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

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

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.