Poetry Night

The 2011 Callaloo Conference had one highlight after another. One was watching academics gallantly performing Ben Patterson’s 1960 composition, “Paper Piece.” You had to be there! Another highlight—and the one that this essay is concerned with—was “Poetry Night,” featuring readings by Vievee Francis, Dawn Lundy Martin, and Gregory Pardlo, with Koritha Mitchell as moderator. The night of poetry was a fine demonstration of the conference theme of “Translation,” not necessarily because one of the readers, Greg Pardlo, had published a translation of Niels Lyngsø, Pencil of Rays and Spiked Mace: Selected Poems.

To echo some of the conclusions from another excellent session on “Creative Writing as Translation,” the night was remarkable because it confirmed the process of creative writing, especially poetry, involves a kind of “interpretation” or transposition of experience and/or ideas into an arrangement of words on the page that stand in for the experience, hopefully adhering to the truth of it, even as it employs transformative tools like metaphor to create something altogether different and yet familiar, a boogaloo, a universe, a “soundproof” womb. As each poet read in turn, it was as if poets and poems called and responded, each to the other, in imagery or theme, in language or mood or rhythm. In turn, the audience responded, clapping after poems they really connected with, and peppering the poets with comments and questions during the Q&A that followed the reading. Impressed by the intensity of her delivery, Charles Rowell asked Dawn Lundy Martin about “how” she read her poems, which generated extensive discussion about how poets treat the notion of the body in their poetry. Régine Michelle Jean-Charles queried Dawn and the panel about “[wrestling] with ‘the unspeakable’” and how she “wrote violence” in her poems. I was reminded of Audre Lorde’s assertion in Sister Outsider that poetry is “a way to give name to the nameless so that it can be thought” (37). And although I asked quite a different question regarding the relationship between speaker, poet, and audience, Régines’s is the question I wanted to ask or should have asked. I was really trying to get at the idea of representing trauma, the “how” of it in the creative process. So what resonated for me was the poets’ communication of violation as default principle, from a black or minority perspective, the idea that trauma (whether global or local or familial), was an inherent existential condition and therefore inevitable.

Of course, each poet’s approach was unique in style and vision, but it is as if they all took turns, even with the most playful poems, “witnessing,” in Sterling Plumpp’s term, as “citizens of chaos,” if we take into account not only the poet’s traditional role in society but the black man/ black woman poet’s call to utterance, given the historical contingencies that would take more time to name than I have space in this essay. In “Blues Not Gonna Die” in Blues Narratives, Plumpp writes,

I am a citizen of chaos I patchwork My angle of vision From how I tell And tell and tell My days

(55)

In this review I highlight one poem for each poet, beginning with the first reader, Vievee Francis. Francis’s “Say It, Say It Any Way You Can” is didactic and performative in its percussive declaratives, a kind of call to arms and defense against despair and feelings of powerlessness, as if the poem’s recounting of the particular experience contains it and thus controls it, while the speaker guides the listener through its labyrinths of feeling. “He hit her in the back of the head. Truth—finds its own coarse measure. Not long out of diapers I wore purple hot pants and danced a funky chicken.” The speaker opens with a blunt monosyllabic declaration that “hits” the reader in a visceral, even familiar way. Francis says it, orders it, from the modal perspective with which Michael Harper’s speaker describes Bessie Smith’s violent demise in “Last Affair: Bessie’s Blues Song” in Images of Kin (28).¹ Francis re-creates experience with...