Listening to Citizen

Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and Eleventh Stack are celebrating Black History Month by highlighting books, music and movies by African American Artists. We also have a ton of great events and programs for children, teens and adults. You can view all of our Black History Month posts here.

It’s been nearly a year since I read Claudia Rankine’s award winning book, Citizen: An American Lyric. Up until now, I’ve resisted every opportunity to review this book or even participate in a discussion about it with others — yet when we Eleventh Stackians were self-selecting our topics for Black History Month, offering my thoughts on Citizen was the first topic that came to my mind.

It’s a book that’s difficult to talk about, yet one that has the potential to serve as the gateway to some of our most important conversations. For just as Claudia Rankine isn’t defined as simply a poet, a playwright, an artist or an essayist, Citizen is a book that defies being boxed in by a single genre.  Is it a poem?  An essay?  A meditation or prayer?

I think it’s all of these things, and it feels fitting that this book doesn’t conform to a singular label. In some ways, that lends itself well to the immediacy of emotions that makes reading Citizen an experience.

At times, that immediacy can be an uncomfortable one — and maybe that discomfort stems from my being a white, middle class, raised-in-Suburbia person in today’s America. Sometimes it is hard to know how to talk about issues of race (Am I going to offend her? Is he going to get upset? Do I sound ignorant? Privileged? Something else? Maybe I should just stay quiet, pretend I didn’t see, didn’t hear, was distracted).  After all, how can we ever really know or understand someone else’s reality?  My reality is not yours and vice versa. Claudia Rankine’s point in Citizen is that the unshared experience doesn’t excuse us for not seeing and acknowledging the experience of others.

Understanding and acknowledging the hard truths of our lives begins with listening and by paying attention to others’ experience. By directing her reader’s attention to the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) instances of racism that occur in American society, Claudia Rankine brings her experience and hurt and pain to the page where we see it in all its rawness and honesty.

Certain moments send adrenaline to the heart, dry out the tongue, and clog the lung. Like thunder they drown you in sound, no, like lightning they strike you across the larynx. Cough. After it happened I was at a loss for words. Haven’t you said this yourself? Haven’t you said this to a close friend who early in your friendship, when distracted, would call you by the name of her black housekeeper? You assumed you two were the only black people in her life. Eventually she stopped doing this, though she never acknowledged her slippage. And you never called her on it (why not?) and yet, you don’t forget.

The poetry (the American lyric) of Citizen forces us to slow down, to listen, as Claudia Rankine writes eloquently of real-life instances of racism that we know from the headlines — the cover illustration is of a hoodie, symbolizing the killing of Trayvon Martin — as well as the more subtle, yet personally searing moments that too often get glossed over and dismissed altogether.

Two examples that have stayed with me:

Because of your elite status from a year’s worth of travel, you have already settled into your window seat on United Airlines, when the girl and her mother arrive at your row. The girl, looking over at you, tells her mother, these are our seats, but this is not what I expected. The mother’s response is barely audible — I see, she says. I’ll sit in the middle.

and

The new therapist specializes in trauma counseling. You have only ever spoken on the phone. Her house has a side gate that leads to a back entrance she uses for patients. You walk down a path bordered on both sides with deer grass and rosemary to the gate, which turns out to be locked.

At the front door the bell is a small round disc that you press firmly. When the door finally opens, the woman standing there yells, at the top of her lungs, Get away from my house! What are you doing in my yard?

It’s as if a wounded Doberman pinscher or a German shepherd has gained the power of speech. And though you back up a few steps, you manage to tell her you have an appointment. You have an appointment? she spits back. Then she pauses. Everything pauses. Oh, she says, followed by, oh, yes, that’s right. I am sorry.

I am so sorry, so, so, sorry.

~ Melissa F.

Hate Ain’t Sexy, and Other Wise Things You Can Learn From Poetry

“I write poems, and I am a poem.” — Vanessa German

copyright 2003, wisarts.com – all rights reserved

Everybody is a poem waiting to happen, even those of us who flinch at the word “poetry,” perhaps those of us especially, because at some point in our upbringing or education we were taught that poetry is only for the special, or the weird, not for us. Poets are either safely dead or dangerously alive, and either way, you’d best give them a wide berth because poetry stains, like blood and chocolate, and good luck washing it off of you once it’s had a chance to seep in.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Scared? Don’t be. You are a poem. You may never put pen to paper in all your born days, but your life is a poem. Some people just take it one step further and put themselves (and other people) on paper, so the rest of us can step back from our own perspectives and see the world around us in a new way. Exploring poetry is simply another way of exploring your world.

If you do not like poetry, I strongly suspect is simply means that you have not yet found your poet. Or maybe it’s just one poem, your poem, buried somewhere in the stacks or lost in the tangled web of the internet (Indra net?).  Does the possibility disturb you? Excite you? Send you back to bed with the covers safely pulled up over your head?

Good. That means you’re getting somewhere. Treat reading poetry like speed-dating: flirt shamelessly, experiment prodigiously. Walk away from whatever doesn’t resnoate with you, but be willing to try anything at least once. Allow your eyes to be seduced, romanced. Extend the same courtesy to your ears.

Consider the possibility that your poem hasn’t made it to the library yet. Maybe your poet, your poem, are out there in your city, the next county, half a world away.  Go to readings. Introduce yourself to the poets you meet at readings and ask them what they’re reading these days. Listen to podcasts. Talk to bookstore owners and librarians and random people reading poetry in coffee shops. Hunt for your poet, your poem, as if it were a golden ticket, because it is.

If you still doubt me, I can only shake my head and retreat back into the dumbstruck wonder of my own experience. I am not a poet, and yet, when I surround myself with poets, and dive into their work, my own writing gains something it would not otherwise have had. Poets have taught me that hate ain’t sexy*, that the devil is in the details, that children’s stories are secretly for grownups, that incremental repetition can be an effective technique for making your point. Poetry reminds me that, no matter how much I have learned, there is so much more to learn. It’s the most real thing there is, poetry, and it’s yours.  Free. For the taking.

–Leigh Anne

also a poem

*This line was uttered by the aforementioned Vanessa German, during a reading here at the Carnegie Library. At the time she read the work she called it “Jorge,” and it’s either just never been recorded and posted anywhere, or I simply can’t find it.  It’s my favorite poem that apparently only exists in my head.

Curiosity/Satisfaction: Notes From A Reading Life

“‘curiosity killed the cat.’ A very familiar proverb that seems to have been recorded only as far back as the early 1900s. Perhaps it derived somehow from the much older (late 16th century) care killed the cat, but there is no proof of this thus far.” — The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, 4th ed.

I

I am a mediocre poet who lives in a city of very good poets, some of whom sit next to me at the reference desk on a regular basis.  Despite my inability to craft a suitable sonnet or a voluptuous villanelle, I find myself drawn again and again to the poetry section; if I cannot create this particular brand of magic, I can, at least, drown myself in it, hoping I will gain something from repeated dunks.  Gills, maybe.  A mermaid’s tail.

So, too, I devour David Orr’s Beautiful and Pointless.  It’s a guidebook for the uninitiated, everybody who fears that s/he’s just not cool enough for poetry.  Orr’s essays soothe me, make me snicker; who knew the New York Times‘s poetry critic could be so darned frank and funny?  I want to give this book to everyone who has ever felt they weren’t smart enough to read or write poetry, so we can tear down our misconceptions and misgivings together, start all over again.

“As everyone knows, all the best poets eat at Taco Bell,” Orr assures me. I smile, and believe him.

II

Vampires are sooooo ’97 (by which, of course, I mean 1897).  It is, however, hot, and a little fluffy fiction would not be amiss.   I pick up By Blood We Live and fall into a plush, posh, well-written collection of short stories culled from masters of the horror genre.  Neil Gaiman and Stephen King are here, and rightly so.  There are, however, many new-to-me authors, such as Barbara Roden, Nancy Holder, Carrie Vaughn.  Gleefully I scribble authors and titles into my to-read notebook, marveling at how one good short story anthology can lead to hours of further entertainment and discovery.

III

Because I’m usually reading multiple books at once, serendipitous moments frequently pop up.  I learn, for example, that both Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife and Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City contain tiger symbolism.  One is telegraphed, the other covert; both are delightful surprises.  It is, however, Obreht’s interweave of medicine and magic, nested as it is in a narrative reminiscent of those cunning Russian dolls-within-dolls, that keeps my attention.  As much as I pity Lethem’s tiger, I have far less sympathy for his wealthy, indolent characters, and I cannot wait a few hundred pages for their redemption, no matter how well-written and charming they are.

I parcel out Obreht’s novel slowly, in paragraphs, to make it last longer.  The delicious suspense is killing me, but I do not want this book to end.  I will probably stay up late to finish it the night before it is due, imagining the impatient toe-tapping of everyone else on the waiting list.  “Relax,” I want to tell them.  “It’s worth it.  You’ll love this.”  Like a mother reassuring her children that the long night’s sleep before Santa will, most assuredly, be worth it in the morning.

IV

My best friend and I are getting pedicures; I have never had one, so I’m a little embarrassed about my feet.  In fact, I’m pretty sure that they are the ugliest feet ever seen in North America, so to hide my embarrassment over what I’m convinced will be inevitable ridicule and banishment from the spa, I turn to the table next to me, grab a random book and hide behind it, mortified.

Said book turns out to be I Love Your Style by Amanda Brooks.  It’s a how-to-dress guide for those of us who could use a little help, fashion-wise, and  unlike other books in this oeuvre I’ve furtively glanced at, the author actually appears to be on my side.  Rather than foisting a list of dos and don’ts on the hapless reader, Brooks gently makes suggestions about how you can create your own signature look based on what makes you feel pretty.  My reservations about this whole girlie-girl thing lift somewhat.

As I flip through the pages, I read random tidbits to my more stylish friend, who listens indulgently.  “Look, minimalism is TOO a style,” I crow, pointing to pictures of the black-clad, no-nonsense Sofia Coppola.  An hour later, purple polish drying, I teeter home on flip-flops and verify that I can indeed check this book out of the library.  Haute couture, for the win.

V

Curiosity killed the cat; satisfaction, they say, brought that cat back.  However, I am still sifting through the murky backwaters of the internet–and kicking up heaps of dust in print resources–trying to find a derivation for this phrase that will satisfy the librarian part of my brain.  This chunk of grey matter insists, despite our brave new content-creation world, that there are still certain standards for what is true in any given situation.  A bunch of people on the web saying something is true does not necessarily make it so.

[And yet, I have, as of right now, nothing better to go on, and precious little time to devote to what is currently a matter of interest to me and me alone.  Then again, if somebody should call the reference department tomorrow and want to know “the truth” about the origin of this phrase, I would have a reason to go on.  Hint hint.]

On a grander scale, curiosity is what brings us to the written word, and satisfaction is what brings us back. We read for all sorts of reasons: to lose ourselves, to learn new things, to kill boredom or its variants, which include “time in airports” and “waiting in line at the coffee shop.”  We read to satiate our hunger to know, even if it kills us, the things we do not know.  We come back, again and again, because the only thing knowledge truly kills is ignorance, and the satisfaction we feel–learning the facts, exploring the new subject, discovering the unfamiliar genre–is more than enough to counterbalance any pain that takes place during the process.

What are you curious about today?  What brings you back to the library, again and again?

–Leigh Anne

Poetry as Insurgent Art

Famed and beloved beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s quotable book Poetry as Insurgent Art is part desiderata, part manifesto on the importance of poetry. 

In four prose poems and a brief essay, its quips vary from rebellious (“Strive to change the world in such a way that there’s no further need to be a dissident”) to koan-like statements to patently-Ferlinghetti comparisons to classic art and canonic literature (“Poetry can be heard at manholes, echoing up Dante’s fire escape”).  Also, there are lots of birds. 

For anyone who needs to be convinced of the vitality of art’s resistance or to be encouraged to pursue the struggle for vitality in life and expression, this little book of poetic affirmations will be a joy to read.

–Renée

photo by by flickr user elgin.jessica

“Sister Outsider:” Audre Lorde

"Audre Lorde and blue jay feather" by ni dieu ni maître

Nearly every article on poet and activist Audre Lorde makes use of her self-description: “I am a Black, lesbian, feminist, warrior, poet, mother doing my work.”   Lorde valued identity as a source of her work, and said, “My poetry comes from the intersection of me and my worlds.”  Regarding identity, Lorde considered herself a “continuum of women,” “a concert of voices,” and spoke of putting parts of herself to work for other parts in the service of her vision. Critic Pamela Steed Hill wrote, “Her work is both staunchly political and direly personal as she addresses the issues of women’s and gay rights,” as well as racism and, later, her battle with cancer.  “But these subjects, vital as they are, do not define the real heart of Lorde’s creative inspirations as a poet.  Her work often explores relationships between people.”

Lorde was born in Harlem New York to Caribbean immigrants.  As a young woman, she used poetry as  communication, reciting poems in response to questions, and began to write when she couldn’t find the poems to explain her feelings.  She earned a master’s degree in library science from Columbia University in 1961, married and had 2 children shortly after, and divorced in 1970.  After that, she committed to two successive long-term lesbian relationships.

In 1987, Lorde moved to St. Croix, US Virgin Islands.  Her home, which she shared with her partner, was among the many destroyed by Hurricane Hugo in September 1989.  In response to her and the island’s experience after the storm, she wrote several poems, such as the startling and moving “Restoration: A Memorial 9/18/91,” which includes the lines:

“Somewhere it is Tuesday
in the ordinary world
ravishment fades
into compelling tasks
our bodies learn to perform
quite a bit of the house is left
our bedroom spared
except for the ankle-deep water
and terrible stench.”

She also published the essay “Of Generators and Survival–Hugo Letter,” which detailed her home’s wreckage and included scathing criticism of the US government’s inadequate humanitarian response to the disaster.

Her poetry was published regularly throughout the 1960s, and she authored over a dozen poetry collections, a memoir of her experience with cancer, a “biomythographic” novel, and a collection of essays and speeches.  She also founded Kitchen Table Women of Color Press and attended numerous workshops conferences and panel discussions as a keynote speaker.  She received numerous awards and grants for her work, and taught at colleges in the US and Germany.

She was deeply involved with various political movements, and was a figurehead in the movements for racial equality and justice, feminism and gay rights.  She viewed the different causes as overlapping and inseparable, and often criticized the movements for their reluctance to accept others who were the victims of different prejudices, arguing that, in order to succeed in the fight for equality, all oppressed people must join together to understand their differences and use them as bridges rather than barriers. Her impassioned message of understanding and inclusiveness radiates from her work.

Lorde was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1978 and had a mastectomy.  Teaching at the the time, she chose not to have a biopsy and instead employed homeopathic treatments.  In 1984, she found out that the cancer metastasized to her liver, and she died of cancer in Germany in 1992, working and writing up until her death.  Her words and work remain as empowering and inspiring now as ever, as the movements to which she dedicated her life continue today.

Her activism was inextricably tied to her writing.  In her 1977 essay, “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” she wrote, “For women, then, poetry is not a luxury.  It is a vital necessity of our existence.  It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.  Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.  The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.”

Themes Lorde fearlessly addresses in her poetry and writings include:

• racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and elitism
• violence motivated by discrimination, including police brutality
• motherhood, parent/child, and other relationships
• daily life
• domestic and international contemporary events
• African mythology
• love

While she considered herself to be primarily a poet, Lorde also published essays and appeared as the keynote speaker at numerous conferences.  She also wrote many open letters in response to current events, such as national and international crises, events within the activist community, and the violent deaths of well-known figures, unknown African-American women and other victims of hate crimes.  A few of the victims of these crimes reappeared in several poems and writings.  Among them: Clifford Glover, a 10-year-old boy shot to death by a police officer whom a jury found not guilty, and Patricia Cowan, a young African-American mother and actress who was brutally murdered in 1978 by a African-American man after showing up to audition for his play.  Lorde also mentions in her writings personal acquaintances, public figures, fellow writers and activists.  Ideas and phrases recur across formats in her work.

Central to Lorde’s philosophy is her “theory of difference,” which she detailed in many of her speeches and essays:

• “[Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism and homophobia are] forms of human blindness [that] stem from the same root—an inability to recognize the notion of difference as a dynamic human force, one which is enriching rather than threatening to the defined self, when there are shared goals. … It is based upon the false notion that there is only a limited and particular amount of freedom that must be divided up between us, with the largest and juiciest pieces of liberty going to as spoils to the victor or the stronger.  So instead of joining together to fight for more, we quarrel between ourselves for a larger slice of the one pie.” (“Scratching the Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving: ”)

• “And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives.  That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own.  For instance, ‘I can’t possibly teach Black women’s writing—their experience is so different from mine.’  Yet how many years have you spent teaching Plato and Shakespeare and Proust?  Or another, ‘She’s a white women, and what could she possibly have to say to me?’  Or, ‘She’s a lesbian, what would my husband say, or my chairman?’  Or again, ‘This woman writes of her sons and I have no children.’  And all the other endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and each other.” (“The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”)

• “In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.” (“The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House“)

Fellow Eleventh Stack blogonaut and poetry expert, Don, said of Lorde, before our 3 Poems By Discussion on her work last week, “Her pacing is impeccable – a strong, powerful stride forward -Her poems always seem like dispatches from the front, every inch of love and dignity fought for, tough grueling battles, but always fought from the center of love, love is always the touchstone and bitterness never gains any purchase.  For her, the political is what it should always be, personal, grounded in humanness.  An outstanding woman and poet.”

To listen to some recordings of Lorde’s powerful, inspiring readings of her poetry and speeches, go to creativecommons.org and search for “Audre Lorde” or check out the audiobook Our Souls Have Grown Deep Like the Rivers: Black Poets Read Their Work.  Also available in CLP’s collection is her biography, Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde.

–Renée

The Anticompetitive Poet – William Stafford

“We have just begun to not fight.” – William Stafford

I sit at my desk surrounded by poetry. Before opening this morning, I gathered eighteen books by William Stafford from the library shelves and carried my armload down the stairs to the office.

William Stafford, who lived from 1914 to 1993, penned more than forty books of poetry. A lifelong pacifist, he was a conscientious objector during World War II. While working in the Civilian Public Service camps, Stafford established the habit of rising early to write. For fifty years he wrote every day in the quiet of early morning. He advocated and practiced writing with no agenda, without judgments or goals. “I get pen and paper, take a glance out the window (often it is dark out there), and wait. It is like fishing. But I do not wait very long, for there is always a nibble-and this is where receptivity comes in.” About Writing the Australian Crawl, source of the above quote and the first of Stafford’s three books about writing and teaching writing, Stafford said, “My disquiets-my pacifist disquiets, I guess-about teaching and writing by competitive methods are in that book.”                        

In 1948 Stafford took his place on the English faculty of Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, where he taught until his retirement. Another of his collections on writing, Crossing Unmarked Snow, contains an interview titled “No Praise, No Blame,” Stafford’s anticompetitive and controversial philosophy of pedagogy: “If a student learns to seek praise and avoid blame, the actual feel and excitement of learning and accomplishing will be slighted in favor of someone else’s reaction.” Seeking praise outside oneself creates fear and inhibition, which can cripple a writer, Stafford believed. He said that art is inevitable, and fashioned his classrooms as relaxed, inclusive places where discussion about writing was grounded in freedom. “I think we should encourage ourselves and others to write, to get into action, to play, to do all sorts of things—you know, music . . . everything!”

In 1970 Stafford was named Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position now known as Poet Laureate. January 17 is the anniversary of his birth, called to my attention by The Writer’s Almanac, whose archive includes many of Stafford’s poems.   

Allegiances (from Allegiances, 1970)
by William Stafford

It is time for all the heroes to go home
if they have any, time for all of us common ones
to locate ourselves by the real things
we live by.

Far to the north, or indeed in any direction,
strange mountains and creatures have always lurked-
elves, goblins, trolls, and spiders:-we
encounter them in dread and wonder,

But once we have tasted far streams, touched the gold,
found some limit beyond the waterfall,
a season changes, and we come back, changed
but safe, quiet, grateful.

Suppose an insane wind holds all the hills
while strange beliefs whine at the traveler’s ears,
we ordinary beings can cling to the earth and love
where we are, sturdy for common things.

-Julie