Signals: Poems

Notes

Notes The epigraph is from Robert Duncan’s “This Place Rumord to Have Been Sodom,” from The Opening of the Field (1960). “Here, or the White Boy on the Bus” is deeply indebted to Brother Outsider, a documentary film about the life of Bayard Rustin. The epigraph comes from a speech Rustin gave on September 25, 1963, at the Community Church in NewYork, N.Y., entitled “After the March,What?”The speech was recorded and aired by Pacifica Radio and included in the audio track of Brother Outsider. “Confederates”—In 1970 a mob of white protestors in Lamar, South Carolina, overturned a school bus of black children on its way to the newly integrated public school. The Confederate flag was removed from the dome of the South Carolina capitol on July 1, 2000. Earlier that year, on January 17 (Martin Luther King Day), almost fifty-thousand people rallied against the flag in a march on the statehouse grounds. “Journal” adapts lines from the diaries of ThomasWentworth Higginson, white colonel of the First Carolina Volunteers, a black regiment of the Army of the United States during the Civil War.The diaries were published in 1870 as Army Life in a Black Regiment. The epigraph to “Pest Houses, Sullivan’s Island” is taken from the poem “Sand,” by MarjoryWentworth, from her book Despite Gravity. “Molasses” was written after reading “Kiva Floor at Abo” by Ray Gonzalez. Some lines in “Pest Houses, Sullivan’s Island” and “Rites” are adapted from Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead” and from Robert Duncan’s “This Place Rumord to Have Been Sodom .” “Rites” also adapts lines from “Thelma’s Precious Cargo” and “Love Oil” by Kwame Dawes. “Three Poems on Politics”—Penn Center, an AfricanAmerican educational center established early in the CivilWar, has served as an important site for community organizing. “Transom”—WhenW. E. B. DuBois applied for membership in the Communist Party USA in 1961, he wrote in an open letter , “Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to selfdestruction . No universal selfishness can bring social good to all.” The epigraph to “Roots: An Essay on Race” comes from Nikky Finney’s “Pluck,” from Rice. ...