Identity

Marian Haddad
First of all I like the forward stating about her poetry that it, “insists on the ‘connective instead of the divisive’ aspect of difference” (Inclined, 102). The range of her cultural experiences and knowledge of languages reminds me of a certain Professor I know.
Malfunctioning FLOWTRON
I love the two line rhythm and the dashes. I think this is a poem about her father dying of cancer But the relationship of identity comes out in his asking for Agua instead of water or the Arabic word for water. What I took away from this piece is that dying or being close to death reminds us that we are in the end the sum of all our experiences, homes, identities, and that being close to death makes the censor of our thoughts quite. So, the internal fight about identity is no longer an issue that shows itself in external thoughts or choices regarding what language we ask for our basic needs. His snoring mouth informs the reader that he is alive and that is music to the poets ears.
I Have No History Here
Again I like the two line rhythm. But this piece is broken also in space between words. The spaces really work to make the reader pause long enough to get the poets intention and not skip over how much weight two, three, words or a word can hold.
“out my window the sun
no longer the night nearing”
The spacing makes it feel different. I can imagine her seeing the sun out the window and being relived to have the darkness of night and fear distant at least for a moment. To be able to convey that with word spacing and order is really great. Order is important in achieving this as well. The line would be so different if it read, The night no longer out my window the sun nearing.
Because the night will in reality always be nearing, with the space and the order of the words it gives the feeling that somehow the sun out side of her window erases the possibility of night being an impending force. Pretty complicated for two lines.
The lines I liked the best were
“I have made a home
In a land I never knew”
“I am starting to write myself
down inscribe myself”
In this line again it is the spacing that is so significant.
I love the idea of writing yourself down. But with down being separate it can give the word many meanings. In one way I think of down as being depressed and writing about one self can certainly so that. Or it can be putting your self on to the page writing yourself into existence. But “inscribe myself” makes me think of tattooing or permanently carving a place into the world through words and your own body. In the context of identity I think that both creating a home and carving out a place where you exist in the world is the crux of what identity means. The way that identity express both the extremely private and public simultaneously makes identity an intensely complicated concept that people struggle with individually and collectively throughout their entire lives. Individually identity resides in the home or the soul and collectively identity resides with public perceptions or representations of issues like race, gender, culture, ect…

Who are I - Who is we

Happy Halloween everybody. Interesting that our blog topic is Identity on the one weekend a year that we celebrate the opportunity to be someone else.

Perez-Wendt's poem in Effigies, "We Are Not the Crime / We Are the Evidence," reclaims identity with the title. Labeled "crime" or criminal by conquerors, the "we" of this poem can hold their heads high - they have been renamed in ownership of history and the wrongs laid on them.

The poem is a re-writing of a nursery rhyme. It demonstrates identity by setting the form in contrast to the content. The European rhythm speaks of the structure of history, the parameters for the people set by foreign invaders, and also of the disdain the European invaders (dressed benignly as missionaries) had for the people, looking upon them as children, uneducated uncivilized underlings that needed help. The content within this structure objects to that perspective, and retells the history from the truth of the people.

The choice of language is a thumb to European indoctrination: "nigh," "uncontroverted," "chastened," "the tolling bell," "consigned," all hint at the imposed culture, attitude, and objectives of the conquerors. "They've kicked the chair from under us" demonstrates through repetition the waves of invaders that have inundated the Pacific island chain. "The chair" referring perhaps to sovereignty, "from under us" indicating the foundation of tradition lost each time. The "Etc. etc." is awesome! Who ends a poem like that? How better to show the volume of injustice, the boredom of the imposed structure, the lies ad nauseum.

Identity intersects within the poem by turning the presumed binary on its head. Where the meeting of cultures has been recorded from the view of the conquerors, this poem re-orients the identity of us v. them. "Them" often refers to the subjugated, the expelled; here, identity is reclaimed by placing the honor of the label "us" within the perspective of the indigenous population.

Perez-Wendt is of Hawaiian, Chinese, and Spanish ancestry. The blend of invader and indigenous in her blood must make for an interesting battle of identity. Though we cannot know to what class her Spanish grandparents belonged, they were able to acquire land, which demonstrates some level of social mobility. It is also telling of the blend we all are, and the struggle for identity faced by most people of mixed ancestry. The Spanish parts likely include Arabic blood, as her grandparents emigrated from Malaga, Spain, a city in Andalusia, the hub of Muslim power in Spain from 711 to 1492. Interesting then, that the conqueror portion of her ancestry likely includes blood from its conquerors as well.

Perhaps because of the multiple perspectives she speaks from, though they may be unified in her being, this poem speaks not only to Hawaiian people, but to all who have endured subjugation by invaders. I connect with this poem through its underdog identification, the fight from the floor, the refusal to stay down. Though my skin is white, I have always identified with the persecuted portion of the world's population. I am always eager to apply my skills to the side of the fight that is not supposed to win, that is unfairly matched, that is unjustly treated. Maybe I'm serving out a sentence for past-life wrongs. Maybe I wasn't always white.

Struggles with my own identity will be played out in my work, I'm sure. Right now, my mind is blown by Steven Cordova's poem, "Of Sorts." The title itself suggests a conglomeration of identities, pieces and parts and uncertainty about where they fit. So much is happening in this poem, I don't even know what's going on. He seems to be questioning identity as a human even, defined as having a body that we are necessarily committed to. By bringing dreams and changing relationships in the space-time continuum into the mix, he puts the corporeal definition of humanity to task.

This may be a stretch, but work with me. In searching the poem for reference to identity, some revelation (as in a revealing) of who is searching and who is found in this poem, I submit that the identity (at least one) he writes about is that of a writer. I think this because of the following lines:

"...recount out loud...Or write it down. Or it will leave you...the need...to expel what, for such a short time, was yours and yours alone."

These words remind me of the dilemma for writers, the lack of ownership of a created thing once the words are laid on the page or stage.

"the need to pee" (after waking up from a dream) relates the physical to the metaphysical. And also hints at the relationship of creation to waste. What this relationship is I don't know, but it makes me think of something we read in Gevirtz' Craft of Poetry that I cannot remember well enough to quote or find. Maybe a classmate can help me out - it was something about art being beautiful waste.

I have more questions of this poem than answers for it. I will ask them in hopes that it sparks discussion or comment.

In the section, "To begin...did buy the ticket to," that describes the flip-flopping of time and space in dreamland, and the changing aspects of ownership from waking to dreaming, he seems to be focused on "movement," and it strikes me that there is some relationship of movement to identity. The changes in identity for populations caused by movement across the globe, the internal movement of shifting identities - anybody got a handle on this?

A diary seems to relate to identity as a record of time and thought. He describes it as necessary discomfort: "the appointment with the doctor's." I wonder if this characterization relates to the grounding activities we feel are required to define ourselves, to stay positioned as a replacement for being "healthy."

Body as ground, as nation, is suggested in this waking space. Commitment to the physical as real. He confounds me on the fourth line, saying, "in your dreams at night you're a bigger infidel." Bigger than what? This is the first mention of being an infidel at all. The notion of treason, within oneself and among bodily processes (sleep) required for health, is fascinating. Maybe the faithfulness he speaks of in waking hours is a facade, for the subconscious takes over in dreams and we cannot control perception. This brings up the question, to which or whom are we unfaithful and when - the waking hours may actually belie the truth of existence. And also draws upon the shaky ground of the word "infidel." Used so often (especially since the U.S. invaded Iraq) as a term of perspective, its meaning determined by the identity of the person speaking it. What do they say? One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.

Anyway, I think what Cordova does in this poem is breathtaking. And I am hoping for more minds at work on what is happening here. The connection of time, space, movement, and physical/metaphysical states to the notion of identity deserves a collaborative inspection.

Haddad & Identity

Thanks for the very directed reading response questions, Identity group—I’m excited to go deeper into these twelve poems on Tuesday! (Especially Camillo’s “The Monster of the Dead”, which I didn’t have space to blog about – his crying for the immortality of the doll, the beauty of the wine, the transparency of its glass – amazing stuff!)

When considering how these poets create or challenge identity in their pieces, I thought of Marian Haddad’s “Malfunctioning FLOWTRON.” This poem places us in the hospital room of a dying man; we do not know his relationship to the poet—he could be a grandfather, father, uncle, father-in-law, mentor—because that element is not critical to this piece. The tension established in the early lines tells us there is a close relationship and impending sorrow: “—he is /sleeping better now—quiet/makes us think—our minds/crank every few minutes, eyes/open…” The enjambment (yea, I wrote that word down in my notebook) and series of m-dashes make the verse stutter, and mimic the “cadence/of the high pitched beep…” The words are caught in this image of cranking minds, minds that seem afraid of the quiet that will force them to think. We know that the speaker is tired, stretched out, and anxious about the state of this man; so we gather she loves him without needing to know who he is to her.

His identity is then tossed around even more—we are offered suggestions and then those suggestions are negated. He asks for Agua in his hazy, Morphine-padded state, so we gather this word must be quite familiar to him, a word that comes from his deep subconscious. Then we are told he is not Mexican (as though this is the only type of person who could ask for water in Spanish). I was slightly offended by that line, and wondered if the poet chose it to play on the assumptions some Americans have that all Spanish-speakers are of Mexican heritage or nationality. Two lines later we learn that he is American and Arabic. But wait—Arabic is a language, not an identity. Again, the poet seems to be playing with our assumptions—that if a person speaks Arabic, it must mean he is an Arab. I’m fairly certain this isn’t true, considering the fact that millions of people around the world, primarily in Northern Africa and what is known as the Middle East speak Arabic but may not consider themselves Arabs. (If anyone else has more insight on this cultural identity, please speak up!) Defining Spanish-speakers as Mexican disacknowledges all other Spanish-speaking South and Central American (not to mention European) nationalities as much as defining all speakers of Arabic as Arabs homogenizes many ethnic identities into one umbrella term.

Of course, after I spent some time breaking this down and presuming what stereotypes Haddad is playing on, I read her bio, which identifies her family as Syrian-Americans living on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border, and as speaking English, Arabic and Spanish at home. So perhaps her use of the word “Mexican” is more intentional; perhaps the man in the poem was often mistaken for Mexican because of the family’s proximity to the border and his Syrian features. (My partner is Sri Lankan and is often mis-identified as Latino—folks will speak Spanish to him when he walks around Berkeley and he doesn’t understand a word of it.) I might even go so far to say that this potential mis-identification of the man in the poem was not always disadvantageous—perhaps he felt more at home on one side of the border than the other; perhaps his new-forged identity as a Spanish-speaker had some commonality with his identity as an Arab-American; perhaps there is even an degree of “passing” here that happened between the two. I bring this up because, in her bio, Haddad is quoted as seeking the “‘connective instead of divisive’ aspects of difference” in her work.

Later in the poem, the subject is infantilized, as he is portrayed sucking the water sponge like a mother’s nipple. Finally, he sleeps and we end with the sound of his snores, much like we began with the sound of the beeping—the sound of the living versus the sound of the dying. Haddad is further exploring the connectivity of these opposing identities—elderly and newborn, living and dying—as she pairs these sounds and images and synthesizes their presence in one person.

So many of the images in this poem could have been taken from my own witnessing of grandparents struggle against age and health—the dryness of the mouth caused by the Morphine, the beeping of the monitors (wondering if they hear, how it affects them), the feeding of the sponge stick. In the last days of my stepgrandfather’s life, he lay with his head back and mouth sticky-dry. All he asked for was water and all we could do was run that moist little sponge over his lips and his tongue. Sometimes he gripped it with the muscles of his mouth, absorbing the only fluid allowed (drinking water would have actually been harmful to him at this state). This man never asked anyone to do anything for him in life, and here we—the women of his family, only recently joined by marriage—were feeding him droplets of water, massaging his arms, warming his cool-shallow cheeks, and inserting Morphine enemas. He was transformed from a regal man into a helpless child, and witnessing this transformation made me feel first slightly sickened, and later, more intimately close to him than ever before.

I imagine many people have held this same sort of vigil over the loved and the dying, and that this poem is not just for Haddad’s unnamed loved one, but for each of ours, or for the shared love/pain that life’s last transformation erupts in us.

A Lost Memory of Delhi, reads just as such. A lost memory. Something that you can barely remember and maybe it's just a color, or a pattern, or a flash of people. This poem reads like any train of thought or memory should, and it packs a punch to go with it.

I am not born
it is 1948 and the bus turns
onto a road without a name

This poem is immediately confusing or startling because of the voice of the narrator, the child. Where are they physically in this? Do they exist, are they merely watching. The tone in this pieces speaks as if the narrator is viewing their parents from a great distance, it doesn't feel close, and this isn't the normal, "observing my parents." There is some subtle and some blatant use of phrase that makes this piece a little darker than most, as if the person, (who we know is directly involved because they are the child,) is an outsider looking into a very beautiful world that they aren't exactly belonging to.
The poem is divided into 3 line stanzas that make up this piece, which gives each stanza a mini story, or a snap-shot of a moment, which is very fitting when they talk of family albums. Within the stanza there is a beautiful image, but to juxtapose it, there is a very uncomfortable aura that comes with it. Lines such as: I am not born, I pass my parents, She doesn't see me, all of these lines alone don't have the same impact as they do when they are accompanied by the beauty that is so OBVIOUSLY separate from this person. This comes to a head at the very end of the poem in the last three stanzas:

I want to tell them I am their son
older much older than they are
I knock keep knocking

but for them the night is quiet
this night of my being
they don't they won't

hear me they won't hear
my knocking drowning out
the tongues of stars

Wow. That is an AMAZING, and visceral way to end this poem. From "I am not born," to the "night of my being," it come to a full circle. When I first read this poem, I thought of conceiving a child, from the view-point of the fetus: viewing a world that they dont belong to yet. However we do see that the narrator is viewing these things, which makes this even more confusing. It'll be interesting to get some thoughts on this in discussion. I think this has a lot to do with the insider outsiders within family, but also children relating to their parents. The narrator stresses SO hard that he is older than they are. Of course it is not literal, but why would a child think that they are older than their parents? Old soul? It feels like the parents are so carefree, living this beautiful life, and the son, the narrator is more realistic. They see the faded photographs and the broken lamp, they see reality for what it is, and it is that alone that separates them in this poem.


... Sigh

Can I just hear that one part again?

hear me they won't hear
my knocking drowning out
the tongues of stars

mmmm.

Bluey aka Michaela C. Ellis

Amiri Baraka ( Via Amanda Johnston's blog)

eh yo!

What I really thought was interesting about what we read from Bum this week was how much form varied from poem to poem. I think most of the time when people think of Spoken word or performance poetry they assume that it has no relationship to the page. But poems like Beauty Ritual, Medusa, A Blue Black Pearl, and Hey Yo/Yo Soy! show just how important the page and space can be even when the poem is being read.

The poem that stood out for me the most was Hey Yo/Yo Soy! because it takes over the page so much. It’s a poem that to me seems to have a sense of machismo but also this sort of sadness at the way that this machismo plays at. The way that it moves across the page and takes up so much space, adds to this sense of oppressive energy. There is nowhere to run to because Jesus Papoleto Melendez, uses practically every inch of the page. He is completely in your face as you read the poem. In performance, this kind of space might be shown by walk around the stage and really engaging with the audience but what reading the work on the page forces your mind to feel invaded in a way in which the performance can’t.
In terms of content v. form, I think the two are working together in this poem. I think in this poem especially the form of the poem is building upon the content. It helps us get a sense for where the poem is coming from and feel the full weight of the poem. I think in some poetry form and content can feel like they don’t really go together or it feels like one is consuming the other. Hey Yo/Yo Soy! incorporates form into content to a point where they feel as though they cannot be separated from each other. For me the words by themselves feel a little abstract at times and at times, it could feel exclusionary with the Spanish but I think that the form adds this other element.

I think the big question for me is whether form is necessary for poetry. Personally, I think that this question is way bigger than it seems. For some poets form and content and intrinsically linked and this tends to be people who have more traditional styles but also for people who believe that poetry is solely meant to be read on the page. For some people poetry is a solely oral tradition. And in most of those cases, I would say that form just isn’t necessary. Personally, I’m of the camp that poetry should be both for the page and the stage and if that means that form becomes necessary then great. I guess I’m saying that writing poetry in itself is a form so it is necessary. Now the more hardcore methods of creating form…. not so much.

Kai's Beauty Rituals 2000

I don't think I ever thought about form as much as I have in the last year. It has become a part of what I see on the page as much as the content of the poem. In my own writing, I experiment with form now and then (or as the poem requests). So this week's look at form helps me continue an internal conversation with all of you.

I've always thought of poetic form as a sort of "order" to the writing. By that I mean, the poem's form is a way for the poet to use the page to "order" the words and sometimes the meaning so that the reader can interact with the writing more closely to the way the poet intends. Of course we (poets) have no real control over what the reader does once they are alone with the poem, but form gives us a false sense of security over the poem. I guess I think of form as the outside of the poem and the content as the inside, but that they cannot (and should not) be separated (if done well). [I already know the stage folks are saying, but what if a poem doesn't live on the page? -- right, right. I'm talking about page poetry here! And I do know/believe that stage poetry has form as well -- that's another discussion.]

So, with all that rambling done, here's what this week's reading made me think:
The shape of a poem gives me the first impression. I look at the poem and before I read anything, I see the shape it has on the page. It's kinda like meeting someone for the first time. Before they say anything, you've already made a "judgment" or assessment based on the way they look. (And if you are digging them, you look at their shape -- right?)

Then, I look past the outside and try to connect to the inside, the content. Once I interact with the content, I try to find a relationship to the form and the content. Sometimes I see it right away and sometimes I must look a little deeper than the surface and still other times, I realize that there isn't a relationship, it was just a choice (or lack of choice) the poet made.

The inherited form in beauty rituals 2000 by Nwenna Kai caught my attention as I flipped through the beauty is moving us forward section of Bum Rush. I call it inherited (not my original idea) because it reminds me of Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls poem. The slashes catch me first and I go to my brain file for Shange and remember Kearney, who we read last week, and then I read Kai.

Kai's poem gives us a list of what makes her ritual of beautification. It's a list and so I find the slashes work to separate the list while simultaneously giving the reader direction on how to read the poem and where to breath. I also think it was a conscious choice to use only one stanza (another element of form). The compactness of this one stanza gives the feeling that all of things must be in place for the ritual to take place; well, except the item that reads /maybe maple brown lip gloss open-toed shoes/

Ending with God is an interesting choice. Because we've gotten use to the listing of items, it almost seems like Kai wants us to know that in the end, God is the item that matters. And God can represent nature and natural-ness in this case. The list starts with really unnatural elements: comb/toe rings/titty rings/rings for the clitoris too/ and gradually shifts to more natural items:

extra virgin olive oil
shea butter
maple brown
cypress leaves
cranberry
henna
oranges and lemons
hot steaming water
exhalation

In this instance, the poem and the form are working with one another. Kai's list and use of slash marks provide a dual reading of the poem -- as a list slowly written out or as a rapidly fired list of things one must check off. Either way the reader interacts with the poem, the form serves it well.

peacelovelight
Kiala

A Word or 500 on Form

"the poem alone"
hmmm. what is that exactly? it sounds so much like poetry, like it should fit. "alone" and "poem," linked in the psyche of 10,000 poets, and the reason 10,000,000 more attempt poetry. But "poem" is itself 10,000 things; by definition, "it" cannot be singled out; "it" is connection.

I do not begin this way to pick at our esteemed discussion leaders (though by now you know me to revel in playful barb), but to get to this talk of form and the intricacies traversed by poetry.

Form, to me, in this post-sonnet and line measure, post-free verse landscape, is a way of enacting nonverbal cues. Stage direction. Even for poetry not written for stage, there is presence to a poem; there is a space that the poem creates and inhabits, with movement and meaning that cannot be expressed in word. Setting. And instruction. A direction, which, ironically, often provides freedom from established reading norms. Structure that invites, provokes, entices the reader to consider the direction a word might take - form makes line and yet makes possible a reading between the lines.

Aloud, the poet interprets these stops and questions through body language and inflection. Often line breaks aren't followed, because they are not needed to slow and manage the sight read of a poem. Some meanings are missed and left on the page, but perhaps a poem is different in air than it is in the mind. Perhaps it is a different poem all together, no more and no less than the one on the page.

I think what is missing from many of the poems we read for this week is an integration of form and content. You can slap a poem on a page, and if all elements are not considered, then I consider it weak. At the same time, you can impose structure on a poem, and if it is only a casing, not informing the content, then I say there is work to be done. Because whether or not you intend it, the form does inform the content. This is why it is crucial to consider form in the crafting. If you don't pay attention to it, the form might be saying, "I don't know what I'm doing." Poems are loudmouths - they will tell on you.

The old guy that's glad to be alive and writes in all caps, calls up for me a person who did not grow up in the computer age, who stuck the keyboard on caps lock and went to town. This doesn't speak informative form to me. It speaks a lack of familiarity with computer etiquette, or "I survived so I'm going to scream at everybody." And I think of all the double or triple margins that might have helped this poem, the space that could have hinted at the passage of time, the thought of placement on the stage of the paper that might have made the work seem more like a poem and less like a 12-step journal entry (no offense meant, big up and much love to those in recovery).

Aside from attempted set structures, I believe a poem calls for it's form. Often a poet gets in the way of what a poem wants to say. And so to be open to the poem, in conversation with it, as it becomes (or occurs) can only enhance the connection of form and content and make for a tighter, "better" poem. Whether or not the form enhances the poem or detracts from it depends on how well the poet listened to the poem, thought of each space and the meaning lent to the message. At sixteen we were all putting words on paper. Would you look back now and call the early stuff your best work? I wouldn't. I understand much more now about the entry points for meaning, how to create levels, how to write about more than a broken heart.

Form, or the consideration of what the poem's construction says in conversation with the content, seems as essential to me as a skeletal system. Without this, a poem is often mush on a page. Is it necessary? Only if you want people besides your mother to call it a poem.

Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie does some interesting things with form in her poem "Medusa." The placement of words adds to the setting, to the turn of past and present that she speaks of in the poem. The left-most margin represents today; she starts here to show the strength of her reclamation, presses it up to the spine of the book. The next margin that appears, though third from the left, represents the painful past of being excluded for her appearance, and is set by the end of "a shedding," to demonstrate what she has shed.

The two stanzas on this margin seem interrupted by three lines that push toward the left strong-woman edge but don't quite make it there. They fall short because in them, she and the friends try to feel beautiful in a way that denies their own beauty.

She returns to the left margin as she speaks proudly and playfully of her hair with a mind of its own, and the final line in that stanza, "beckoning brown hand," returns to the margin where she spoke of the old notion of seductive qualities. This shows a reclamation of what is beautiful; her qualities become "1,000 spiraling waists" that beckon brown hand and replace a time when "seduction looked like...tresses fingers eased through."

The final stanza is set on the innermost margin, a fourth, and speaks to the reader of this knowledge going deeper than the discrimination and the pain of the past. A true reclamation of self, routing out all the fallacies that once held her down. I reprint it here because I like it so much. It does that last-line bam-dam thing.

"As a plaited girl
I was stung by the word 'Medusa'
As a woman
I am unafraid to turn men to stone."


So I guess you could put the words down and say that they don't need a form, but I feel like that is only writing half the book and calling it finished. If you don't take enough time to give your poem a body, why am I taking the time to read it?

So...group 2......As I read through the poems Bobby Miller's "My Life As I Remember It" is utterly amazing. A simplistic yet melodic description of his life in the most straightforward sense and demeanor possible. And I absolutely love it. One thing that I did notice was miller's reference to numbers. I noticed all but one time did miller reference even number to things that were more positive than other subjects that were associated with odd numbers.

AT TWO YEARS OLD I WHISTLED AT THE MAILMAN
AND SET A PATTERN FOR YEARS TO COME.
AT FOUR I DANCED IN THE SUNSHINE OF OUR FRONT YARD,
AN INTERPRETIVE DANCE TO THE GODS...
AT SIX I TOLD MY CLASSMATES THAT I WAS FROM ANOTHER GALAXY
LIGHT YEARS AWAY...
I'VE BEEN AROUND THE BLOCK AT LEAST TEN TIMES AND I'M
READY
TO GO AGAIN UNTIL THESE FEET WON'T CARRY ME
ANYMORE...

MY NINTH GRADE REPORT CARD WAS ALL D'S AND F'S EXCEPT
FOR ART AND MUSIC CLASS...
AND I FEEL BETTER NOW AT FORTY THAN I DID AT
TWENTY-FIVE.

The one line where I feel it changes is on the top of page 450
I'VE LOST EIGHT THOUSAND IN CASH GAMBLING AND WON
FIVE HUNDRED
ON A BET IN LESS THAN A MINUTE


But still even in this line it ends in "less than a minute" which could be considered 59 and that is an odd number; the negative subject in reference to that odd number is losing more than he had gained. So in the form of this poem I see much form in relation to number's and their positive or negative significance and/or representation. The FEELINGS I got from this poem was triumph, warmth, cold, bitter, wise, sweet, high-intellect, experienced, confusion, sorrow, pain, guilt, and last but not least freedom. This poem took me through some highs and lows and carried me through his story with such imagery that spiritually placed me in his shoes as the story went on. As far as the form enhancing the message I would say yes. The capitalization with the letters and punctuation Miller uses is eye catching and has much depth to it. I also noticed that when he lists things out on page 448-49, when Miller speaks of the diseases there are 9 (negative), and when he goes on explaining his religious affiliations and for the lack of better words occupations, those two listings are 14 and 26 (positive).
The form of the poem draws you into the life and context of the poem while leaving you with the safety and comfort of your surroundings and personal beliefs. I personally would be very much interested to meet Bobby Miller because he seems like a very interesting person. lol. People who have been to hell and back making heaven on earth are the most intriguing people alive. They have seen the unseen and to me are a portal between here and beyond. Most people would classify that as crazy or insane, but aren't most geniuses mentally unstable anyways??????

-Dorothy

Form & Alsadir

My housemate, who is a visual artist, told me the other day she was going to separate form and content in her process. Once she decided what her content would be, and entered into creating the form, she found herself questioning her original vision to the point of distraction and reconsidering her content. (Her current project involves stitching lines of prose into a canvas...) This got me to thinking about whether form and content can be divided in the creation of poetry—do we come up with an idea, or a collection of words and see how they tumble onto the page? Or is form integral in the planning/creation of a poem?

When I was working in letterpress last fall, I found myself constantly adjusting my text to fit within the boundaries of handset type. This line won’t fit into the typestick, or there aren’t any more g’s in 12 pt Garamond, etc. There was something very powerful about these limitations. Choices had to be final because there was so much tedious work to undo them (breaking down lines, letter by letter, into their appropriate cubbies). It made me consider how valuable each word was, and what it was doing (as a prose writer, I tend to overuse them). So, in this case, form dictated content. The poems I printed were not the ones I had originally typed up on my laptop or typewriter, or scribbled in my journal—but this was the only way these poems could be expressed in the form. And one could run your fingers over the page and feel the debossed letters—an experience far more intimate than reading a longer, or more explicit, line on an offset page.

So, that is my tangent, now to the texts at hand. I’ve been considering Nuar Alsadir’s use of couplets in all three of her poems. The first thing couplets make me think of is that each line needs to be paired with another, needs a partner. This is a consideration for a poet who is crafting the poem—everything that wants to be said must fit within the decided structure. I noticed in “Bats,” (which was so special to me, because I am seduced by the lives and secrets of bats, and feel they are such ill-treated, underappreciated beings!) that each set of lines served a dual purpose that could not be replicated had the lines been shuffled.

In “Bats,” each couplet offers a physical description or visual element (of the bat) and also a reflection, or connection to the outside world (often, the human’s world).

ONE:
description – wings, not like rodents
reflection – “—not like you” (the m-dash pointing to those words is stern and intentional, a warning about the tone of the poem.)

TWO:
d – clicking of fangs
r – “they are not ashamed”

By the end of the poem, the descriptive and reflective elements have merged; they are no longer easy to separate, their meanings overlap and enhance one another.

FIVE:
d – “swim the air”
r – rising from dreams to belief

SIX:
d – clap/applause, changing direction
r – not needing applause, changing direction

Another thing that came up for me with the couplets was a feeling of authority and calm in the voice. The information is supplied steadily, uniformly (in terms of space on the page). Reading the couplets makes the pace of the poem slower and puts me at ease with the poet. The lines are almost aphoristic in this manner, particularly in “The Riddle of the Shrink.” There is so much continued white space between the lines that we are invited to read between them, to add our own impressions within the poet’s observations and reflections.

Primarily the language and form, but also the content, made me trust Alsadir—I feel entranced by her words, and I want her knowing, poetic voice to guide me & accompany me from this point onwards!

Beirut Survivors Anonymous by Haas H. Mroue

We are experiencing post - traumatic stress
somewhere in Massachusetts, Colorado.
We don't attend Beirut Survivors Anonymous.

As a direct address to the Beirut civil war "Beirut Survivors Anonymous" by Haas H. Mroue presents the conflicts concerning the aftermath of the war and how the civilians escaped, particularly as this conflict relates to how the narrator's "culture that has no name" find refuge in material goods and ecstasy pills yet they truly find refuge in the "rhythm of the Mediterranean." From rooftops the speaker looks at rockets fly over head: "until my eyes hurt." The speaker notes that he is in contact with the outside world through radio:

I listen for names of the dead
on the radio, putting faces to names,
scars to bodies, burns to flesh.

The narrator’s tone is melancholy with tinges of irony and contempt. The narrator’s contempt is for the fact that his generation drives BMW’s, yet they wish for:

a flying roadblock,
Howitzers, sniper, anything
to replace the monotony of oceans.

A howitzer is a type of artillery piece that is characterized by a relatively short barrel and the use of comparatively small explosive charges to propel projectiles at relatively high trajectories, with a steep angle of descent.

The narrator uses “eyes” as symbolism to carry the poem back and forth from Beirut to the States. The eyes contribute to the poem’s theme by being in the beginning, middle and end of the poem.

Although there is not a resolution in the poem, the eyes play with the notion that the eyes are windows to one’s soul. Eyes witness, eyes cry, eyes can go blind, eyes close and sleep, eyes see and reveal truth and lies. The narrator reveals that he has “always been alone. But now I sink and it’s not the Mediterranean.”

The comparison and contrast of the oceans represents the miles and miles that the narrator is from home. The narrator’s deep connection with Beirut is revealed in the first line “on good nights I watch rockets fly.”
The narrator is then flying in an airplane:

I fly coach cross- continent
searching for someone
to recreate my childhood with.

Post-traumatic stress is also known as "fight" or "flight" when someone is afraid. The fact that the narrator says "searching for someone to recreate my childhood with" emphasizes his inability to cope with death and that he witnessed all that death.

The narrator points to specific “I” moments but then quickly changes to “we” to describe the impact of the war on a community. “You” is only time mentioned once towards the end of the poem:

You can look into our eyes
and see we’ve been to Beirut.

“You” may suggest Americans, youth from the current generation, elders, family, or strangers.

There are many end-paused lines good, fly, dead, candlelight, now, sink, someone, no name, young.

I found it interesting that the second to last stanza's first line
"You can look in our eyes" can be on its own with the last line of the poem:
"after a car bomb."

Post - traumatic stress is experienced collectively even though all the survivors are in Colorado, Los Angeles, Long Island, Burbank, Fort Lauderdale, on the corner of College and 13th, Massachusetts, Colorado. As a side note, there has been a recent study that taking ecstasy pills radically improves PTSD survivors. Interestingly, Mroue mentions "popping ecstasy pills hoping to be artistic." Ecstasy releases the narrator's generation from the war and is a way to be emotionally detached from reality. I believe that the narrator is being elusive after he lists the ways his generation escapes but its not as real as:

"wishing for a roadblock,
Howitzers, snipers, anything
to replace the monotony of the oceans
for the rhythm of the Mediterranean."

~Melissa

The Riddle of the Shrink

I wondered about the use of couplets in Nuar Alsadir’s “The Riddle of the Shrink.” The couplets in this poem are open-ended, and the words in the lines continue into the next couplet, but the structure forces a pause between each one. The white space breaks up the reading of the poem and, as it creates a disjointedness between the lines, it also magnifies the tension described in the poem.

The language of the poem talks about “distress,” “disconnects,” “fear,” and “strain,” and the form of the poem parallels and reinforces the language. The overriding feeling I got from the poem, even trying to read it without the breaks between lines, was anxiety. It starts in the first line, “It is the distress of losing a ticket/or any other document granting passage.” What is “it” that’s causing the distress? We sense that we won’t get where we’re going. The unease builds when “the phone disconnects” and increases because we expect “to be let in” and gain access, but we miss “a secret.” By leaving us hanging, and then taking us someplace we didn’t expect to be, the split between couplets emphasizes the separation. The poem continues but without the continuity we were anticipating; this adds to the discomfort we are experiencing.

The form of the poem interrupts the flow of the reading, but there is flow in the language. If the poem were written in stanzas with complete thoughts grouped together, it would still create the unease, but perhaps without as much “strain.” Because most of the poem is written in the present tense, we feel like the action is either taking place right now or it happens on a regular basis. We go from one state of being to another; we "become the letter/that never receives a response;” we become “the ball/that rolls under the neighbor’s fence and stays.” The metaphors shift, but we are in the moment, and, at the same time, becoming something else. There’s a state of constant transition. It is the form of the poem that adds the hesitation and gives us pause.

Midway through the poem we are told, “The image of the future is the memory of the dream...” It’s a vivid image of living both in the future and in the memory of the past, but we’ve “forgotten [the] code,” so where do we go from here – forwards, backwards, or in-between? It feels like we ourselves are “suspended between this world/and the next.” This is consistent with being a letter that doesn’t receive a response – do we belong to the writer or the recipient? The ball stays in the neighbor’s yard, but it’s still our ball. Later, when we “strain/to hear another’s conversation while feigning/involvement in [our] own,” the conversations continue, but we belong to neither. The content of the poem is reinforced by its design. The words are arranged so that the language exists in more than one couplet.

The placement of the page break also felt like a significant transition. We start out on page 47 “rush[ing] to take a seat” on the subway, but continue on page 48 with changing lanes on the freeway. The division of these passages on two separate pages makes us feel like we’ve missed the train altogether (after all, we’ve lost our ticket), or that we’ve literally been “cut-off” in our lane, and life is moving too fast to ever be where we’re supposed to. The detail is “trying to get over to the right lane/in fast traffic” and the feeling is that our exit is coming up, but we might not make it in time. Again, we won’t get to where we are going.

The dream imagery works well when the last line mentions “dreaming that the alarm is about to go off.” The poem does feel like a dream where things happen but the transitions don’t always make sense. We feel like we are on the verge of something that is going to happen, but there are frustrations and white spaces that get in the way. The language expresses this tension, and the form of the poem in couplets heightens it.

Sheila Joseph

Rather than answering “yes” or “no” to the question, “Is form necessary in poetry?” I would argue that “Form is inescapable in poetry.” Whether we like it or not, once a poem is placed on the page, it is given form even if that form is formlessness. In order for a poem to be effective, it must be supported and enhanced by its form, inseparable from it, forever bound in a communal conversation with it. Before we can understand, perceive and evaluate form in a poem, we must first ascertain the poem’s purpose: we must corner it, interrogate it, determine whether it accepts or rejects us, whether or not it wants to befriend us. A poem demands our attention. We examine its physical characteristics: how it looks on the page, the length of the lines, the tone of the words, the attributes of the fonts, the presence/absence of punctuation, the sense of urgency. When we read the words, we evaluate them through any number of available decoding systems, attempting to approach the poem in its own voice in order to render the most truthful interpretation. We ask it to move us; we either agree or refuse to be moved. 

Jesús Papoleto Meléndez’s “¡Hey Yo / Yo Soy!” is an excellent example of how a poem is inseperable from its form. The poem moves about the page, imitating the swaying of the body, a swaying that is also reinforced by its choice of words. One can hear the punctuating rhythms of the Yo!’s while the ellipses signal the desire for audience response. The word Yo! stomps upon the ground, a hand in the air, and the ellipses call back, Yo! The audience response is not on the page as the ellipses indicate, and we are therefore allowed to imagine what the audience response might be during each different reading event. It will likely be different every time. We recognize now that the poem is not only occurring on, but also off, the page. 

Upon visual appraisal, the poem is stretched out across the page, yearning to encompass a whole world of multicolored individuals and views. It begs for solidarity, for unity, and thus, the form in the first stanza behaves like an umbrella, calling all words to congregate beneath it. After the first stanza, the words fall more in line, hiding under the shelter of

Hey!
            Yo!. . .
                       Yo! . . . Yo! . . .

The poem’s title, ¡Hey Yo / Yo Soy!, functions like a mirror, the slash being the actual mirror and the words on either side reflections of one another. The title, and indeed the poem, is dependent on the Spanish/English double entendre of the word “Yo!” The word asks for our attention and is called out like a greeting, but it is also a word meaning “I.” The poet is calling all of the "I"s in the world to gather: 

Hey-ey! . . . Yo! / Yo! . . .

We see in this line again the slash as mirror, alternative readings of the line being Hey You! / I! or Hey You! / Me! Then, the poet says, “I am Puerto Rican, Bro!” followed by the ellipsis, asking the reader/listener to answer back with what he or she is. 


In his “The Politics of Noise: Unmasking the ‘face of the voice as speech,’” Craig Dworkin explains the current difficulty “critics” have of explaining and understanding the visual components of a poem’s form. He states that: 

In part, this may well be due to the difficulty of talking about visual prosody; we lack a sophisticated critical tradition and ready vocabulary. In fact, when such matters are considered at all, any radical deviation from a printing norm is generally taken to be a more important classificatory element for poetry than the underlying theoretical conceptions of representation, performance, or the relationships between text, space, sound, and so on.

Melendez does radically disrupt the “printing norm” (a left aligned, relatively patterned line breaks, similar line lengths) in his poem; however he is not attempting to radically unsettle “the grid of the page,” as Dworkin argues poets like Susan Howe might do. Rather, the form of Melendez’s poem is dependent on the accepted, physical grid of the page: a right to left, up and down reading. It does not seek to subvert this paradigm because it relies on the paradigm to get its message across: we must uproot the norm by pushing against it, by undoing its violence against us and its encouragement of violence against ourselves. The “radically disrupted page” (in Dworkin’s words) has the effect of “situat[ing] its readers in a position from which they might more empathetically respond to the issues of power addressed by their thematic treatment of personal and cultural violence.” How does this work? When we normally read in English, we expect the left to right format and the patterned line breaks, etc. We read patriarchally; that is, we expect a certain parataxis in our reading, a certain syntax, an understanding of symbols by their oppositions (i.e. light vs. dark, cold vs. hot, me vs. you). When we read something that is against these norms, we are displaced, we are both experiencing and participating in the feeling from which the poem’s message stems. Melendez thwarts the patriarchal power structure by refusing to “properly” align words with one another, by using one word to embody a paradox (as in Yo! referring simultaneously to both “You” and “Me”) and by using both English and Spanish to deliver a message that might not be wholly understood by those who are not bilingual. The reader is now in a place to understand a communication that emerges from the margins. 

Form, according to M. H. Abrams, is not a “fixed container, like a bottle, into which the ‘content’ or ‘subject matter’ of a work is poured,” but rather, is elastic, shapeshifting to fit the purpose of the poem or the viewpoint of the person writing/evaluating it (Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 101). In this case, Melendez uses form to relay the message that both love and racism run deep: 

Because of Love
                          of A Love so deep
                                                  deep
                                 that still it seeps
                                                        seeps
                                        within Us deep
                                                            deep,
                                                        yet still
                                                          it seeps. . .

The words themselves are like a pouring, trickling down into the soil of language. They are deeply rooted and seemingly impossible to excise. The same form is repeated later in the stanza on racism: 

This, Thing, 
                  RACiSM!!!
                               is an Unnatural schism
                  that makes You
                        part of a SyStem

Here, you can see in the way the words are arranged on the page the similarities with the seepage of deep love in the previously examined stanza. Also, the way Melendez separates “SyStem” with capital letters calls our attention to the word “Stem” that lies within the root of the word “system” and corresponds with the aforementioned stanza: the unspoken metaphor of roots. Here, also, the small “i” in “RACiSM” is mirrored in other words containing the “I” such as “KiLLing” and “prisoN.” The alignment of the three capital letters on the page (yoU, prisoN, and NO) form the word “UNO” also referring to “one” along with the “I” and the “Me.” Eventually, the lower case “i” in “KiLL” gives way to small capitals in “KILLKILL!!!” indicating the rise of the “I” to do violence, an especially heinous violence: the destruction of one’s own kind. Similarly, Melendez has separated the word “Violado” (rape) from other words in a previous stanza, effectively illustrating a rape’s ability (both literal and metaphorical) to separate and isolate. 

Finally, the discerning reader cannot overlook the use of punctuation in Melendez’s poem. He uses both Spanish and English punctuation, but in focusing solely on the English punctuation, one can see a certain conscientiousness evident in his choice of symbols. Melendez has almost run the gamut of available punctuation (and some almost to excess): the exclamation point, ellipsis, comma, dash, period, quotes, colons, parentheses, the slash, and even the elision mark (as in “’Tis” for “It’s”). However, this overabundance of punctuation draws my attention not so much to what is there (for the excess of it is a message in itself) but to what is not there: the semicolon. In thinking of the earmarks of the semicolon, I am drawn to two particular characteristics: its visual element of appearing like a hybrid between the colon and the comma, and its use as a punctuation mark that separates two sentences of equal weight. What does this mean to the form of the poem? In order to understand the semicolon’s function as a hybrid between the comma and the colon, we must first identify the uses of both commas and colons. The comma is a pause, a simple breath. It is a way to step back from a sentence, a way to evaluate from a very short distance. It is a politeness. The colon, however, serves as a signal that more information is about to be given. What follows the colon enhances and explains what has come before. It is complimentary. The semicolon thus indicates a type of compromise. Therefore, the absence of the semicolon, this hybrid, reinforces poem’s message of solidarity: there can be no compromise. Without a semicolon, the poet is stating that if we are to overcome the seepage of racism with the depth of love, we must come together wholly and finally, without compromising our values. In the poem, two sentences of equal weight cannot be separated, they must be fused: the I must be the You and the You must be the Me. One can neither perform nor promote an act of violence on his own kind.

ComprendeMI!!! he finishes. 

Do you understand?

H.K.

What struck me immediately in the form of Mroue's Beirut Survivors Anonymous is the way in which he uses the the minimal white space to provide shifts in focus, narrative and voice.

Initially we are in the midst of an attack, present to the flying of rockets and living in the dark of war so as not to provide any more targets. In this process the narrator talks about,

on the radio, putting faces to names,
scars to bodies, burns to flesh.

The war is personalized, taken out of the realm of the abstract and distant, faces receive names, scars are bodies, burns are flesh, it presents these victims as whole people not disconnected dead bodies as western media often portrays them. From the immediacy of that stanza the white space leaps us ahead a number of years. It now presents us with a remembered incidents, we are not in the war but in memories of war, a very different perspective. This stanza also contains the last instance of a singular voice for this narrative.

The lines,

I fly coach cross-continent
searching for someone
to recreate my childhood with.
We are walking to school. It is May.

with this moment of communal we is then disrupted by a return to I for the rest of the stanza; however it is a foreshadowing of the rest of the poem. The next white space involves the shifting of the voice from a singular personal experience to a shared one. The someone the narrator is searching for is found and merges into a seamless voice that nevertheless positions itself as multiple with We being the voices of many raised to say the same thing. Through the remaining stanzas the We is deepened and processed into a more clear identity for the reader.

The positionality continues to shift in the white space between the stanzas. In the third stanza we are back in America, wrapped in memories of war that are preferable to the place they find themselves now. Isn't this a function of memory, a yearning for times/places that the passage of years has rendered into a soft focus that erases the more negative aspects of the experience? I think so, and while I do see some of that there's also a fierce honesty in regards to the realities of war, evident in the fourth stanza.

We jump back in time, in memory, back to the war but the shelling is only the framing:

It is for nights of unrelenting shelling
we long, for the calm of corridors and neighbors
boiling coffee until dawn, for gunpowder seeping
through shut windows and the wails
of a single ambulance.

While the first and last lines of the stanza enclose it in the acts of war and the results the placement of the words we long puts it in an inbetween position. Is it longing for the shelling or for the things that follow, the community that forms through survival of war? When we keep in mind the We voice and the title of the piece it becomes an obvious call for connection. It is not actually the war that is missed but the personal connections and support that formed in opposition to it.

The next white space provides another switch back to the States, it also builds on the the search for community. The We tries to return to the memories of Beirut by links to arak, belly-dancers and hummous but the connection is false, in the end the last two lines of the stanza

longing for green plums and salt,
the ecstasy of Howitzers on a school night.

show us a longing for the reality of home not the falseness of American narratives of Arab culture that focus on the exotification of watered down pieces of the society taken completely out of context. It is a longing for the truth of home set against the facade of home that America presents for consumption.

The white space after that stanza gives another huge shift, this time from concrete to abstract. The focus on physical interactions of things, places and people is replaced by the psychic space and scars of those who've lived through the war and been transplanted into America. As opposed to previous stanzas when the communal we is connected to actions such as "lived", "long", "drink", "watch", "vomit" while in the final two stanzas the wes "are", "don't", "still", "can" positioning them in a space of being as opposed to doing.

The exploration of the identity of a Beirut Survivor happens in the white space where changes of voice, place and position happen silently and without fanfare.

spoken word contrapuntals?

The question of content v. form is one that never gets old for me. Is form reacting to content, is content built around form? Does it switch halfway through the writing of the poem? I’m interested, sign me up.

I just about peed my pants when I saw “A Blue Black Pearl” in BumRush today. Seriously. How many contrapuntal poems do you find in a book of spoken word poems? Um, NONE. Bam, so stoked, especially after reading what a jaw-dropping four-footer this one by Clairesa Clay is.

I decided to look up what contrapuntal actually means (when not applied to poems), and the definition is unsurprising: of, relating to, or marked by counterpoint. This makes great sense, considering the latin root of the word, contra punctum, expands to very literally mean “point against point.” I think the term is originally a musical word, but I’ll leave the expansion of that to HK Rainey, since I’m almost positive she knows much more about it than me (and can probably explain it better, too).

My understanding of the contrapuntal (a poem that is multidirectional in its reading) is that, like in music, the two directions represent two distinct sounds or voices. Often, I think, contrapuntal poems tell two versions of a story within one. They are not necessarily opposing views, but definitely different vantage points. Often, one is much more poetic than the other, by fault of tricky punctuation (or none, as the case may be) or missing articles or pronouns.

In “A Blue Black Pearl,” the voices take hold right away. There is a history being told, a reparation for the past being carved out. We read down the columns for a cold, hard story. She is frank with us, tells it straight, and lets us breathe during the looping of “forty years.” There is a moment of transformation that happens at the end, but one that definitely isn’t complete without the additional reading.

The second reading, across all four “feet” of the poem, let’s the narration drop into a trance-like reflection. Instead of seeing the narrator straight on as she speaks to us, we are pushed to zoom in past her and focus on what’s happening behind the words. Whereas “forty years” was a place holder in the previous reading, it has become the drumbeat that keeps us steady with our eyes closed. Because the “forty years” lines appear in somewhat of a predictable pattern (two or three grouped closely and then a long break, in which the language becomes intense both topically and phonetically), we can pace ourselves through what might otherwise be an unusual reading. Instead, the poem seems like an incantation from this direction, a stretched mantra of healing for this blue black pearl.

By the time we reach the ending of the poem (in the second, horizontal reading), the speaker doesn’t sound any more relieved and yet we must know that she is. Like the relief after a good cry or the breaking of the sky over your eyelids after heavy meditation, we are pulled from the poem abruptly, but with a sense of self. We have a body, we know where we stand. There is some kind of intuitive hope that slips in during this hypnotizing read that couldn’t have happened within the plain narrative.

So when I return to the question of content v. form, I’m not necessarily concerned with which happened first, but with the fact that they both happened, finally. This poem would have been really long and hard to follow had it been written sporadically across the page or, pete forbid, in one tiny column against the left hand margin. Then again, not just any poem works in the contrapuntal form. Technically they do, but not intuitively or emotionally.

I guess my question, then, is how do we know which form to choose? Is it like trying on clothes, you pop the words into different forms until you find one that’s occasion-appropriate (and cross your fingers that it fits)?

And then also -- how would you read this aloud? 

Poetry and Form: Mroue and Powell

In Beirut on good

nights I watch rockets fly

over rooftops until my eyes hurt.

I listen for names of the dead

on the radio, putting faces to names,

scars to bodies, burns to flesh.

I remove my contacts by candlelight

and flush my eyes with Detrol.

In Haas H. Mroue’s poem “Beirut Survivors Anonymous” (Inclined to Speak, p 240) there is not much white space. There is little room for rest or peacefulness in a history of haunting violence that Mroue in title and the poem’s beginning, locates as Beirut. “I” turns to “We” in the second stanza and the poem does not lose it’s intimacy. It is consistent in form and content and does not stray from heavily holding on to the left sided margin, like a weight that keeps Mroue from falling into an abyss of despair and loneliness. The trauma from surviving war, is steadily piercing but in a numbed ritual, an everyday pattern of remembering.

The poem “Civil War” is similar in theme, but the form is slightly different. The lines are shorter in some areas, more white space. Mroue uses less words, but the impact is more intense with a volatile imagery. Here are a few lines that were particularly jarring (Inclined to Speak, p 246),

Give me back my testicles

my sister’s nipples...

On a balcony of a bombed out skyscraper

I dangle my soul out for you.

Snipers where are you?

Don’t ignore me now...

I scrape my eyes out with the cross,

collect my gushing blood

on the pages of the Koran...

In reading Kevin Powell’s “What the deal son?” from Bum Rush The Page it reminded me immediately of Mroue’s first poem in form, leaning to the left but in this case with no line breaks at all. Ideas and images intersect, conflict, overlap and flow together like a chaotic dream-in the form of a question that loops. “Will I? We hear again and again in an almost defeated repetition like falling in a dream. There is an ominous intensity that builds quickly in the beginning lines of this poem, especially with the imagery of falling into “a pit of purple rats,” “apocalypse,” “welts”, “darkness,” “gunshot residue”and “mother’s two failed abortions.” His poem takes a surprising turn as it becomes specific, a story within a church of a feared reverend. Here Powell is a boy never quite the same (Bum Rush The Page, p 168)

bow-legged black boy

who became an insomniac

as a man so terrified of sleeping

The form of this poem is a fast pace tempo and with no breaks we are thrown into this feeling of a child not being safe who has become an adult. At the end of the piece Powell questions religion, declares his own belief in God. All of these poems mentioned use form effectively because the line’s tempo speeds up giving immediacy to the words, or in some instances, slows down for contrast and breath between images. The block form on the left gives the content a sense of importance and weight. This is why form in poetry is so important to express ourselves in various ways, whether it is elusive or declarative, singular or plural, etc.

There She Go, There She Goes-A Hip Hop Ballad Battle

For this week’s readings the poems that resonated with me the most were in the section: It Was the Music That Made Us from Bum Rush the Page. This section began and stayed relatively strong with a womanist, or feminist take on hip hop. Thank you to the editors Tony Medina and Louis Reyes Rivera for not just including a token splice, but allowing us to breathe a layered representation of critical thought and savvy poetic flow. From Jessica Care Moore’s poem “I’m a Hip Hop Cheerleader” to Nzinga Regtuinah Chavis’s “enter(f*#@ckin)tained” I was delighted to engage with readings that demonstrated both a love for hip hop in form and yet were critical of content reflected in the mainstream.

In “I’m a Hip Hop Cheerleader” Jessica Care Moore is not afraid to express her gender and bravely shows us a feminine strength in raising serious issues with humor and pom poms. I first came across Moore’s work through a circle of girlfriends who sent one of her poems, “I’m in Love With Potential,” around through email. With a recent breakup having just passed at the time, her poem hit me in a nurturing, strong way and made me laugh. I enjoyed it so much I posted it on one of my blogs! Here it is,

I'm in love with potential

I keep falling in love with potential

But it never seems to work out

He was full of a lot of it

And he was TALL

But potential had a way of becoming diluted with insecurities

And just cause you can see the beauty of someone

Doesn't mean they can see it for themselves

Still I believed potential would eventually love me

As much I loved him

Then begin to love himself

The way I loved myself

But there was someone else

There always is

Potential had an influential way

Of showing me what my potential was

And he celebrated all I could do without him

Potential reminded me of how he loved my commitment

To doing whatever I had to do to exercise my own potential

Even if that meant potentially leaving him behind

Still I unconditionally loved potential

And held on to the potential future we could have

If only he would see our potential

Without being intimidated by my own potential

If he would just stop loving me with conditions

Especially when I loved him

Simply for the possibility of how great

He could become and already was

But didn't know it

Cause he was caught up in my potential,

Instead of seeing my life

As a reflection of what he already had or

What we could potentially have together

And that meant loving you when you hadn't yet

Reached your full potential

But helping you get there as quickly as possible

Isn't it just a bit too easy to fall in love

With someone after the glory and

Not along the slow, goal setting, potential way?

And if I didn't love your possibilities

Then I didn't love you

And if you didn't realize our possibilities

Because you were too wound up in my potential

Then you didn't really love me

I guess sometimes we give potential too much credit

And borrow interest from our own accounts

Without taking ourselves into account

How many times did I blow off your behavior

Relying on potential?

I can no longer count

Or wait around for you

To let me stand naked in front of you

So you can see yourself as worthy of my love

You loving me for me and not through me

Can really be potentially dangerous

Now again in Bum Rush The Page, Moore has poetically delivered a similar upbeat, feisty attack with “grown ass woman” tactics. An aspect I appreciate in both of these two poems by Moore is her ability to not let us “off the hook” as women. She challenges us to take responsibility for our choices and not settle for less than what we righteously deserve, whether it be our choice of partner in a relationship, or the music we listen to or create. In this “the personal is political” style Moore reminds me of our local Bay Area heroine poet, Aya de Leon who is best known for her work on these themes such as in her book Thieves in the Temple: The Reclaiming of Hip Hop (which she later turned into a one-woman show) and her performance, act of self-love in “Deciding to Marry Myself.”

Jessica Care Moore’s “I’m a Hip Hop Cheerleader” carries as a hip hop ballad and battle for women, witnessing herself and other women who continue to represent. She masterfully repeats the music sample lines from “There I go, There I go” (from “Same Song” by Tupac and Digital Underground) in the middle and toward the end of the poem (p 191) and changes the lyrics to,

there she go

there she goes...

An ending that has no end and pushes us to come along with her in a wave of optimism and change for new voices to enter. Thank you, Jessica Care Moore!