Nikki Giovanni

Despite my aversion to poetry, I love Nikki Giovanni.

When I was a little girl, I was driving in the car with my mother and one of Nikki Giovanni's song/poems came on the radio (I know, right? A time when radio stations had the autonomy to play poetry, r&b, rock, soul, the whole side of an album, or whatever tickled the DJ's fancy).  It said something about feeling like a cow chosen by Carnation every time she was kissed on that spot behind her knee. My mother smiled a funny way that suggested she had felt that kinda way.  I remember thinking why would anybody kiss your knees? (I get it now and could do with some knee kissing myself. Check out the poem here.).

I went to hear Ms. Giovanni speak last night.The thing I like about her is that she has lived until she has exactly zero fucks to give. Like many who came of age in the Sixties, she is a race woman and unapologetic about being so. She said if she were to be sent somewhere outside this universe and she could only take one person, she'd take a Negro because we're good people, fun, friendly and we'd find a way to get along (She used Negro, Black, and Colored interchangeably and if you grew up with those words like she did, I think you should).

At first, I found myself getting anxious for the white people in the audience. But, in retrospect, I see what she was doing. She was letting Black people exist in a space not defined by whites. She has amassed enough power to flip the usual dynamic on its head and let them be the outsiders who monitor their behavior around "the other." I had been angry--I mean like Mercury-is-in-fucking-retrograde angry--for two days from not having a space to be myself in and a combination of crying, praying, and sitting in Nikki's presence released that from me.

What I love, love, love about her is that, though she creates space for us to be us, she loved us too much to let us stay us (you don't hear me!). She subtly challenged homophobia in the Black community, even calling out T.D. Jakes. She did that. In the Warrensville Public Library. And those good Christian Deltas just oo-ooped her and didn't say a word, (hush now.)

I bought her books Chasing Utopia ( Utopia is a beer, not a society) and On My Journey Now. 

I Am Not A Feminist

The reading this week was from three feminist authoresses (yes, I lady-ed up their titles.) Let's get a quick Jeopardy/cocktail party overview of them:

First up is Monique Wittig. In addition to being a novelist, Ms. Wittig's is also known for shocking the Modern Language Association convention in 1978 with her radical lesbian proclamation: "Lesbians are not women," which she explores in the essay, "One Is Not Born a Woman."  There is some Hegelian somersaulting going on there, but, really, I don't care.

Next up: Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Together, these two gals authoressed The Madwoman in the Attic. G & G suggest 19th century authoresses wrote at great peril to their psychic selves because of "the patriarchal authority of art," but, really, I don't care.

Finally, Helene Cixous. I like her the most because she's pretty, and she doesn't presume white privilege the way the other authoresses and theoretician-ettes do. Being Jewish, French, and Algerian, she explored things in terms of "multiple alterity [the state of being other or different; otherness]constituted by the logic of nationality." She'd probably be annoyed that I called her French and Algerian, but this is the cocktail party version, not a dissertation.

I'm not a feminist. I took some class way back in college where I learned that white suffragettes threw the cares and concerns of women of color under the bus in pursuit of voting rights.  That was enough for me to see being a feminist would have me end up old, fat and alone (hey, waitaminute...).

I'm much more interested in this take on privilege, white women, Black women and slavery on Jezebel by the awesome Michaela Angela Davis.  Or this book, Out of the House of Bondage, by Thavolia Glymph, in which she discusses how "plantation mistresses—typically portrayed by historians as removed and not part of the slaveocracy—who, were, in fact, the major culprits of these violent acts and executed their power against enslaved women."  Or Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins, which one day I hope to read. 

The New Critics

Ooh. I been slacking and laid-backing. 

My nerves are bad.  Lot going on.

Anyhoo, this week, we're reading critical theory essays by T.S. Elliot, John Crowe Ransom, and Martin Heidegger. I haven't finished Heidegger yet, mostly because he was a Nazi and I figured I was about due a break when I got to that little tidbit.

But this Ransom cat. Wrote a tongue-in-cheek essay in 1937 called "Criticism, Inc." He said we should study the text and not the text's history or effect on an audience and certainly not its moral value. He and his road dawgs (Eric Bentley, Cleanth Brooks, etc.) were called The New Critics. New Criticism was kind of a response to The New Humanists, who believed the classics were the only worthwhile art. Irving Babbitt, a Harvard professor, was the chief proponent of New Humanism and kind of a prig.

Sinclair Lewis was down with The New Critics.  So much so, that when he wrote his famous satire of American middle class life, he named the lead character Babbitt  —completely obscuring Irving's contributions to the critical theory and forever linking him to his buffoonish literary namesake.  

Sinclair Lewis is hella zany.

Six Word Stories

One of our assignments this week is to tell a six word story. You know the famous Hemingway (or whoever) one:

For sale.
Baby shoes.
Never worn.

That's just so perfect that mine always seemed to suck in comparison. 

But since I have to write five a day for the next week, I tried to look at what makes Hemingway's so great.  First, it's got a clear beginning, middle, and end.  More importantly, as my friend Greg pointed out, it builds and then has a satisfying pay off: "Hey, look, someone's selling something. Baby shoes? That's weird, I wonder why they —oh, they were...never worn. Sigh."

Here's one I came up with.

First date.
Great chemistry.
Loud fart.

Stuck

I used to have a blog. It was called Ephphatha and I wrote about Black folk, mental health, pop culture, and foolishness. Sometimes I wish I still had it because untreated mental illness is running rampant lately. Miriam Carey, the young mother who rammed her car into barricades and was shot to death; Joseph Constantino, the elderly man who set himself on fire on the National Mall.

I used to wake up every day with something on my mind or something that I saw on the internet and I'd write up a storm, like I knew what the hell I was talking about. Don't get me wrong, it was a good blog; The Plain Dealer asked to link to it and I was labeled a Northeast Ohio blogger. Most of the people I started blogging with are either dead (R.I.P. Undercover Blackman) or they've figured out how to monetize their blogs or they've moved on to grad school across the country.

And here I am. Stuck? Stuck. Stuck? I don't know.  I know, that my life changed irrevocably over the last 16 months. I made a bad decision; I moved; a relationship ended; I went apeshit crazy; the last of my family died (it was just my dad and he was an asshole anyway) and here I am back in Cleveland Heights, back on a blog.

I know I just don't care about stuff the way I used to.

I'm trying to find a poem about being stuck. (Ugh, don't ever go looking for a poem on poemhunter.com. LOL. It full of the kind of poems your emo-niece writes two days before her period.)

I can't find one, but I did come across this poem by Patricia Smith.

They Romp with Wooly Canines

and spy whole lifetimes on the undersides of leaves. Jazz intrudes, stank clogging that neat procession of lush and flutter. His eyes, siphoned and dimming, demand that he accept ardor as it is presented, with its tear-splashed borders and stilted lists, romance that is only on the agenda because hours do not stop. Bless his sliver of soul. He’s nabbed a sizzling matron who grays as we watch, a thick-ankled New England whoop, muscled to suffer his stifling missionary weight. Earth-smudged behind the wheel of her pickup, she hums a tune that rhymes dots of dinner trapped in his beard with twilight. Is it still a collision course if you must lie down to rest? Bless her as she tries on his name for size and plucks hairs from her chin. Bless him as he barrels toward yet another wife who will someday realize, idly, that her only purpose in this dwindling novella of his days is to someday lower his heralded bulk, with little fanfare, into a grave. 

I like that line, "Bless her as she tries on his name for size and plucks hairs from her chin." And the  part about suffering under his "stifling missionary weight."

We read David Hume's Of the Standard of Taste. It talks about how one should be able to discern whether or not something has value. It's wrong in a thousand ways. And right, too. One of the good points was about immersing yourself in a particular field of study so that you can contrast and compare and speak on what's good with some oomph behind it. Maybe that's what I'm doing.

Wouldn't it be cool if I developed some kind of insane passion for poetry and I understood my life's purpose? Hahaha. No.

Kevin Varrone Poem

OK, so far, it seems what I like about a poem is that it's short, in English, and sexy in a non-slutty way. Sensuous, I guess you'd call it. And I like poems about love. 

I hate love. 

When I am in what I frequently mistake for love, I write all kinda of poems. And I think they're good, too, because they make me feel like I'm sitting on a peach and soaking in the juice.  But I haven't written a love poem in a long, long time. Not since 2008. Ugh, I know exactly who he is and he is worse for me than rotten teeth, but when I get to thinking about his skin, spread like dark loam over bone and sinew...don't tell him, but a tiny part of me is still holding out for a meaningless romp with him. 

Wait, what? This is for school. Loins be still.

Today's poem is by Kevin Varrone.

poem I wrote sitting across the table from you

if I had two nickels to rub together
I would rub them together

like a kid rubs sticks together
until friction made combustion

and they burned

a hole in my pocket

into which I would put my hand
and then my arm

and eventually my whole self–– 
I would fold myself

into the hole in my pocket and disappear

into the pocket of myself, or at least my pants

but before I did

like some ancient star

I’d grab your hand 


Now, I don't know the ins and outs of why this is a poem. I don't know if it meters, why he broke the lines the way he did, and all that. But I like the image of a man reaching through a burned hole in his pocket to disappear and then grabbing his woman's hand right before he did. 

Affirmation by Donald Hall

Like I said, I hate poetry. Well, I like Nikki Giovanni. And Lucille Clifton. And Maya Angelou in small doses. And my friend Kamilah Aisha Moon (go buy her book!).

 I just don't know a lot of poetry. And when my eyes start glaze over from all those verse or really obfuscatory words, well, I'm not going to know it.

But this poem, it made me feel some kinda way. It's by Donald Hall and it's called "Affirmation."

To grow old is to lose everything. 
Aging, everybody knows it. 
Even when we are young, 
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads 
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer 
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters 
into debris on the shore, 
and a friend from school drops 
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us 
past middle age, our wife will die 
at her strongest and most beautiful. 
New women come and go. All go. 
The pretty lover who announces 
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand. 
Another friend of decades estranges himself 
in words that pollute thirty years. 
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge 
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.

I like because I'm getting old. And, this past year, I lost just about everything, starting with my damn mind. I also started rowing, you know, crew, oars, boats, all that. So, the metaphor he uses trips my trigger (and if you've ever rowed on the Cuyahoga after a summer rainstorm, you know all about polluted waters and debris on the shore!). 

But it's the idea of things drifting away — relationships failing, family dying, friends turning — and realizing there's nothing to do but declare it "fitting and delicious."  Well, that just gave me LIFE, y'all.

Ferdinand de Saussure: What's He Talking About?

Ha ha, get it, what's he talking about? Saussure? The father of semiotics?  I'm not so sure (get it?) I get it, so maybe that's why the joke wasn't funny.

The main text for class is the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, which has the kind of tiny, hard-to-read type that suggests graduate degrees should only be pursued by people under 40. After reading the assignment in Norton, the thing I'll guess on Jeopardy about Saussure is that there is the idea of the sign, signified, and signifier. 

I'm sure this is wrong on so many levels, but I think it's like me saying, since I'm a spinster, it would be nice to have a small, furry thing to love. The sign and signifier are the letters that make up the name we have for that small, furry thing: CAT. The small, furry thing itself (in my case, her name is Fran) and all the love, petting, purring, and litter box cleaning that fill my empty days is the signified. (This is hella convoluted. For a better example go here)  

Saussure also says signs are arbitrary because if I were in Spain, I'd be calling Fran el gato. I just happen to live in Cleveland where small, furry things taken care of by lonely, older women are called cats. If you had a naughty thought about lonely, older women's small, furry things, that's okay! You just made a postmodern critique of Saussure's theory which argues Saussure leaves out the small linguistic differences that take into consideration 21st century slang and gender politics and so on.

Like I said, I could be seven different kinds of wrong about this and I'm foolish enough to publish it on the internets. If you know more, tell me.

Poetry? No Thanks, I'm Full.

Ugh, I hate poetry.

Okay, I don't hate it, but knowing that I have a finite number of years of sightedness and no known proficiency for braille, I'd rather fix my eyes on something more enjoyable, like a good book with densely worded pages.

But, I'm in an MFA program and I'm taking a poetry craft and theory course and I hafta do a final project, so here it is. A blog. 

How positively 2006 of me.

Here's what I'm going to do: I'm going to blog every day for a month. Easy enough. I'm going to blog about the reading assignments and I'm going to try to find poems that make me feel some kinda way and see if I can't gain a finer appreciation for poetry.

There you have it.