Tag: poetry

What Black Poets Taught Me

It’s more than halfway through National Poetry Month, which I personally observe in some way every April, and this post, to me, is a little late. What I wrestle with in these times is trying to figure out what to say that is helpful, even when I’m not sure what that is. Trying to make sure that I am not allowing events or bullies to suppress my natural inclination to share, while I am also not adding to the noise.

Here is where I landed, which is where I started with poetry back in the day: I’ve been contemplating what I’ve learned about courage, writing and language from Black poets. And I elaborated on what I posted on Substack with this Medium post:

“…Poetry reminds me that feelings of despair and hopelessness that I sometimes feel are not unique to this time, that beautiful words and unique insights are a common reoccurence.

In the words of Audre Lorde, poetry is not a luxury:

The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us-the poet whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary awareness and demand, the implementation of that freedom.

I hope these times find you implementing your freedom in all the ways you see fit. If you are a poetry lover, please share your faves with me in the comments. I made a brief list of some of mine over at Bookshop.

Women of the Post is a Gotham Book Prize Finalist & the 2024 Bay Area Book Festival, June 1-2

Thank you for your ongoing patience with me as I navigate a full and busy life. I’ve been gushing all over social media about the news that Women of the Post is a 2024 Gotham Book Prize finalist. The winner will be publicly announced next week, but in the meantime, here’s a little history about the prize, and why it’s such an honor to even be nominated.

And I would be remiss not to mention that I’m headed back to the Bay Area for the 10th Anniversary of the Bay Area Book Festival to speak on a panel with some brilliant Black women, which is basically my favorite thing to do in life. Come visit if you’re at the festival!

Finally, in case I haven’t mentioned it enough, I spend most of any imagined free time I have writing reviews and other things at my Substack, Black Book Stacks. Here’s what I thought about Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham, and what I’m reading now.

A Black Girl Joy Poem: Rhythm

As published in Kweli Journal’s Black Girlhood Issue – My gratitude to Laura & crew for selecting it.

Sunup to sundown, a hundred shades of Black girl beauty. Caramel & pecan-colored, rays springing from our lips, mouths full as golden balloons, sweet as Jolly Ranchers. Sugar bubble gum breath, tongues grape purple, hair deep brown or bright pink or braided royal blue, slicked with shea butter & coconut oil, edges smooth & dry elbows oiled like our thirsty shins.

We stay ready – we don’t need to get ready.

We spring after winter, a breeze of competition. Eyes prying youth open to look inside at our becoming, hips spreading womanhood wide east & west.

Bass flying through rattling windows, energy lodged in earth thrumming, shoulders curved in, protecting our hearts & the fly chains at our necks from the chill as our bodies learn to be the sounds of the city.

Our souls sway to drums that never stop pulsing.

Our feet never stop moving.

If we can’t move, we don’t exist.

We are some bodies, so: we rock, we roll, we slay with Janet Jackson levels of control.

Spring, a short bridge to summer, means time to show these people we mean business.

We pound out hood morse code on cafeteria tables, rocking steady, swaying up against the wall with our loves, legs scissored, hair turning back from the humidity we make as we become songs.

We grown in every moment we steal, singing to our own soundtrack.

Tamika & Amecca & Ayana & Monique make another party with us, names like songs, like prayers rising from the Atlantic floor so we would always be music.

A drumbeat, a declaration, a love song.

A step, a cheer, a chant with our mouths, the beat vibrating from hands on flesh.

We make celebration between the long hours of what else is there? Passing notes or sending texts or watching the timelines & scrolling & scrolling. Sweat reminds us we are alive & we are here & we are planted.

The rest is here.

 

A Letter to my Nieces & Nephews on Ella Baker’s Birthday

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Photo Credit:  NAACP Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

My loves,

One of the greatest Black women poets of our time, Lucille Clifton, is not frequently taught in schools — or at least not taught enough. Her poem, song at midnight, contains a line you may have seen on the internet, in part. We like to circulate it among ourselves as a clarion call, a prayer, a balm & mantra, especially the last lines, but here is the second part of it, from The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010, edited by Kevin Young and Michael S. Glaser:

born into babylon

both nonwhite and woman

what did i see to be except myself?

i made it up

here on this bridge between

starshine and clay,

my one hand holding tight

my other hand; come celebrate

with me that everyday

something has tried to kill me

and has failed.

The epigraph to this poem is from a Sonia Sanchez poem: “…do not send me out among strangers.”

Black women’s lives, for so long, were shaped around survival, and it had always been so, it’s true. In The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales told by Virginia Hamilton, in the introduction, though, I was reminded of something else.

“It is amazing,” she writes, “that the former Africans could ever smile and laugh, let alone make up riddles and songs and jokes and tell tales. As slaves, they were forced to live without citizenship, without rights, as property – like horses and cows – belonging to someone else. But no amount of hard labor and suffering could suppress their powers of imagination.”

 

Continue reading “A Letter to my Nieces & Nephews on Ella Baker’s Birthday” →

Summer Music & Magic

I’ve been more quiet than usual because I’ve been dusting off my photography/summer counselor skills at Jewish surf camp (!) [more on that later, obviously] interviewing my share of incredible writers for Kirkus Reviews, reading and watching and reporting all of kinds of other things for other stories, finishing up my work in progress draft, for which I am in the final stages (last push! OMG!) and trying to find the essence of this thing they call the “summer slow down” (Have you seen it? Is it really real?)

Anyway, when the rest of the world is back to school and on a more regular schedule, I suppose I will be, too. In the meantime, I wrote this piece about the dynamic poet JP Howard, a Harlem native in Brooklyn and fellow VONA/Voice Workshop alum for Literary Hub, which posted today. I also spent some time writing this other piece for Bitch Magazine about my favorite albums from 1998, which I can’t even believe was 20 years ago!

I hope you’re enjoying your summer. How are you spending it out there?

Poem: For writers

Do not wait for validation

the language at war with currency.

Feast instead on self possession

& poems:

The stories of the ones before us,

The dreams of our descendants.

Narratives that remind our hearts how to soar.

 

No one is coming to proclaim your talent rough or refined.

You are your only true nemesis,

a house divided against its productivity.

 

Do not wait to write.

Not for love, nor money;

Not for attention nor glory.

 

Do it to heal &

because you are compulsive &

because the story claws at your attention &

because those words weigh down the gut,

& wring them from your core

until you can’t do anything but devour experience

or starve for want of stories

to give your language life.

 

Live deeply in moments that give to you

the broadest horizons

& make for yourself worlds that

delicately remind us

how powerful it is to reach beyond the limits we

dream for ourselves while we are yet

never sleeping.

 

Finally,

Forget this advice

& anyone else’s.

You are the best author of your destiny,

after all.

This, too,

is noise you’ve read

to keep from writing.

 

Genuflect only at the altar of creation.

 

Not a single thing

will ever match the importance of

your devotion.

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