A personal essay exploring my relationship to language, but particularly how I came to know poetry
I cannot fully explain how I fell in love with the art of or the technique of, but the relationship I have with poetry seems to be one of great strength and of an even better, even greener curiosity. I won’t profess to be a strong poet. I’m still young and dumb. I still know nothing. I still write mostly for recognition and not for thrill. My wisdom is, for the most part, trite and contrived, and that of only a thirtysomething year old. I only speak what I have heard spoken and only advise with what I can remember was said before. But a good poet—if he is to be a good poet—a voice that speaks authentically and is filled with universal truths—in many cases, must have the mind of greater maturity, must have lived, must have studied the craft, must have great responsibility to that craft, and must exercise the craft in a way that their work speaks to several audiences, creeds, stereotypes, and phenomena.
A little over a year ago when I purchased The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, I was reminded of how I had been raised. I had the most peculiar upbringing. My mother was devoutly Christian, my paternal grandmother had—through much practice and great clientele—received a reputation and was known for working Roots, a sub branch of Magic stemming from African Voodoo; and my father, the spiritual opposite of my mother, thought it best to spend most of his weekends with his young son in a double-wide where his unlicensed friend, who happened to stay with his mother, sold Coors Light and Seagram’s Gin till the wee hours of the morning. Perhaps this is a place among the many places where I began to notice language. It was there amongst drinks and functioning alcoholics, the working poor class, and the jobless-turned-tired due to racial turmoil and predicaments at home, that I saw good music, good conversation, and good drink tame the wildest of men. I heard the men use a mixture of epithets while watching football, common talk filled with hyperboles, and sophisticated language strung together with allusions, each for their own reasons.
I took certain wonder in how my father would listen to a song over and over and over. Over and over and over. Then he’d beg his friends, or me even, to listen at that record and would ask us what that record mean? He waited, his slick brown face genuinely intrigued to what we thought. He, with more questions to follow, told us how that song related to his 1970s loves and how they would someday relate to me. What I didn’t know is that these discussions over The Isley Brothers, Marvin Gaye, The O’Jays, and Keith Sweat was much like the poetry analysis I would undergo in my graduate and undergraduate programs as a student of English. Instead my father’s analysis would be tied to some girl he used to say or his teammates in basketball or some other element that seemed more of a conversational piece than it was analysis.
My introduction to poetry with my mother looked quite different. Although she wanted me to be a football player, she raised me to be an academic. I remember as a boy coming home from school reading the few books we had in our house and making trips to the library throughout the month. But when Momma or Daddy worked their 16 hour shifts, I remember reading words from the dictionary, toying with their definitions, and using them wisely. I had to. Momma made me. And if I didn’t memorize the plot, remember the definitions of the words I studied, or even answered questions from her oral quizzes incorrectly, I knew what to expect.
Then I remember paying attention to the ways my paternal grandmother talked to me and thought it funny, Boy be real particular who you hang round wid. Or the ways Momma talked on the phone with a bill collector differently than she would Aunt Ann, Uncle Pipp, or her best friend who I learned to call Aunt Laura. And then my craving for poetry began, my craving to both read it and to write it. I knew about Maya, Langston, Mr. Frost, Edgar, and when my mother’s seventy-year-old-Jeri-curl-wearing friend, Sister Reddick, visited our home, she always grabbed my working collection of poetry and recommended alternatives to lines I had written or words I’d chosen. Regardless of my being twelve and thirteen, Sister Reddick told me that a poem was not a forced thing, that it took time and that I tried way too hard in some cases.
In addition to this, Momma took me to church where I’d heard the old deacons pray prayers filled with language I thought was a delicious language. The words from the old men’s mouths fell down lightly but powerfully, had a majesty to it. There was some kind of exoticism to the pictures they painted while they prayed, something that made us want to stand and listen for fifteen minute prayer sessions, something that made the people reach out their hands as if they themselves could literally catch the Holy Spirit. It was there that I had been introduced to one of my favorite words in the English Language: Jubilee. I hate that it is a word tied to religion, but it seems so yellow, orange, and red all at the same time. The word rolling off the tongue just sounds like a dignified, glorious revelation that could be tasted as if it were a piece of food to stick into our mouths.
I revisited the carefulness of how poems come to be when I flipped through the pages of Lucille Clifton’s book. I saw several I liked and several I came to like once reading them aloud, and constantly. The one I came to know quite well was “Dancer,” a piece written about King David and his dancing-beneath-the-stars routine. The poem begins with David announcing his rule. David dances through his wars, his infidelity, and concludes his journey profoundly with what seems to be a do-si-do of which he had had an impeccable wisdom. David appears to the reader as no saint, but filthy and with a deserved reverence. In this fairly short poem, with no more than four words on each line, Clifton takes us through David’s biblical journey without the poem doing so didactically.
After my fifteenth time reading the poem, the verses were still fresh. I believed that this poem was not just a story about David. It was a story about every liar, every bigot, every brute, every adulterer, every murderer, every dancer, and every liver of life, because dancing in this poem is really a metaphor for living. And it reminds me that no matter how terrible, how daunting, how malicious life may become, that no matter the road I take to reach my denouement, if I dance beneath my own stars, I may not remain unscathed, but I’ll be alright. I always liked how poetry, if done correctly, seems to be an all-inclusive thing. I have, like Lucille, tried it on my own:
of no good use
this life i have
will be the thing
feeding me to daisies
in the spring and fling
me up to heaven where
in the crooks of the avenues
there angels pass nickels
to charities like me with holes
in their souls and shoes untied
i pray this little life of mine
for when thunderclouds gather
and rain trouble like stone
i pray this little life of mine
When Milkman learned to fly in Song of Solomon is the moment I realized that the poetry in which Toni Morrison writes was one that provided me a story to live by, a story that flung me into a greater confidence as a Black Male living in America. Historically speaking, I always had confidence, but just to witness the strength of Milkman as he sought out his identity added to my own person. I learned so much from Circe and Pilot, Magdalene and Macon. With her language, Morrison made each character real, formed real words in each character’s mouth, gave the story such beauty by way of poetics and made me literally want to go out the next day and get my own wings. The novel made my heart stand up, made me realize my intrinsic value. Even if I were a “stereotype,” even if I had somehow fallen beneath the status I hold today, the language in Morrison’s novel would not have let me stay there long.
I often have to be reminded of the power of poetry. I had forgotten just how vivid the language is in Black preachers’ sermons until last December when a preacher eulogized my father who had died from a seven year battle with lung and bone cancer. The church was blaring with uncontrollable cries. The preacher, when it had come time for him to preach, knowing my father quite well, had spoken to my father’s musical taste and made mention of how my father loved to dance. While we were still yet crying, while my father laid there flat and cold to the bone, I thought I had stepped right into Lucille Clifton’s poem which was, in that moment, not for the murderer or the bigot, but for the grieving son. Like David, my father’s life was filled with several evils of which shall go unnamed, but his final di-so-do was a glorious one. The preacher, who was given instruction to make the eulogy electric, begged us to dance like my father both literally and metaphorically. He begged us to listen to the Isley Brothers and to have dancing competitions to see who would dance best out of my father’s entire family. He painted this glorious picture and gave a resounding message of a dancer who had danced his way from life to death. After he sat down, my mother and some other family members were still crying, but others had exhausted from amens and hallelujahs and preach-it-preachers during the sermon. What I did next was what I knew to do and what I would receive recognition for even months afterwards. I said a poem over my father. It was Maya Angelou’s “When Great Trees Fall,” the same poem she wrote and read in the passing of James Baldwin. When I read it, the people saw the lions and they adored the elephant. They heard the rocks fall silent and saw the grass at peace. It was then that the people, along with me and my mother, ceased their crying, rose up altogether, and sang a mighty song.
