185).

This poem is an homage to a father who has passed. Yes, we have read such poems before. Yes, we too have loved those who have passed. So how is this poem new; how is it distinctly hers; and how does it open its arms to also become ours? She chosen one detail, trained the lens of the verse upon it, and through that detail told us the most essential story of her father's life and how it touched her own. She does not waste words, holding each moment to two lines. The nine couplets cup the moments before us, each a set of hands themselves.

In the first couplet we are shown the hands that will pass us through the poem. In the second couplet we see a practice, one way they moved perhaps every day. In the third couplet we see what he eats, this family's home placed between the ripped bread, the olive oil, and the birthright. In the fourth couplet we witness his grief, powerful yet almost hidden. In the fifth couplet we see his beloved craft and are introduced to the relationship with the narrator; we see his devotion to beauty and to delicacy, but also notice the narrator as an outsider in the frame, longing for more than what she is given. In the sixth couplet we finally see a meeting between the narrator and father, it is deeply tender but also bittersweet; he holds her face as a child, just once, but for a long moment. In the seventh couplet they have aged, become beasts, this time more visibly mourning the possible loss of a beloved partner. In the eighth couplet they are more emotive than in all the rest, reaching out dramatically, "for the first time pleading;" but we are not told what they plead for--longer life, another chance to more fully express his love, benevolent passage into the next life? In the ninth and final couplet we have left the father's hands and been passed into the narrator's; these hands will stay with her throughout her own life's couplets, keeping her connected to her father and offering her understanding of him that she may not have been able to see in his own life.

Majaj's carefully-chosen details and references to the hands keep this from being a sentimental piece. Through the decidedly loving homage, there is a note of ambivalence in her relationship to her father. Telling the story of father and daughter, or daughter viewing father, through the hands, specifically, functions two-fold: the hands are elemental parts of life, following only these extremities can tell us a great deal about culture, emotions, work and lifestyle; at the same time, there is something detached about telling from the hands. They are far from the face, from the heart. Hands are able to hold back, to rest quietly, to be folded away. Mystery is maintained by the hands. Majaj's relationship with her father seems to mirror this treatment of the hands. Ever detail is lovingly told, expertly observed, but a distance remains, a solitude that was lifted only upon death. The poem moves beyond homage to exploration of the subtle complexities of familial love. And it ends with a note of hope, connection: the return to the poet's own self. The poem takes us on a journey, then releases us with an image of the future--promising and unknown.

Tania Price

Poets of Color

Blog #3

9/23/09

Response to: Lawrence Joseph’s “Before our Eyes”

In Lawrence Joseph’s, “Before Our Eyes” the narrator presents a slue of declarative statements sustained with the thoughtful integrity of vividly illustrative images. The vivid imagery is able to materialize through the sentences in a magnificent array of colors both interposed and singularly woven into the phrases. As the narrator states “saturated manganese blue.”(2), the reader can feel the heaviness of this color of twilight impose itself upon the page. The expansiveness of the word “saturated” allows blue to take on a new and more dynamic meaning, a coating more luxuriously brilliant and deep of a hue.

Joseph continues his interlacing of color with conjunction, mixing independent clause with independent clause creating a stew of nouns and subordinates, such as, “A yellow line besides a black line,”(3). While the clause “A yellow line”(3) could definitely exist on its own, the limitless possibilities added to the imagination when one envisions what “A yellow line besides a black line”(3) could mean, adds a truly subjective and speculative consideration to the statement. It is within these strings of clauses where the narrator truly begins to sparkle. Within one stanza (so to speak) Joseph mentions eight different colors and closes out his enumeration of the different aspect of these colors by slyly suggesting ”sweet sleep of colors.”(15)

And though the narrator quickly moves from his grand visions of colorful anecdote into the realm of political commentary, one tactic that is never lost is the narrator’s ability to string clauses together. As the narrator says “Waiting rooms, shopping centers, after all, empty moods and emotions.”(40-1), there is no shortage of proper nouns however predicates are another matter. Describing contemporary issues without verbs is a rather tricky issue that the narrator tackles rather well and though the narrator, at times, employs an arsenal of verbs, the verbs the narrator chooses to use are usually verbs being used to describe physical activity, “written”(14), “seeing”(17), “sit”(19), “crack”(22), and “undulating”(34) just to name a few.

As the narrator moves back and forth between vivid imagery and poignant political declarations the poetic voice in never lost on the reader. As the poem starts to wind down the narrator continuous his assertion with strong verbs such as, “resisting”(57), "charred"(57), and "smell"(57) but returns to his ever prevalent use of the injection of metamorphic colors personified.

America, the Flag

The Pledge of Allegiance was as close a prayer as my tongue ever recited. I chanted it morning after morning in the schoolyard, lined in a row amongst rows of all colors of children of immigrants from the Mission, not understanding why we pledged to a limp textile product, which never waved in the San Franciscan fog, not seeing the irony of the flag being held up by a different colored child each day. It was a duty that was clamored for, as cool as being the class officer for the day and getting to feed the colony of guppies. Every morning, I was confused by the line that I heard as “Under God, invisible, with liberty and justice for all.” So I was pledging to a flag and God? Sometimes, I wouldn’t touch my right hand to my heart, and more times, I touched my lips together at the word “God,” a moment of silence for the word that was not a name to me.

The poems for this week from Wind and Inclined make me think of the flag. The American flag, an icon for America and American dreams, but not for its people, maybe. The flag is an image of how I see us, us as in the we who have ever had to explain our right to be here and be the same even if we aren’t seen or accepted as such. The flag is made up of red stripes on a white canvas, with a small blue section that boxes up the stars in a corner. It is a mockery. The stars represent the 50 states, most of them annexed in as the country claimed population for name, for size, expecting the newly collected lands and people to be relieved and grateful for citizenship. The stars, the variations of American dreams, collected in a box, governed by the red and white stripes even though any vein of mine is as red as any vein of yours. Sameness of a different breed, is what the flag says to me. The stars, too, are white, but they are of a different shape, and the points, as four-limbed with a head on top as any person, are interpreted to be amo. Lined in rows, the stars point at each other cornered that box, and they swim in blue immersion, quarantined in bruises.

The poems read to me like the flag: We all live here, standing side by side, but we have designations. The place we live, whether we all call it home, is bordered by the same black borders, but we have designations. Printed bold on a flag we are supposed to hold sacred is the very emblem of dominant holding hostage made subordinate. Arm to arm, legs over top heads, heads beneath pointed feet, the cramped blue corner keeps us sharp; don’t touch me and you won’t get hurt, we at least are together in watching the tidal waves of red and white America. Be grateful for the backward safety of quarantine.

No matter how many mornings we pledged to a flag of no response, we still had cooties by recess, but we did all have cooties.

Over the Phone, One of Our Hero's Close Personal Homeboys Recounts Life in a College Town. Once again we see the use of the large title that always seems to catch me off-guard. The content of the title, seems flippant, trival. Perhaps this has to do with the language of the title: Homeboys, life in College... How is this important? Read on:

I miss having you around too, dawg.
Listen to my wack-ass routine:
The Great Hand makes a striking motion,
and the day is cracked open,
sliding onto the blazing iron of the world.

I imagine myself as the yellow center:
inconstant, supple and relaxed
until forced to harden against
the whiteness that surrounds me,
the encroaching blank

Within the first two lines of the poem, we see once again the use of the slang language (Is slang the appropriate term? Will leave it there until told to do otherwise) with: dawg, and wack-ass. But then something very strange happens. The poem departs from the colloquialism we first see, and jumps into phrases that seem more adult? worldly? It's as if, within the poem itself we witness this college student grow up and face the "real world," (whatever that means,) however, it implies the struggle that this person, the "Hero," faces. The Great Hand that he mentions with although obvious connotations towards a clock, and the day beginning, says so much more. The way he says the last part of the line, he is using very aggressive, angry language: Stricking, cracked, blazing, saying much more then a simply benign clock telling you the day has begun. Is it the intent of the poet to display the hardship of each day? "Sliding onto the blazing iron of the world," seems to mean so much more. I feel like there is a saying of some sorts, it reminds me of nose to the grindstone for some reason. However blazing iron, there's something about it, especially since it is being referred to as the world's: It feels alone and persecuted.

The second stanza, expounds on this feeling, the images not all too subtle. It speaks of originally being relaxed, supple, and the quickly changing to being hardened. Going back to the title, I can only imagine that it is the realization of what college brings with it. From high school we arrive, most from parents who shelter us, or at least try to keep us safe from any of that "real world," the parts that would harm us. Then we get to college, and our protective shell that we have is totally shed, and we are completely vulnerable. We are vulnerable by our race, sex, age or orientation and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves BUT to harden, become numb to it and carry on.

And what of the encroaching blank? This blank that imposes itself on you? It, for me speaks of Blank Slates, Blank faces, Poker faces, and hidden emotions. How else can one harden, but to become a blank, and give away nothing.


-Bluey
aka Michaela C Ellis

This week I found myself particularly moved by Sheryl Luna's poetry in Wind Shifts. Using the topic for this week of "placement historically and culturally, dominance and subordination; center and edge" as a reference point, I interpreted several of Luna's pieces to be unexpected paradoxical embodiments of precisely those elements. In each piece there is a palpable sense of loss, regret, and pain. Between each line break and use or disuse of punctuation, the reader has no doubt as to the narrator's tragedy ridden history (I specifically choose to use "history" here rather than "past" in order to illuminate the narrator's undeniable intertwining of her physical present-day with the spiritual and cultural past of her family). It's almost as if the narrator's point of view serves as a reincarnation of voices and lives previous who were left unheard or unappreciated. She capitalizes on her ability to write and speak in order to make transparent the experiences that were once darkly shrouded. What the reader does not find in Luna's poetry however, is a feeling of submission or apathy. It's simply not present. The narrator never falls into helplessness, but instead immerses herself in the emotions of "loss, regret, and pain" in order to empower and enlighten herself. She never denies the existence of grief; in fact she often seems to embrace the emotion. She allows her experiences to chisel a realistic, honest, and raw perspective.

A powerful example of this perspective is found n the piece Poetry for Drowned Horses:

“You carry the cracked hose to water the drying tree, & the dead grass sings a silent hymn, the water’s dribble makes you want to cry, not because the pipes are dry like your grandmother’s bones, but because the sky is still, yet moves like the night you turned seven. Here, the dry garden hose brings tears to your eyes, and you weep your insignificance. The dead neighbor’s white Chevy truck parked in the same spot for years is gargantuan, yet invisible. Mr. Tellez, try to remember his round face, his broad back in a white t-shirt watering the pink and white oleanders. Were the imagined? Was his face so unimportant?”

Through these lines the narrator delves into the intangibility of things unappreciated. She mentions “your insignificance” and the invisibility of the large truck, two entities that are largely overlooked and almost nonexistent due to the lack of appreciation by outsiders. The same outsiders who also allow for the forgetfulness of Mr. Tellez and his oleanders. Does this forgetfulness equate to a lack of existence? According to the narrator, it’s quite to the contrary. However instead of dwelling on the issue of existence, the narrator uses this phenomenon as an opportunity to raise questions and doubts as to the direction of society.

“The highway buzzes where desert once sat calmly. Cars replaced screaming children, bicycles and the holy ritual of running through the sands native, dark thighs sweating in what seemed an eternal sun. And what do we care for the smallness of another? It’s our own shame, the way palms clench or eyes dart fearfully, the way we learn gossip in shadow, talk ourselves into believing god is listening because we are afraid”

The narrator is assured of her position in the history of her culture. She has witnessed or heard of past traditions, and through her unique poetic eye demonstrates her reverence and remorse for their lack of place in the current day.

Luna’s outlook on the muddied state of her past and present is constantly displayed in the most organic of forms. In An Atheist Learns To Pray, she again uses the unique contrast between a seemingly “hope”less outlook (Atheism) and its almost religious appreciation for the reliable return of contentedness. The narrator explains, “We always return to beauty after the abyss, bruised and cold, learning that a rose open to May is unburdened. Why not swing our hips and sway as leaves chime to darn. One learns from children, a dog’s thick ribbed breath, the rise and fall of night. Even when slandered, one drinks water and the sky.”

In summation, Luna has a steady understanding of her place in the context of her culture’s history. She recognizes the beauty of the past, and the unappreciative attitudes that allowed for the past to be left and forgotten. Interestingly, she also seems to recognize a similar pattern in the present, as society continues to further push tradition and culture aside in return for modernization. She disdains the intolerance and ignorance that she encounters in people, and though such individuals may disillusion her she never allows them to silence her. This point is strongly supported in the piece Slow Dancing with Frank Perez. She writes “And life is like this, hurried and awkward; the way pride swells and need takes over, all weary desire. The way those lost speak through an old song that lives duende or heart and steam, knows what it means to touch.”

- erin a. gutilla

When reading poems from The Wind Shifts, I expected to read poems that I would instantly connect with and poems that I would feel that I had a personal connection with, though it didn't turn out that way. Fingers by David Dominguez had a deep cultural respect to it. Dominguez talked about pain and indecisiveness, how to gain strength and courage for oneself through the courage and bravado of another person. I wiped the blood and thought about Julio/how he did not cry out...how he pushed away those who tried to help/How the finger was never found. That is where I see the cultural significance, through one's culture you gain characteristics that were not originally your own. Experiences of someone close to you, or someone you admire can provoke you to change or want those strengths and/or weaknesses to embody for yourself. Another poem that caught my eye by Dominguez was Empty Lot, a sorrow story about a couple who longs for their home to be built, if it ever comes true. This poem in my eyes lacked culture, it had no reference to historical placement, and there wasn't a reference to subordination or dominance. It seems more like a poem about the American dream for immigrants or homeless people. To have a home to call your own and the only thing you have to hold on to is your aspirations and dreams. The upbeat in the poem in the end that describes the couple dancing to music played by the construction workers only enhances this typical story with a happy ending. The couple still smiles despite their situation, still finding something to smile about. . .

Sheryl Luna on the other hand had something to say. Her poem Her Back, My Bridge was a story that I feel so many young girls can relate to who have either met or is that young troubled girl who has fought her whole life to be normal. My favorite line is Here I am singing the unsung positive capability of the desert, how weeds grow orange wildflowers. That line is a full description of the poem, how she is trying to make a positive outcome that is seemingly invisible. That is what I love about this poem, it tries to BUILD a bridge from hell to heaven, trying to map out a way to get there, without having to be told how. This can be used in any time in history especially in American society because that is what our history is all about, trying to make the good out of the bad. . . The second poem I liked by her was An Atheist Learns to Pray. Reading the poem over and over to grasp the concept that connects with the title led me to think that the poem described everyone, and not anyone in particular. I took from that that anyone can be atheist, and at times many of us are because of what we may go through, but in the last line ( the sun later rising like a man listening to god) is what we all do in the end. Many people go through hell and be in disbelief of a higher power, though once that crisis is over or a resolution is reached, the sun rises and at that moment we began to listen to God again, because we start to believe again. God will always be dominant in our lives and at times we as people don't want to feel subordinate to him, but its not subordination its a give and take situation where you have to give not only to God, but the world in order to receive goodness and grace from him.

From Inclined to Speak I loved Just Words by Samuel Hazo. I am currently in a psychology and language class and we are learning about words and the English language in general. The poem Just Words is fun and exhilarating. I take it as a poem that compares and contrasts many similarities and differences on how different languages use words, it can also be used as a small history lesson on words and their usage. For Which It Stands is probably the best poem in this book by Samuel Hazo. He takes a stab at dominance in American culture and calls it out for its flaws and prejudice. We as Americans are so proud of our civilzed ways and unsavage like behavior we portray (YEA RIGHT!), we degrade and demean anyone else who does not meet American standards. We say that we seperate church and state, but that is not at all true. In Washington God's lawyer warns we stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord. That is how it is sold to the American people, in a religious matter with immense emphasis on God, that the many things we do in life and for the government is also for God, and which God exactly are they referring to? . . . Lawrence Joseph's I Pay The Price says it all in the title. A poem about being proud that one has paid the the price and that the price had to be paid in order for one to be where they want to be. The expense in which that price is paid is what really counts, not when and why. That is a morale question that I think is hard to answer, what price would you pay to get where you want? For me, anything that does not negatively affect my dignity, respect, family, and soul... what about you?
-Dorothy

Inclined and Wind Shifts

So as I read the poets for this week’s reading, it was difficult for me to not see the poems in the context of pre-Columbian, colonial, and post colonial. I started to read each poem looking for these references or the lack of them. Of course, I realize that this is not a required element of amazing poetry, but for the purposes of discussion about poets of color, I am quite intrigued by this concept.

The poets from this week made me realize how, in many respects (whether poets accept this or not), we (poets) are historians. We look at the vast world around us (or the small neighborhood we live in) and we select the things we need/want to share for the purpose of a particular poem. There is so much information available to us and we can, if we want, write about that information in any form we want. Poets typically select poems as their medium. In these poems, we can make war seem like a heroic adventure. We can truthfully display a culture or exaggerate their existence on this planet (then we give it a cute name like hyperbole). My point is that this issue of placement in history and culture is important and can often be the element in the poetry that readers most connect to.

For instance, in the poem titled September 11, 2001 by Samuel Hazo, I am captured by the title alone. I know this date by heart and I remember what it felt like to sit in front of the television for hours not knowing what was really happening and not knowing if people I knew were in the towers or on the plane. When he says, “The natural and scheduled worlds keep happening” I am there. I am reminded that I was getting dressed for work when it happened. That I was still in my robe – that I still had my scarf on my head and that my boyfriend (now husband) didn’t believe me when I yelled to him in the shower, “a plane just crashed into the world trade center” and he responded, “what? did you say near or into?” I don’t remember much conversation after that.

Hazo uses powerful language to describe a horrific event without mocking it or degrading it. In line 19 he writes, “engulfing us like dustfall / from a building in collapse / The day / turns dark as an eclipse.” No matter where you were in the world when this happened, you will surely agree that your life was engulfed by this event and that the world metaphorically turned dark.

In the second movement of this poem, he takes us deeper into the bowels of the moment. He describes a scene where people “downfloated from the hundredth floor” and tells us that “there where others—plunging, / stepping off or diving in tandem / hand in hand, as if the sea / or nets awaited them.

By the end of the poem, we are in day two when we all woke to realize that it did actually happen. It was not a collective nightmare. That last image of “snapping from aerials or poles, / the furious clamor of flags” sticks with me because I wonder whose flags he is referencing. I assume that because he is of Arab descent that he means those flags to be the ones Arabs may have been flying in recognition of their homeland, that they were suddenly afraid to display.

This poem makes me feel that immediate movement towards the edge. I feel an entire nation of people being pushed closer to the edge when I read this and at the same time, I feel a nation that historically has felt dominate, suddenly feeling subordinate. It’s powerful and moving and doesn’t pick sides and doesn’t try to accuse or blame or justify – it just reports with the “poet’s eye” and brings me back to a discussion we had in class about the inseparable nature of poetry and politics.

I’m sure there are many out there in the poetry critique world who found this poem offensive in some way, because the critical eye is guided by our personal politics and our background and our experiences in the world and our age and so many other factors. I’m not discrediting anyone’s opinion of this poem. I feel strongly that this piece touches on many of the elements we have discussed in class regarding poets of color – how history and poetry relate to one another, how we can identify the natural elements from a colonial/post-colonial perspective, the question of what is place, the placement of history and culture, dominance and subordination, and the center and the edge.

***I wanted to talk more about other pieces, but got carried away with this one. Maybe I will post separately about the powerful pieces from Suheir Hammad and one of my favorite poets, Naomi Shihab Nye or the poem “Pig” by David Dominquez, that made me react out loud in a quiet but crowded café filled with reading customers. There were so many in this section that I want to discuss. Maybe I will.

peacelovelight

Kiala