i have new poet crushes!

I think I’ve found one of my new favorite poets. This is huge.

Lisa Asagi’s work takes me by the throat. She nails isolation, I mean really freakin nails it. Is her series of dated prose poems (April 14, 15, 22) part of a larger book? The acknowledgments say yes, that they first appeared in Twelve Scenes from 12 A.M. Incredible! Just incredible!

In “April 14,” Asagi sucks me in with her authoritative but delegating tone. She requires the reader to be responsible, she expects the reader to be comfortable without hand-holding and instead trusts us to read through the fragments easily as if we were following her through her sister’s house to the child’s room. Everything changes with the line, “And I wish it could stop,” referencing the plastic fish bobbing mechanically in circles. Before we even reach the following line (equally jarring and vortex-like), she transforms the color of the space from childlike to dark and very adult. I find it interesting that Asagi writes “could” instead of “would.” The phrase, “I wish it would stop,” which I find myself saying often when the dog next door won’t quit barking or when the craziness of scheduling rolls out of control, implies that whatever is happening is physically capable of stopping. That it can happen. When Asagi writes “I wish it could stop,” the room shuts down. She implies with one word a new level of intensity, of impossibility. The poet stops talking about the fish or the room in that moment. She speaks of something much bigger and immortal.

By the next line, we understand this futility, that the ability to stop is rendered hopeless. It expands from the room to the “motion of this living.” Bam! We climax here, this is the moment the poem has been building toward. And surprisingly, she eases us back out. I find that endearing and wonderful; most poets will bring you to the edge and leave you.

I thought a lot about how reading this particular work and others in this week’s reading has already changed my writing. I’m watching what they’re doing and absorbing the directions they’re giving me. I feel like I have new routes to travel, new and more exciting ways to arrive at similar spaces. This is exhilarating. These poets (and Asagi in particular) have rewired tiny parts of my brain, directionally. Even in “April 22,” Asagi writes “But it feels like one by one ropes are being untied and tossed onto a boat I am standing on.” How many times have you known that feeling but not articulated it in a way that makes sense to someone or hasn’t been done a million times? God, I’m in love.

Other poets that are teaching me things:

Agha Shahid Ali, in the poem “A List Memory of Delhi,” re-introduces me to film on the page. The poem reads as if each stanza is a clip from a movie, a series of short scenes in which we get a larger story with ineffable motion. We are literally moving through the poem, we are the camera lens. (This is also really helpful to me for selfish reasons in that I am currently writing poems about memories for which I was not present, much like Ali’s retelling of a time when he was not yet born. Awesome.)

Brandy Nalani McDougall’s poem “How I Learned to Write My Name,” is using similar techniques, but feels more like a single camera angle that moves in and out of focus between the foreground and the background. While she is remembering how she learned to write her name, she’s using this foreground to tell the real story of her father stealing from her mother and leaving while her mother is in the shower, in the background. The distraction is what tells the story, the poem sits at the fuzzy place in between foreground and background. Such a smart and beautiful poem.

Similarly, I thought a lot about how I might learn from these poets’ particular stylistic choices. I’ve already expressed my conflicting feelings about this idea of  “published = finished” on the blog, and I by no means intend to try to edit or workshop these poets. Still, I look at Vandana Khanna’s poem “Alignment” on page 83, for example, and wonder at the job that the asterisks are performing (all the while knowing Elmaz is secretly cringing, hah). I wonder why space is not enough to separate these stanzas and think back to my own work, wondering if & where such punctuation (is an asterisk a punctuation mark?) might function, much less benefit, the poem. I’m also looking at that last stanza where it is mentioned that the parents of the narrative voice met with an astrologer to see if their “stars were aligned.” Could this be a physical/visual enactment of that stanza’s intention, that all of these stars (four sets of three) are aligned neatly & reliably? Whether or not this is the case, I begin thinking about different ways to accomplish the same affect without using a symbol like the asterisk. Khanna has me thinking stylistically and I appreciate it.

Totems to Hip Hop

Hi all,

Reed’s introduction to From Totems to Hip-Hop really moved me. Got me thinking. He gave me the words I’ve been searching for to explain how I know when I appreciate a writer’s work. “It’s when a writer, through the use of their talent, connects to readers who might not share that writer’s background, that the writer’s work becomes universal.” I found that to be the case in the Politics section of this book. I don’t consider myself to be politically-savvy, but I know enough to have intelligent conversations with those who do. I don’t get into great debates about politics, but I am aware of how politics affects my life. So when I read Miguel Algarin’s, And in the U.S.A., I didn’t need to be from New Brunswick, NJ to connect to it, I’ve got enough family members who have gone through the criminal injustice system to understand the picture he paints. I didn’t need to know about the Strawberry Swimming Pool in 1998 (see link below) to know what it feels like to be somewhere that I didn’t belong (according to those who claim they did belong) and to have my presence questioned and threatened. I can go to the Claremont Hotel 10 blocks from my apartment and experience that today. But these poems did widen my lens. They made me aware of the fact that what I experience is not isolated to my experience. That is what I think some poets of color do really well. They use poetry as a medium for telling the truth, no matter how hard or how harsh that truth may be. Not that white writers don’t do that, but more times than not, white writers write for themselves ( a really selfish use of the craft) or they write for others just like them—not concerned with the universality of their work.

**Let me provide the disclaimer before you start banging on your keyboards: I know I’m over-generalizing –not ALL poets of color use poetry as a medium for telling the truth and not all white writers are selfishly using the craft or only writing for those like them.

Moving on – so the idea that poetry has the power to be universal is not a new one, but one that continues to intrigue me as a poet and a writer. I found most of the poems in this Politics section to have some universal quality to them and I found ways to connect to them either as a poet or as a person of color who shares the experience they are writing about.

Mari Evans’s poem, “Speak the Truth to the People” seemed like a mantra poem to me (can we add mantra poem to the glossary?) because of the abundance of repetition. Not just because of the repetition – great poets use repetition all the time, it’s where Evans places the repetition and how she chooses to emphasize the repeated lines/phrases/words. In the first and second lines, she repeats, “to the people” then in the third and fourth lines, she repeats, “free them.” She continues to use similar repetition in lines 8 – 13 with the word “enslaved” and the words “can be” and “unwisdom.” This pattern continues throughout and becomes mantra/chant-like.

How do truth-telling and mantra poems go together? Well for me, a mantra is something you use to change or alter your energy in a positive way – I feel the Truth (yes capital T) can do the same thing.

My favorite piece from this section of Reed’s book happens to be by a white poet, 1990 by Bob Holman. Aside from that being the year I graduated high school, the poem really read aloud beautifully. Are y’all starting to see that I’m a fan of repetition if done well? Okay, I’m guilty. But Holman uses the phrase, “It’s 1990/& Nelson Mandela is free” to highlight the other, somewhat insane, moments that were happening or being focused on when this historically powerful and significant event was taking place. He uses lots of sarcasm (which I am also a fan of if done right) to show how many people simply moved on as if Mandela’s freedom was just another thing to take up news footage and keep them from their soap operas or their busy lives. He uses the truth of what was happening in 1990 and creates a satirical poem that mimics Kenneth Fearing’s 1933 in many ways. While Fearing does not use repetition to propel his work, he does highlight events by personifying 1933—Holman was able to do this with repetition. So to bring this post full circle, I must point out that the political content in all of the poems in this section did several things for me the poet – 1)they made me realize that my poetry might benefit from the inclusion of political content and 2) that political content will be best if I see my poetry as a vehicle for truth and honor the truth that is my unique experience as delivered by my unique voice. As a reader, the political content reminded me that there is a global experience that is happening in this world, whether we choose to participate in it or not, it happened, is happening, and will happen. I appreciate the work of poets (no matter their color) who use their poetry to include everyone in truthful conversations about this one world we all share – regardless of the many elements that we allow to divide us.

--awaiting your thoughts—

Kiala

p.s. the link to a fairly recent article about the Cecil Brown experience