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4 Telegraphs from a Distracted Sibyl i went to graduate school in santa Cruz. d ipping into the Bay a rea bouillabaisse of aesthetically and politically engaged poets, artists, filmmakers, musicians , and new age root workers, and getting all sorts of ideas and notions in my encounters with postmodern theory as a grad student, i rediscovered my favorite modernists, Jean t oomer, Melvin t olson, and Gertrude stein, and started on my second book, Trimmings, which is, in part, my way of giving propers to our Ms. Gwendolyn Brooks, and talking back to Gertrude’s Tender Buttons and Melanctha. My “girt/girdle” paragraph is also a tribute to Gertrude “Ma” r ainey, as well as Genie stein. Trimmings was followed by S*PeRM**K*T, which is similar to its predecessor, but with a nastier attitude , since it spews out the mass culture that has used my brain pan as its petri dish. (i could remember 20-year-old jingles but couldn’t recite a line of Jay Wright or ed r oberson to save my soul.) Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T are both prose poems and list poems. i particularly enjoyed the challenge of transforming and recycling the list poem, a workshop cliché, from the compost heap of listless language and depicted devices. However, i freely admit that a persistent fear, as i composed these poems in prose, was that they might not be recognizable (despite my dotty improvs on Black english and my deliberate choice of a “trivial,” “feminine” subject matter and a “minor” literary form). Like legal scholar patricia Williams , i occasionally dread that the greatest accolade, or even acceptance, the so-called mainstream culture can oἀer me is that, after i’ve been dead long enough, i might be remembered as white and/or male (or praised for having written “like” a white male). i suppose that’s why i allowed the publication of those frightful pictures of myself on the books. in both texts, i adapted the prose poem, composed of my own kind of “new sentences,” instead of using open or free verse forms. i also took the t elegraphs from a d istracted sibyl 19 risk of abandoning the precisely located black female subjectivity of my first, folksy book—Tree Tall Woman—for something that looks more like the text of a telegraph from a distracted sibyl whose songs, if not her feet, are always shuffling. (in this respect i compare myself to erica Hunt, whose Local History struck me as urgently urban, postmodern, and sibylline. incidentally the sibyl was perhaps the first deconstructionist in the sense that she constantly deconstructed her own written texts, and her oracles, something like ifa divination, or like what ishmael r eed in Mumbo Jumbo calls “Jes Grew’s text,” were randomized fragments from her voluminous manuscripts, which some zealous literary censor later burned. a less complete annihilation, or what translator d iane r ayor calls “a collaboration of the poet and time,” produced the tantalizingly spare lines of sappho.) i think of my first book as more a derivation and celebration of my mother ’s (spoken) voice than as the discovery of “my own voice” as a writer. in poetry i have no voice, only text. i like it that way, since i’ve always been a shy and disorganized speaker but a much bolder and more focused writer. My next work, Muse & Drudge (also known as “Mules & d rugs”) is a verse poem in quatrains that uses rhyme and rhythm inconsistently and, i hope, unpredictably; it is an attempt on my part to return to a more-orless recognizably “colored,” “negro,” “black,” or “a frican a merican” base of folk-street-blues-based riἀs, rap, and rhetoric without returning to the specifically located subjectivity of my earlier work. i wanted to use all that i’ve learned since i strayed from the beaten to the oἀ-beat path but still keep my promise to meet the devil at the crossroads and walk a mile in some other body’s down-or-upbeat sneakers, as the case may be, with plenty of wordplay along the way. Muse & Drudge is, on the one hand, a pretty straightforward praise song to women of the a frican diaspora, although a good deal of it is less than flattering; on the other hand, it is a blues riἀ on sappho as sapphire . a s an old bluesman said, with double-edged ambiguity, “if it wasn’t for women...

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