Broadside!

Tonight was a reading with Matthea Harvey. The reading was organized by Thomas Sayers Ellis at the Center for Book Arts. The series is called the Broadside Reading Series. The Center brings in poets and they choose artists to create original broadsides of a selected poem. My poem, "Knowing the limits of the earth" was put into another art form, a beautiful broadside.

The picture does not do it justice. Eventually the broadside will be on sale on the website. It's 10 bucks, I believe, and worth it. You can also look at other poets featured in the series.

Exciting, indead.

Next up: Book Party/Launch on May 31!!!!!!!!

Then three more readings and my Spring/Summer schedule is over. Then, summer?

The reading, a poem.

Pictures from the reading.

a poem: (previously published in Inch magazine)

Oyster and Pearl

I am trapped

in my mother's house.

She cannot dislodge me

but finds ways to smooth over

the friction between us.

------

The set:

Opened up with Lucille Clifton's poem, Quilting.

Some Beastiaries (with regards to Ms. Anne Sexton)

1. Small-mouthed Bass

2. Io Moth

3. Oyster and Pearl

4. Beetle

From Cartographer

5. Knowing the Limits of the Earth (soon to be released as a broadside!!!)

6. Respect the Spaces

7. Palinode

From How God Ends Us

8. Ode to the Camel-Hair Brush

9. Closer to Knowing

10. Diving

11. The Last Touch

12. Backseat Savior

Mother's Day and a Reading

Tomorrow is Mother's Day. Again, another Mother's Day that I'm in New York City, and my mother is in South Carolina. I hope she gets what I sent her.

Also, tomorrow, I have a reading. It's in a garden. I'm praying for sun and flowers abloom. And, of course, poetry.

If you're in New York City, come, check it out!

http://www.6bgarden.org/

4pm.

Happy Mother's Day; Happy May

Come what May --

I realize I sort of sprung the essay excerpts on my readers. That is, if there are any readers out there! Allow me to explain a bit -- only a bit.

I haven't been writing poetry for a while. That's partly a lie. I was in a workshop with Tracy K. Smith, and it was hard to put myself in a position of both writer and promoter of my poetry/self when the book came out, and so I decided to let my promotion self step forward. However, writing largely focuses for me as a place I go to (it is a place in my mind) when I am dealing with difficult things, when I want to be in a different world for a while.

In tradition with a lot of events in my life, the last couple of weeks everything sort of came crashing down on me at once. And I had to (continue to) keep up this public persona, and I needed somewhere to escape, because there were little places to escape. Too, I've been wanting to write some of these essays for a while, and had been spinning them several different ways in my head, this way and that, and decided: what time is better than this to just write them? I wasn't interested in journaling the week's events. That becomes tired an old. I just wanted to not think about them, brood over them, so I do what I do in times of crisis: give myself a project.

The essays, even though excerpts only are presented here, are largely still unfinished. What I hoped to do was get to at least the heart of what I wanted to explore, to give myself a good running start for several essays that maybe can work their ways into something grander, can maybe even live together. What I discovered in the process is I am most ready to embrace my southern self than ever before. Maybe because I'm an ex-pat of sorts? I can't say that I don't ever imagine myself living in the South ever again, but I know there is a longing in this distance that is finding, sneaking its way into my writing -- an identity that I didn't have when I was in the South.

In other news, it's May. It feels like Seattle in New York -- it has rained consistently for the past week. We have seen a bad winter, one or two really good days, and now lots and lots of rain. I'll be happy for consistent sunshine. For walking the city streets without a jacket. Even -- gasp! dare i say it? -- a little humidity and heat. Oh, summer. Be with us now.

Writing, day 6

an excerpt:

Just black, then


An overheard conversation of three of my students:
A: Where are you from?
B: My family is from Ghana
A: Nigga, you ain’t from Africa – look how white you are! Really, where are you from?
B. Ghana. (he looks to the third boy) Where are you from?
C. America
B. No, dummy, where are your people, your parents from?
C. Down South. I’m not sure exactly where.
B. Oh, so you’re just black, then?

I am afraid that since I have moved (or escaped from) the South, that most of my stories begin or end or travel through there. Even when I don’t want them to. Even when I try to forget it, the City puts a mirror to my face. There it is.

I wanted to start this essay with this conversation I overheard while chaperoning middle schoolers Upstate to pick apples. This was to avoid starting with an obvious statement like I’m from the South or to start again the endless cycle of comparison between the City and what I am calling home.

Back home, we are not so much occupied (that is, anymore. It is the New South) with this idea of ethnic identity. Blame it one its history. I do. Rather, we simplify into broad categories capable of containing many exceptions. We identify as either: white, black or mixed (added post-Jim Crow to accommodate an idea of the “other”). You can tell a non-southerner by their need to create sub-categories to this filing system. They’ll say: “I’m white, but my mother’s family is from Ireland )or England – whichever European country will allow such classification),” or they’ll say, “I’m mixed: my father is Indian and Black; my mother is German.”

If I was in the conversation with those boy’s I’d be just black, then. I learned this label several ways: first, upon playing on my daycare playground and being told that I couldn’t play games with them because their parents said they weren’t allowed to play with “Blacks.” Another time I learned was when we were vacationing in Washington, DC and my father was looking for a parking space, and we had entered into this battle with someone who claimed to have seen it first, and my mother leaned out the window, and the woman leaned and said we should take our black asses back where we came from, and my mother – self-identifying for the woman – said we were taking our black asses and parking there. So the woman did not get the park. We were just black asses and the woman had said it and my mother confirmed. There were no other questions.

writing day 5

who knew i could keep this up?

an excerpt (it's not titled):

Though I hated it then, the best thing my sister could have done for me was assume her elderly sister’s role and pick on me. She took advantage of every opportunity – once I lost both bottom baby teeth while trying to pull a too-small thermal shirt over my head so we could play in the once-a-winter South Carolina snow. They were already loose, but in keeping with my tradition of holding onto things for too long – way longer than they should be held – I refused to let anyone pull them. I have a constant reminder of this truth every time I offer a wide-mouthed smile: one tooth is exceptionally higher than the others because it refused to wait for the dead tooth to dislodge itself from my gums. I remember specifically during those times of no-bottom-front-teeth that my sister would sit at the dinner table and laugh as she watched me negotiate an ear of corn my mother had prepared.

Too, around the same time, I was her maid. We inherited an elaborate kitchen set, complete with stove, silver (not plastic) pots and pans. We were playing house one day and it was tea time. I was to set the table, including getting water for the tea. I approached the bathroom and noticed the missing footstool I used in the mornings to wash my hands. The sink was too high for me to reach then. Perhaps I could have tried the bathtub. Instead, I reached into the toilet bowl with the silver kettle and returned. She took a sip. Maybe it was because the water tasted weird, or because she had not heard any water running at all yet I had come bearing the thing she sent me after, but she asked me where I got the water. Because I still had not mastered the art of lying with a straight face, I had mastered the art of delaying consequences. I told her simply: the bathroom. She asked if it was from the sink and I said no, I couldn’t reach it. The tub? No. Not the tub. House was over. She loves to tell this story as an example of how evil I am, but I defend myself and say resourceful. I was using what I had to get what I was supposed to get.