Imani X. Davis Reads "Napoleon Club" + Happy National/International Poetry Month

HAPPY POETRY MONTH!

Back in 2018 I posted a clip on here of a young performer, Orlando Watt, on YouTube performing a snippet of my poem "Words," which had appeared on the Academy of American Poets' Poetry Daily, courtesy of the amazing poet Dawn Lundy Martin. It is rare to have anyone read or perform my work, and I didn't know Watt, but I loved his interpretation, which he subsequently removed from YouTube. I believe he stated that it was part of his audition reels, which I also appreciated, because if one of my poems can in any way help another young artist get a gig, that for me is an unexpected but added bonus of creating it.

This morning while scrolling on Twitter I came across a tweet by Mani (Imani X. Davis), a doctoral student I've never met but who very kindly selected another poem of mine, "Napoleon Club," which like "Words" appears in my new collection Punks, to read online, and they do so beautifully. What a marvelous way to launch National/International Poetry Month, which begins today!

Many thanks to Imani X. Davis, and thank you especially for selecting a poem from Punks. You can follow this scholar and reader at @imanixdavis on Twitter, and please do read some poetry this month if you can!

And here is the video (many thanks again!):

Cave Canem's Tribute to Russell Atkins

This afternoon Cave Canem hosted a celebration for the great 20th century African American poet Russell Atkins, who had turned 96 just a few days earlier (February 25), and who wonderfully was able to be present, via Zoom, to experience the tribute to and for him. Hosted by Cave Canem's own Dante Micheaux, a gifted poet in his own right, the event featured thrilling readings and performances by Julie Ezelle Patton, Janice Lowe (who read one of Atkins's seemingly unvocalizable poems in marvelous, enthralling fashion), Daniel Gray-Konter, and Milena Gilgić, the first three of whom are, like Atkins, native Clevelanders, and all of whom were able, in various ways, to convey Atkins's profound originality and his abiding influence on their own work.  It would not incorrect to say that Atkins is one of the most important Black experimental writers of his generation and of the last 100 years, and yet his work remains far too little acknowledged. One of the highlights of the event was seeing Atkins onscreen and witnessing him wave and acknowledge all present.

Russell Atkins, 96 and watching
via Zoom

From Cave Canem's press release: 

Russell Atkins’ collections of poetry include the chapbooks and small-press books A Podium Presentation (1960), Phenlomena (1961), Objects (1963), Objects 2 (1964), Heretofore (1968), The Nail, to Be Set to Music (1970), Maleficium (1971), and Whichever (1978). He also wrote two verse-plays or “poems in play forms”: The Abortionist and The Corpse, both published in Free Lance. His only full-length collection, Here in The (1976), was published by the Cleveland State Poetry Center. Russell Atkins: On the Life & Work of an American Master (2013), was edited by Kevin Prufer and Michael Dumanis, and included a large selection of Atkins’ previously published work and essays from poets on his continuing influence. World’d Too Much: Selected Poems of Russell Atkins, edited by Kevin Prufer and Robert E. McDonough, was published in 2019.

Some screen captures from the event:

Host Dante Micheaux, with the sign-
language interpreters

The wall of attendees

Russell Atkins

Two Poems for Black History Month

It has been a while since I posted poems for Black History Month, but this year Rutgers-Newark made it fairly easy by inviting me to tape several of my poems for their annual Black History monthly commemoration, with the understanding that they would create videos for them. 

Here are the two poems with videos we taped, featuring my poems "Jackie Robinson in Sportsman's Park, 1949," and "Martin de Porres." 

The first invokes the pioneering Black baseball player who needs no introduction, and the second brings to life the Black Peruvian saint who particularly fascinated me in childhood. Both appear in my collection Punks: New and Selected Poems (The Song Cave, 2021).

I've attached two images, both copyright © Rutgers University-Newark, from the videos, which you can find at the links.

"Jackie Robinson in Sportsman's Park, 1949"

"Martin de Porres"

Punks' Official Debut

It's official! Punks, my new book of poems is officially in the world! You can order a copy directly from my publisher The Song Cave, via Small Press Distributors, and from bookstores (such as Barnes & Noble to Powells.com, etc., as well as the behemoth) around the country!

This collection, which includes a selection of collaborative poems with the late poet Cynthia Gray, experienced many false starts over the years on the way to publication, but once I connected with The Song Cave editors, talented poets in their own right Alan Felsenthal and Ben Estes, Punks was on the road to publication!

Please consider ordering a copy or at least urging your local bookstores--very important to support them--and your local libraries to order copies if you can. If copies are in bookstores people will see them and consider buying them and if libraries purchase them far more people have the opportunity to read them!

Many thanks to everyone who helped me and this book along the way, and enjoy! 

Poems: Shira Dentz + Robert Hayden

Shira Dentz

I first saw some of Claude Monet's (1840-1926) "Waterlilies" paintings on a school trip to the Art Institute of Chicago when I was junior high school. The trip was memorable--and I have written about it, in condensed form, in Annotations--not just because of the visit to the art museum and my encounter with examples of some of the finest European art of the late 19th and early 20th century, but also because of an unexpected moment, when my classmates and I spied a sailor making love to his girlfriend in a nearby window. This was before cellphones or even inexpensive cameras (beyond Polaroids) and video cameras, so it was a scene that, like the water lilies, I and they committed to the sole repository available: memory.

I am not suggesting that I associate Monet's "Waterlilies" paintings solely with this experience, but there is a sensuousness, a tinge of eros, in Monet's great Impressionist series of flowers and water and light and space, the colors and brushstrokes vibrant and shifting, the Giverney landscapes so alive that the paintings themselves seem to come to life, casting a spell over the viewer.  Over the years I have been discussing and occasionally writing about visual art, I have encountered opposition about particular artists I love (Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Lois Maillou Jones, Adrian M. S. Piper, etc.) and art works, like Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" or Francis Bacon's portraits, but I have never heard a negative word about Monet's water lilies. (I have read some critiques, of course.)

Today's poems, then, summon Monet's late masterpieces. The first poem is by Shira Dentz, a poet I have known since my 20s; my friend the fine poet Amy Lemmon introduced us. Shira is a gifted poet as well and the author of four books, including Door of Thin Skins (2012), my favorite and a formal hybrid that manages to surprise and delight from start to finish. Her "Monet" poem appears in her 2010 collection, Black Seeds on a White Dish, whose title, as the poem below make clear, is drawn from this poem.

The title isn't literal, as Shira's poem shows; instead, as her work often demonstrates, it serves as a marker for a complex psychological exploration, in lyric form, that the reader pieces together. That "lilypad" is a metaphor she employs and plays with, the poetic speaker's relationship with her mother linked to their history together "that began before" the speaker was born, and continuing like the "tough rubbery vine" of which the lily pad is but a synecdochic, superficial component. Monet's waterlilies will not redeem things, but they serve as a means of understanding this relationship.

POEM FOR MY MOTHER WHO WISHES SHE WERE

A LILYPAD IN A MONET PAINTING

by Shira Dentz

We’re in a gray tree (you and I).
Lunging into an orange—not eating it.

I’d like nothing better than to come to another kind of

                                             arrangement;
mostly, though, we just don’t come apart.

’

Behold
a single contractual mark 
to possess and to withhold (contractions),
and the dialogue within the dialogue that began before it.

Black seeds on a white dish                     
…………………………… (pores)

         
The sound of your voice has always been a fragment

                     organized as a flower,
              a tin can cling-clanging upstream,

 the spaces between my heartbeats
              lengthening (like shadows);

You a part of the tough rubbery vine that expands on the

                                          skin of the pond.

Previously published in Black Seeds on White Dish (Shearsman, 2010) and Letters to the World: Poems from the Wom-Po Listserv, Leslie Wheeler, Rosemary Starace and Moira Richards, editors (Pasadena: Red Hen Press, 2008).

***

The second poem is by a different kind of lyric poet, Robert Hayden (1913-1980), whom I also hold in high esteem. One of the most important African American and American poets of the mid-20th century, Hayden produced a wide-ranging body of work, with noteworthy lyric and narrative poems, including one of his most famous, "Middle Passage," a masterful marriage of politics and poetry. "Monet's Water Lilies" also combines the political and lyric with concision and elegance, presenting the poet's encounter with one of Monet's beautiful works, which amidst the national and global strife, the violence and oppression produced by state-sponsored racism and wars of colony and empire, returns him to a state of grace, a recognition, despite our inability often to see it, of (our common) humanity.

Hayden is seeking balm in the midst of tumult, a social and political one producing emotional distress, but the paintings are not, as he indicates, a means of escape, but quite powerful sites of spiritual connection, restoration and transformation. "The seen, the known / dissolve in iridescence, become / illusive flesh of light"--the painting embodies this spirituality depth and transfiguration--"that was not, was, forever is"--that never existed because this is only an artistic image, that was the world that Monet painted, that will remain as long as the painting hangs and Hayden and others have the opportunity to see it." I particularly love the final stanza, where, through tears, Hayden is reminded of the auratic power of the artwork--pace Walter Benjamin--and in this exquisite human-made image of the natural world, "the shadow of" the "joy" of that world that we have lost.

Robert Hayden

MONET'S WATERLILIES



by Robert Hayden



Today as the news from Selma and Saigon
poisons the air like fallout,
I come again to see
the serene, great picture that I love.

Here space and time exist in light
the eye like the eye of faith believes.
The seen, the known
dissolve in iridescence, become
illusive flesh of light
that was not, was, forever is.

O light beheld as through refracting tears.
Here is the aura of that world
each of us has lost.
Here is the shadow of its joy.

Copyright © Robert Hayden, from Collected Poems, New York: Liveright, 1996. All rights reserved.

And here are the Art Institute's two paintings from Monet's water lilies series; the first comes from the third set, when he ceased to depict a horizon at all, peering instead into the water itself.

Claude Monet, "Water Lilies," 1906, oil on canvas, Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection, Art Institute of Chicago.  

Claude Monet, "Water Lily Pond, "1917/19 oil on canvas, Gift of Mrs. Harvey Kaplan, Art Institute of Chicago.

Poems: giovanni singleton

A few years ago, when her first book appeared, I shared two poems by giovanni singleton, a poet I've known and been a fan of for years. giovanni's collection ascension deservedly won the California Book Award and garnered a great deal of praise from fellow poets and critics, some of whom noted her ability to utilize silence to great affect, and the cumulative power of poems, which, once they set the book down, continued to fizz in their consciousnesses. I wholeheartedly agreed. To this day, I can remember the effect a very short, seemingly simple but powerfully erotic little poem entitled "the chair" had when I heard her read it years ago.

Another direction giovanni has taken, related to those earlier poems, was in exploring poetry's material and graphic qualities. In her most recent book, American Letters: works on paper (Canarium Books, 2018), she reproduces a number of poems that are as much works of art in a visual sense, which is to say, drawings in language, as they are poems made of language. This is not ekphrastic poetry in any of the ways I have presenting it. It is poetry as art, akin to concrete poetry and textual performance (think of the poems I shared by Doug Kearney).

In the case of the second poem-artwork below, it also seems related to asemic writing, though giovanni's calligraphic poem's words are real and do mean something, individually and together, even as they challenge our ability to read them, and bar any easy interpretation. American Letters' poems' sources include African American spirit writing, sacred sound, Tibetan meditation practice, giovanni's study of Japanese language and calligraphy, and the multiple traditions of visual poetry.

The first poem was featured during last year's National Poetry Month by Colorado State University, and as soon as I came across it online, I found myself studying it. One need not read the words to see what giovanni is up to, and yet it is necessary to read them--you can enlarge the image by clicking on it and pinching your trackpad or screen, depending upon what you're using, or even download it, to get a fuller sense of what the poem is doing. Note also how the title, with the marker "Untitled," is similar to many works of visual art.

Poems like "Untitled (Bird Cage)" and the second poem below, from American Letters: works on paper, raise the question of what kind of language is appropriate to discussing the poem, and how to read it. Or rather, it organizes our ways of reading it first, and we have to come to terms with it and how it resets our expectations. That is what poetry and art does, it seems these poems keep reminding us. We can't hear this enough, though.

and from American Letters: works on paper (II):

Source: Poetry (December 2016),

Poem: Rita Dove

Rita Dove, in 2017
(from Wikipedia.com)

One of the highlights of my youth was working across the hall from Rita Dove (1952-), one of the great contemporary American poets. At that time she was the Poet Laureate of the US, and though I did not work for her or study under her, I did have to periodically consult with her on matters concerning a literary journal for which she served as a senior editor and which I was managing. As much by observation as by osmosis, I learned little tips and grace notes about how to deal with editors and contracts, how to navigate in the shoals of academe, and what dedication to one's art and career, within the context of the university, might look like. She was always warm and kind toward me, and though I have not had many interactions with her since, I will always remember that moment, and her and her husband, the writer Fred Viebahn, with great fondness.

My first introduction to Rita's work was Thomas and Beulah, the book that received the Pulitzer Prize in 1987. I was a senior in college, and like many, was amazed that a young Black woman writer had just won the Pulitzer in poetry--she was only the second ever, after Gwendolyn Brooks--which led me straight to the Grolier Book Shop in Cambridge to buy as many books of hers as I could afford. Her second book, Museum (Carnegie Mellon, 1983), differed from the tightly organized structure in Thomas and Beulah, a perfect volume; it was more like a conventional collection of poems, more wide-ranging in its focus, and a bit more expansive in its forms, though the sure eye and pen Rita brings to every poem in every book were evident in this one too.

I was especially fascinated by Museum's cover image, which, it turns out was by the German painter Christian Schad (1894-1982) in the counter-Expressionist, early Weimar-era style known as the Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity. Think Max Beckmann, Georg Grosz, Otto Dix, and Rudolf Schlichter; Rita ended the collection with a poem exploring Schad's painting, the artist's process, and the figures contained within it and its depiction of difference.

This final poem, "Agosta the Winged Man and Rasha the Black Dove" is also meta-commentary in part on process and experience in writing poems, including this one, and a metonymic exploration of art-making as well. Yet again as in previous poems I've posted, this one reminds us that it is the canvas--the ground of the artwork--and the art work's subjects themselves, whose gazes are "merciless"; they see and show what the artist does not and yet does, intuitively, in the creation of the painting, and transform the artist, and the viewer, in the exchange.

"Agosta the Winged Man and Rasha the Black Dove" is a lyric poem, but it also paints a portrait, as Rita's work often does, in quick, precise, vivid strokes. There is no excess here, and yet her skill creates an aesthetic surplus, as Anne Carson once put it, of meaning. The poem itself is a model of objectivity, mirroring Schad's stylistic approach--his sharpened realism pressed beyond the observable. Yet it swerves away from mere description with notable subtlety. It also gives glimpses of a world that was on the precipice; just a decade and a half later, Berlin, and Germany, would be at war, on the cusp of one of the most abominable horrors, the Nazi Holocaust, that the human race has ever exacted on itself, and the diverse world we see in miniature here--Russian aristocrats, a Malagasy immigrant performer, Agosta himself--would be swept away with a severity and violence the poem hints at.  Look, it is saying, look closely. And note who and what are looking back at you. Pay attention.

Rita Dove, originally in Poetry, November 1981, from Museum, Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporary Poetry, 1983. All rights reserved.

The Schad painting:

Christian Schad, Agosta, the Pigeon-Chested Man, and Rasha, the Black Dove, oil on canvas, 1929, Tate Modern.

Poems: Doug Kearney

Douglas Kearney

Posting poems about art works and ones using ekphrasis has been illuminating, because one thing I've always known and even practiced myself but never really articulated publicly is how many different ways one can explore conversations between poetry, literature and visual and plastic art. (Seismosis, my collaborative book with artist and poet Chris Stackhouse does walk through various ways of initiating and sustaining the conversation.)

In his poems in response to the late genius artist and musician Terry Adkins (1953-2014), poet and performer Doug Kearney (1970-) shows yet another way to think and write about and with a fellow artist and the work of art. Doug is not just a brilliant, highly inventive poet, but an excellent performer as well. I don't mean simply that he performs his own poetry well, nor do I mean that he is a performance poet; rather, he understands in a profound way what performance can be, and elevates it to an art in conjunction with his poetry, which sizzles as poetry on the page but also serves as a graphic score, with latent possibilities that Doug activates when he is presenting his work live.

But back to this idea of graphic texts, concretion, and poems' visual components: Doug sees and often explores all of these, which is to say the materiality of the text alongside its semantic possibilities and the connections between the two. His "granted collaboration" with Adkins produced a score for a project entitled Freedom of Shadow, as well as poems that look almost all the ones I've shared on here so far. They started working together in 2013, yet Adkins sadly died but a year later, at age 60, of a heart attack. Doug decided to continue, and the result was a series of works that are as much visual art and poetry.

Doug discusses with moving insight the process of working with Adkins, and how he thought through a variety of approaches, only to lose his collaborator, at least in body, just a few months into the new (2014) year. The folio he presented in Poetry--and Adkins, who had created a persona named "Blanche Bruce," after the first black US Senator, from Mississippi, to serve a full term, during Reconstruction, did not want a "book" as the final product for their work together--is both a powerful tribute to Adkins and their thinking and working together, and yet another example of Doug's manifold gifts as a poet. You can read Doug's thoughts at Poetry's website. Below are the two of the drafts and final pieces (poems) that comprised Freedom of Shadow.

And, lastly, here is an image of Terry Adkins' "Muffled Drums," which spurred Doug's imagination, in conjunction with a different Adkins piece, as Lone Wolf, performing his "Muffled Drum Lynch," a sculpture recital about W. E. B. Dubois and his anti-lynching campaign while creating intelligent propaganda with the NAACP. (Via Atum53 on YouTube.)

Cecil Taylor (1929-2018)

Another one of the greats, Cecil Taylor, is gone. He passed away on April 5. As longtime J's Theater readers know, I've posted about Taylor many times, including on his 86th birthday, back in 2015; when he appeared on NPR back in 2012 (along with my poem about him and his music, "Dark to Themselves," which appeared in Jazz Poems, edited by Kevin Young); my afternoon in 2007 watching the marvelous documentary Imagine the Sound with Northwestern colleagues Kevin Bell and Ed Roberson; back in 2005, on his 75th birthday; and again in 2005, when I saw him perform live at the Blue Note, in Manhattan ("Apraxia, apraxia, apraxia!"). (I wanted to meet him then but only got a glimpse of him peering out through the crack in his green room door.)

I described how he opened the performance like this (the Keith I mention is Keith Obadike, who was there with his wife and fellow artist Mendi, as were Christopher Stackhouse, his partner Kelly Kivland, and a friend of theirs named Lute):

Taylor, as Reggie H. and others have described, entered dramatically, this time in his striped socks after his bassist and drummer had opened the set as a duo, Balgochian doing some interesting moanful bow-work with the lowest portion and register of his bass strings. Then he extracted a handwritten score/graph/chart, which I assume, in my gross musical ignorance, contained the melodic kernel he was going to develop and improvise off of, as well as some harmonic guides and cues, some text and the gods know what else (scribbles? quotes?), CT proceeded to recite an opening poem that riffed off "Chinampas 1," which I listened to again today. Then he and the trio launched into this long and furious set. Afterwards I told Mendi and Keith that it reminded me of a player piano that had caught the Spirit (and spirits) and was revved up by multiple motors. Keith put it more succinctly: "A player piano speaking tongues." Krall, who appears on CT sessions from around 1996 forward, seemed to flow well with CT, sometimes pacing, other times mirroring, other times chasing CT's polymetric races along the keyboard, but Balgochian sometimes seemed out of sync as if he couldn't catch up or missed some of his cues (sometimes his expression betrayed this) or just wasn't up for it, though he gave it a valiant effort. He did know enough to stop on a dime, like Krall, when CT (maybe giving a visual cue) ended the pieces.

Reading some of the obituaries of Taylor, I appreciated how they captured differing facets of who he was and what he accomplished. He was, as the 2005 performance demonstrated, at his very core a poet--experimental, searching, daring, profound, uncompromising, his medium and grammar extending from words into space, and onto the keyboard, via notes themselves. Sound and time were his true media. Pushing the evolving jazz conventions from the very beginning, Taylor kept developing and trying out new possibilities, individually and with ensembles. A native of Queens, he deftly combined a wide array of influences, drawing from the blues, other African-American, Euro-American and European sources--he studied at the New York College of Music and the New England Conservatory--to an often sublime invention, and though one could draw throughlines from his early career to the works of the last few year, Taylor almost never repeated himself.

Among the musicians Taylor recorded with are innumerable greats: Earl Griffith, Steve Lacy, Buell Neidlinger (who passed earlier this year), Sunny Murray (who passed late last year), John Coltrane, Gil Evans, Jimmy Lyons, Andrew Cyrille, Mary Lou Williams (!), Max Roach, Dewey Redman, Elvin Jones, and Peter Brötzmann. He also performed with dancers, including Min Tanaka and Mikhail Baryshnikov. Taylor's detractors, including Miles Davis (another great innovator) and Branford Marsalis, were legion, but so were his admirers, including former President Jimmy Carter, who invited him to perform at the White House. (Just imagine the current resident even vaguely considering such a thing.) One of my favorite albums of his is Great Paris Concert of 1966, which includes the masterpieces "Student Studies (Part 1)," "Student Studies (Part 2)," and "Niggle Feuigle." I also love his late-career trio recording with Dewey Redman and Elvin Jones, Momentum Space, particularly the songs "Is," "It," and "Spooning." One commemoration I especially appreciated was Jason Moran's discussion of Taylor's artistry, and how it took him years to grasp what Taylor was up to.

Cecil Taylor was outed by the critic Stanley Crouch, and became one of the most high-profile gay figures in jazz, though he sidestepped that term while remaining unapologetically himself. His oeuvre, I would argue, queered jazz as we know it, and its influence continues to ripple out in instrumentalists who may or may not appear to have any direct ties to him. Taylor's relationship to his blackness was solid and complex, and was a topic about which he could be combative, as when, back in 1964 while participating in a "Jazz Weekend" at Bennington College, he defined  what jazz was and could be, avowing its roots in African-American life, culture and experience, to the displeasure of some on a panel discussion and in the crowd. In 2013, he received the prestigious Kyoto Prize; the Inamori Foundation, the award's grantor, praised his life's work, though "free jazz" only scratches the surface:

One of the most original pianists in the history of free jazz, Mr. Cecil Taylor has developed his innovative improvisation departing from conventional idioms through distinctive musical constructions and percussive renditions, thereby opening new possibilities in jazz. His unsurpassed virtuosity and strong will inject an intense, vital force into his music, which has exerted a profound influence on a broad range of musical genres.

A contractor he had befriended stole nearly the entire amount, before being caught, tried and convicted.

A few videos about Taylor, including one of my favorites, "Les grandes répétitions":

"Les grandes répétitions"

A fragment from Ron Mann's Imagine the Sound

Interview, from the Snapshots Foundation (full interviews here)

Cecil Taylor performing at Ornette Coleman's memorial, in 2015

Dark to Themselves

As I concluded in my poem tribute, "Their ears are still learning." 

Poem (Excerpt): Robin Coste Lewis

Robin Coste Lewis

One of the leading volumes of poetry published in 2015 was Robin Coste Lewis's debut, The Voyage of the Sable Venus (Alfred A. Knopf). A collection in the truest sense, it brought together Lewis's shorter lyrics with her pièce de résistance, the long conceptual, epic title sequence. To summarize it hardly will do it justice, but in essence, Coste Lewis detourned and transformed, with impressive vision and skill, the titles, catalogue entries and exhibit descriptions of a range Western art works that referred in any way to female figures of African descent (see below). Not unlike M. Nourbese Philip, she has shown us a new way to think about the poetics and practices of revision and resistance in relation to the (Western) archive.

Coste Lewis avers that her poem is narrative--and taken as a whole it is--one could also read it as a counter-lyric, engaging the objective alongside the subjective in its metonymic, externalizing gestures of drawing in thousands of years of history into the poem while also drawing the reader beyond lyric interiority, without resorting to strategies of documentation, non-lyric discourses, hybrid forms, and the like. Instead, as she details below, the titles, their framing, placement and relation to each other, the friction and conversation they produce in and through their proximity, procession and totality, achieve her goal.

"The Voyage of the Sable Venus" queers the possibilities of what narrative, conceptual and lyric poetry might look like, while also grounding these genres profoundly in a black-centered perspective; whereas those titles, catalogue entries and exhibit descriptions centered the European/white, hetero-patriarchal gaze, in its global colonialist and imperial formations as objective definitions of aesthetic artifacts, Lewis, by repurposing and transforming them, unsettles the foundations on which they draw their meaning. Moreover, in its articulation, Coste Lewis's long poem does not sacrifice poetry's emotional impact; the effects, instead, may be awe, astonishment, anger, and a profound appreciation for what she has achieved, the lost voices she has unarchived and restored to individual and collective subjectivity and expression, that she has invited into her chorus.

To put it another way, The Voyage of the Sable Venus presents a distinctive way of writing poetry about and in relation to works of art that runs against the grain of much of much of what you might learn in a workshop or a literary studies class. It also suggests other options for conceptual writing that challenge some of the orthodoxies of that method and approach, while also resuming a conversation about poetics, race, theory, art practice, and performance that conceptual art predecessors including Raymond Patterson, Yoko Ono, Charles Gaines, Adrian M. S. Piper, and others took up, but which have tended to be obscured or elided altogether in too many critical surveys and discussions of contemporary conceptual writing.

Given its length, I am presenting two sections that originally appeared on LitHub, on September 30, 2015. The first is her introduction to the poem, describing her methodPlease visit that site for more sections, and above all, if you can purchase a copy of the collection or at least borrow it from your nearest library, please do so. Robin has held a wide array of fellowships and received many awards, including the National Book Award in poetry from The Voyage of the Sable Venus. A fellow alumna of Harvard and NYU, and received her PhD from the University of Southern California, where she lives and teaches.

***

VOYAGE OF THE SABLE VENUS

And never to forget beauty,
however strange or difficult 

                 REGINALD SHEPHERD

Prologue:

What follows is a narrative poem comprised solely and entirely of the titles, catalogue entries, or exhibit descriptions of Western art objects in which a black female figure is present, dating from 38,000 BCE to the present.

The formal rules I set for myself were simple:

1) No title could be broken or changed in any way. While the grammar is completely modified–I erased all periods, commas, semi-colons–each title was left as published, and was not syntactically annotated, edited, or fragmented.

2) “Art” included paintings, sculpture, installations, photography, lithographs, engraving, any work on paper, etc–all those traditional mediums now recognized by the Western art-historical project. However, because black female figures were also used in ways I could never have anticipated, I was forced to expand that definition to include other material and visual objects, such as combs, spoons, buckles, pans, knives, table legs.

3) At some point, I realized that museums and libraries (in what I imagine must have been a hard-won gesture of goodwill, or in order not to appear irrelevant) had removed many 19th century historically-specific markers, such as slave, colored, or Negro from their titles or archives, and replaced these words instead with the sanitized, but perhaps equally vapid African-American. In order to replace this historical erasure of slavery (however well-intended), I re-erased the post-modern “African-American” and changed all those titles back. That is, I re-corrected the corrected horror to allow that original horror to stand. My intent was to explore and record not only the history of human thought, but also how normative and complicit artists, art institutions and art historians have all been in participating in–if not creating–this history.

4) As an homage, I decided to include titles of art by black women artists and curators, whether the art included a black female figure or not. Most of this work was created over the last century, with its deepest saturation occurring since the Cold War. I also included work by black queer artists, regardless of gender, because this body of work has made consistently some of the richest, most elegant, least pretentious contributions to Western art interrogations of gender and race.

5) In a few instances, it was more fruitful to include a museum’s description of the art, rather than the title itself. This was especially true for colonial period.

6) Sometimes I chose to include female figures I believed the Western art world simply had not realized was a black woman passing for white.

7) Finally, no title was repeated.

***

And what follows is but one section of this magnificent work.

CATALOG 1: ANCIENT GREECE & ANCIENT ROME



Here is your name
said the woman
and vanished in the corridor


                              ­MAHMOUD DARWISH


 

I.

 

Statuette of a Woman Reduced
to the Shape of a Flat Paddle

 

Statuette of a Black Slave Girl
Right Half of Body and Head Missing

 

Head of a Young Black Woman Fragment
from a Statuette of a Black Dancing Girl

 

Reserve Head of an African Princess
Statuette of a Concubine

 

Full Length Figure of a Standing
Black Woman Wearing Earrings

 

Statuette Once Supported an Unguent Vase
Vase with Neck in the Form of a Head

 

of a Black Statuette of a Female
Figure With Negroid Features

 

Figure’s Left Arm
Missing Head

 

of a Female Full-length Figure
of a Nubian Woman the Arms Missing

 

Bust of a Draped Female Facing Forward
One Breast Exposed   Black

 

Adolescent Female with Long Curls and Bare
Breasts Wearing a Voluminous Crown

 

Partially Broken Young Black Girl
Presenting a Stemmed Bowl

 

Supported
by a Monkey

 

Element of Furniture Decoration
[Two Nubian Prisoners Bound

 

to a Post] Protome [Probably
the Handle of a Whip

 

or Other Implement]
Oil Flask Back

 

View Head of an African Prisoner
Statue of Prisoner Kneeling

 

Arms Bound at the Elbows
Left Arm Missing      Bust

 

of a Nubian Prisoner with Fragmentary Arms
Bound Behind Funerary Mask

 

of a Negro with Inlaid Glass Eyes
and Traces of Incrustations

 

Present in the Mouth
Censer in the Form

 

of a Nude Negro Dwarf
Standing with His Hands

 

at His Sides upon an Ornate Tripod
and Supporting on His Head

 

a Small Cup
in the Shape

 

of a Lotus
Flower

 

Standing Female Reliquary Figure
with Crested Coiffure and Hands

 

Clasped in Front of Torso, Holding
a Staff Surmounted by a Human Head

 

Figure Has Prominent
Vagina Bended

 

Knees and Oversized Head
with Half-Open Eyes

 

and Semicircle Mouth
that Juts Out

 

from the Face Some
Fine Scarification

 

on Chest and Belly
Dark Brown Almost Black

 

Patina with Oil Oozing
in Several Places

 

Numerous Cracks
on Back of Head and Hole

 

on the Coiffure
One Nipple Appears

 

to Be Shaved Off
or Damaged Black Woman

 

Standing on Tiptoe
on One End of a Seesaw

 

while a Caricatured Figure    Jumps
on the Other

 

Copyright © Robin Coste Lewis, from The Voyage

of the Sable Venus, New York: Farrar Straus,

and Giroux, 2015. All rights reserved.

Poem: Derrick Austin

Derrick Austin

The first time I came across this poem at wildness by Derrick Austin, directed there via Twitter (and I think I retweeted the link before reading the poem, and am happy I did), I stopped and thought: wow! It is only one stanza, with a sonnet's brevity and length, but as only poetry can do, it achieves quite a bit, pointing our gaze both towards the Italian Renaissance painter Paolo di Dono, also known as Paolo Uccello's (1397-1475) work and life--"His name meant Humble Bird"--and beyond the poetic frame, to the absences in our knowledge about Uccello's and everyone's lives that imagination and emotion fill in, as well as that "grief and art" from somewhere just outside our ken that arrive sometimes when we expect them, but also when we do not.

Yet, as every poem reminds us, we have the aesthetic artifact itself as a gift, a form of proof, of consolation, however, brief, and the best poems, no matter how difficult or painful the subject matter, the themes or the content, are also little vessels of beauty. Also embedded in the choice of Uccello, I think, is his fame as a pioneer in the development of perspective in visual art; his mastery of depth of field was legendary, particularly in the paintings that the poet names, depicting the Battle of San Romano. That theme, perspective, is crucial to this poem.

So: this poem, is a work of speculation, and may be about work that does not exist, which is another component of its charm. Unlike the other works I have posted so far, for which there is an artwork or artworks (cf. Rilke and Aragón) to which we can refer as a source of sorts, a touchstone, in the case of Uccello, there are winged angels and dragons but from my cursory searches, as Austin's poem suggests, no birds. Into this negative space, Austin pens his beautiful poem, much as Giorgio Vasari had to fill out his sketch of Uccello's life beyond the facts and anecdotes that he could glean, the interpretations he could make based on the paintings themselves.

Derrick Austin is the author of Trouble the Water, which poet Mary Szybist selected for the 2015 A Poulin Jr. Prize and which was published by BOA Editions in 2016. A Cave Canem fellow and MFA graduate of the University of Michigan, he was the 2016-17 Ron Wallace Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing, and serves as Assistant Poetry Editor at Memorious. I follow him on Twitter and you can too, at @ParadiseLAust. You can also find more of his poetry, and other writings, at his Tumblr site, The Mad Scene.

PAOLO UCCELLO'S BIRDS


by Derrick Austin


It must have been about sacrifice,
a parable of sorts within the art. Why else
would Uccello, who so loved birds
as to have sketched their wings,
never paint one? His name meant Humble
Bird. No place for fluttering gloss
in rendering plain our linear perspective.
All recede into mathematical dark.
No space for swallows between lances
in The Battle of San Romano. So much tension
in all that Roman stillness: the banners
of nations and gold-plated weapons free of the gore
vultures will eat when they come
like grief and art from somewhere just outside our vision.

Copyright © Derrick Austin, 2018. All rights reserved.

Here is a Paolo Uccello painting with some birds:

Flood and Waters Subsiding, c.1447-48 Fresco, 215 x 510 cm Green Cloister, Santa Maria Novella, Florence

Poem: Tyehimba Jess

Tyehimba Jess

Several years ago, Tyehimba Jess (1965-), winner of last year's Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his innovative, rich and complex collection Olio (Wave Books), published the following poem on "Poem-a-Day." In it, he calls forth a sculpture by the famous 19th century African American sculptor Edmonia Lewis (see below), a pioneering figure in the world of Western art. Lewis was the first Black woman  artist and first woman artist of Native American ancestry to gain international recognition and acclaim, in no small part for artworks that depicted Black subjects, though often with the features tempered for her white patrons and audience.

Jess, a friend and fellow former Cave Canem grad and NYU alum, excavates American and African American history, often in relation to major and lesser known Black figures who are artists and performers, whether working in the fine arts or vernacular and popular forms. The poem below, while differing in form from the page-crossing sonnets in Olio, offers a sense of his poetics, particularly his skillful use of voice and imagery, which also are on vivid display in his award-winning first book, Leadbelly. What I also like about the poem below is how he merges ekphrasis and dramatic monologue; it is the sculpture, as well as Hagar, the Biblical figure serving as a metonymic stand-in for Black women, and Lewis, who speak through the lines, figuratively and literally bringing the art work to life.

HAGAR IN THE WILDERNESS


by Tyehimba Jess


Carved Marble. Edmonia Lewis, 1875
 


My God is the living God,
God of the impertinent exile.
An outcast who carved me
into an outcast carved
by sheer and stony will
to wander the desert
in search of deliverance
the way a mother hunts
for her wayward child.
God of each eye fixed to heaven,
God of the fallen water jug,
of all the hope a vessel holds
before spilling to barren sand.
God of flesh hewn from earth
and hammered beneath a will
immaculate with the power
to bear life from the lifeless
like a well in a wasteland.
I’m made in the image of a God
that knows flight but stays me
rock still to tell a story ancient as
slavery, old as the first time
hands clasped together for mercy
and parted to find only their own
salty blessing of sweat.
I have been touched by my God
in my creation, I’ve known her caress
of anointing callus across my face. 
I know the lyric of her pulse
across these lips...  and yes,
I’ve kissed the fingertips
of my dark and mortal God.
She has shown me the truth
behind each chiseled blow
that’s carved me into this life,
the weight any woman might bear 
to stretch her mouth toward her
one true God, her own
beaten, marble song.

Edmonia Lewis (1845-1907) was an African/Native American expatriate sculptor who was phenomenally successful in Rome.

Copyright © 2013 by Tyehimba Jess. All rights reserved. This poem appeared in the Academy of American Poetry's Poem-A-Day on December 26, 2013.

And Lewis's "Hagar," also known as "Hagar in the Wilderness," 1875, carved marble, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., 1983.95.178

Quotes: Will Alexander

Will Alexander, Celebration for Bob Kaufman,
San Francisco Public Library, April 11, 2016

Living art can withstand the peril of the vitriolic via the extrinsic as propaganda, of the masses condoned as they are by critical misperception.

*

I am a spirit who exposes his mandibles in order to appear and disappear. This being a kinetics that spontaneously arranges ghostly collapse to appear as simultaneous visibility. The latter being an apparition that allows the mind to ruminate upon its circuitous connecting traces.

*

I work always knowing that one must resist carking exhaustion, always resisting its a priori inclination as did Alhazen, and in later times Rimbaud. One gains from this resistance impalpable nths of stamina so as to enact prolific creativity rife with palpable transmutation.

*

I think of Desnos rife with oneiric eruption, verbally fishing for oquassa. This being the inner work of extending lightning bolts from stark extremities of sleep. What follows are vocables that mimic proto-fires that condense in the shape of burgeoning aural seed. What then emerges are slivers from uncanny aural scarps that magnify and extend into strangeness.

*

I speak Gullah and cater to stored rats. As for me, there always exists abominable increase, dazed lepers, arachnids crawling through hair. As for hunting migrating forms from the inferno, I scour its satanic region, I take into account forms of unleashed fever, creating from my presence a brackish type of moth, soaring, yet all the while cadenced by telepathic inherence.

-- five selections from Will Alexander's Across the Vapour Gulf, New Directions Poetry Pamphlet #22, New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2017. Copyright © 2017. All rights reserved.

Tracy K. Smith New Poet Laureate of the US + Poem

Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

In a marvelous move, the new Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, has just named Tracy K. Smith (1972-) as the new Poet Laureate Consultant to the Library of Congress, i.e., Poet Laureate of the US. She is the 22nd person to hold this post, and succeeds acclaimed poet Juan Felipe Herrera, who was the first Latino to serve as in the post. She also will join a long list of distinguished predecessors, including three Black women who have won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, as she did: Gwendolyn Brooks, who served--as Consultant for Poetry, before the Poet Laureate post was officially created--in 1985 and 1986; Rita Dove, who served from 1993 through 1995; and Natasha Trethewey, who served from 2012 through 2014.

Tracy is a native of Massachusetts, and grew up in California. I have known her since her undergraduate years, when she first joined the Dark Room Writers Collective as she was finishing up at Harvard, where she studied English and African American Studies. She later attended Columbia, where she received her MFA, and was a Stegner Fellow from 1997 to 1999. Tracy now directs the undergraduate Creative Writing Program at Princeton University, where she is Professor of Creative Writing.

Her poetry has received acclaim from her earliest book, The Body's Question, which received the Cave Canem Prize and was published by Graywolf Press in 2003. Her second book, Duende, earned her the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and was published by Graywolf Press in 2007, and her third book, Life on Mars, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2012. In 2014, she received the prestigious Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, given for distinguished achievement. Tracy has also published a highly praised work of nonfiction entitled Ordinary Light: A Memoir, and has a new book of poetry, Wade in the Water, forthcoming next year.

Among the last ten or so Poet Laureates, some, like Trethewey and Herrera, have been very active in taking poetry outside the academy and engaging an array of communities in public programs and projects. About her own aims for the post, Tracy has told the New York Times' Alexandra Alter:

“I’m very excited about the opportunity to take what I consider to be the good news of poetry to parts of the country where literary festivals don’t always go,” she said. “Poetry is something that’s relevant to everyone’s life, whether they’re habitual readers of poetry or not.”

I am excited about her appointment, not only because of her gifts as a poet, teacher and poetry citizen, but particularly because if there is anyone who can negotiate and navigate the challenges a Poet Laureate--or any major figure in the arts--might face in our deeply divided country, particularly with the current President and administration operating in the foreground and background, it's someone like Tracy. Congratulations to her!

Update: Although Tracy noted in the Alter article that she did not plan to "advocate social causes," despite the fact that her work has, from the beginning, demonstrated a complex grasp of the world and social engagement, the following first step is a good sign: On the PBS News Hour's site, Tracy recommends four poetry books to read, and all are not just fine works of craft, but each speaks in a different and necessary way to our current political moment: Solmaz Sharif's Look; Erika L. Sánchez's Lessons on Expulsion; James Richardson's During; and Claudia Rankine's Citizen.

***

Here's one of Tracy's eponymous poems from Duende, her second collection, my personal favorite of her three poetry books, and perhaps the most formally daring, borrowed from the Poets.Org (Academy of American Poets) website. (One poet who comes to mind whenever I read Tracy's Duende poems but whose name I've never seen mentioned in conjunction with hers is Jay Wright, oddly enough.) The voice in this collection's poems immediately grabbed me. Tracy's lyric transformations, the dramatic movement in these poems, which follows not just the actions the poems describe but the pathways of feeling flowing throughout them, show incredible skill, and often in this volume, as here, cast a spell.

DUENDE

1.
 
The earth is dry and they live wanting.
Each with a small reservoir
Of furious music heavy in the throat.
They drag it out and with nails in their feet
Coax the night into being. Brief believing.
A skirt shimmering with sequins and lies.
And in this night that is not night,
Each word is a wish, each phrase
A shape their bodies ache to fill—
 
         I’m going to braid my hair
     Braid many colors into my hair
         I’ll put a long braid in my hair
     And write your name there
 
They defy gravity to feel tugged back.
The clatter, the mad slap of landing.
 
 
                                    2.
 
And not just them. Not just
The ramshackle family, the tíos,
Primitos, not just the bailaor
Whose heels have notched
And hammered time
So the hours flow in place
Like a tin river, marking
Only what once was.
Not just the voices of scraping
Against the river, nor the hands
Nudging them farther, fingers
Like blind birds, palms empty,
Echoing. Not just the women
With sober faces and flowers
In their hair, the ones who dance
As though they’re burying
Memory—one last time—
Beneath them.
               And I hate to do it here.
To set myself heavily beside them.
Not now that they’ve proven
The body a myth, a parable
For what not even language
Moves quickly enough to name.
If I call it pain, and try to touch it
With my hands, my own life,
It lies still and the music thins,
A pulse felt for through garments.
If I lean into the desire it starts from—
If I lean unbuttoned into the blow
Of loss after loss, love tossed
Into the ecstatic void—
It carries me with it farther,
To chords that stretch and bend
Like light through colored glass.
But it races on, toward shadows
Where the world I know
And the world I fear
Threaten to meet.
 
                                    3.
 
There is always a road,
The sea, dark hair, dolor.
 
Always a question
Bigger than itself—
 
          They say you’re leaving Monday

          Why can’t you leave on Tuesday?

Tracy K. Smith, "Duende" from Duende.

Copyright © 2007 by Tracy K. Smith.

Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press.
www.graywolfpress.org

RIP Mari Evans & Derek Walcott

Within the last few weeks, two major Black poets, Mari Evans (1919/1923?-2017) and Derek Walcott (1930-2017), have passed. Unsurprisingly, there has been much more coverage of Walcott, an internationally renown poet and playwright, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature, than of Evans, who probably is best known among afficionados of 20th century Black Women's writing and the Black Arts Movement. In both she was an invaluable voice. As I have come to do when thinking about the rich constellations of Black poetries throughout history, I see them as part of a continuum, a point I doubt will be mentioned in obituaries of either. Both poets probed their intersectional identities in part through an investigation of history and contemporary society, and both drew upon the oral traditions in which they had grown up, to different but parallel ends. With their passing, the poetry world has lost two significant voices.

Evans was the older poet, an African American, a native of Toledo, Ohio, and did not publish her first book until she was already 40 years old. It was around this time, in the late 1960s, which marked the rise of the Black Arts Movement, that she began teaching, a profession in which she made her mark. In 1970, she issued her second volume, I Am a Black Woman, which stands alongside early books by Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, Lucille Clifton, and Carolyn Rodgers as exemplars of the new Black women's poetry that still continues to influence Black poets writing in the US and globally today. In this collection's poems you can see the themes, the style, the fierceness that would appear in all of Evans's later work, and you can also see how it serves and continues to function as an important counterweight to the sometimes masculinist, misogynistic discourse that marked some--but not all--poetry by Black Arts male poets.

A feminist, politically progressive, a poet drawing from vernacular traditions but possessing a keen sense of the line, and of humor, Evans would go on to publish four more books of poetry, as well as writings for children and plays, while also pursuing a career as a poetry professor at a number of institutions. I had the pleasure of hearing Mari Evans read a few times, though I never got an opportunity to speak with her at length. A longtime resident of Indianapolis, Indiana, she died there on March 10, 2017. Here is one of her most famous poems, "I Am a Black Woman," from the AfroPoets website, and I hear echoes of it in so many poems being written today, even as they take different approaches to the themes Evans so movingly articulated in her work:

I Am a Black Woman

I am a black woman
the music of my song
some sweet arpeggio of tears
is written in a minor key
and I
can be heard humming in the night
Can be heard
humming
in the night


I saw my mate leap screaming to the sea
and I/with these hands/cupped the lifebreath
from my issue in the canebrake
I lost Nat's swinging body in a rain of tears
and heard my son scream all the way from Anzio
for Peace he never knew....I
learned Da Nang and Pork Chop Hill
in anguish
Now my nostrils know the gas
and these trigger tire/d fingers
seek the softness in my warrior's beard


I am a black woman
tall as a cypress
strong
beyond all definition still
defying place
and time
and circumstance
assailed
impervious
indestructible
Look
on me and be
renewed 

Copyright © Mari Evans, 2017. All rights reserved.

I have written about and posted a few poems by Derek Walcott over the years, including back in 2006, when I ran into him at a New York bank branch, spoke with and snapped a photo of him, upsetting the customer assistant who was handling his business. (A subsequent encounter at Sea Grape--which nearly shares the name of his 1976 collection--a wine store on Hudson Street, was without incident, and he was warm and gregarious, though I still think he really had no idea who I was beyond a vag with Boston.) I wrote about him again in 2008, when I posted "As John to Patmos," the first poem by him I ever read, when I was in junior high and I happened upon it in a poetry anthology my class was using. If I remember correctly,  we were not assigned Walcott's poem but the poem's final lines immediately drew me to it. I did have the pleasure of meeting Walcott a few times over the years, including all the way back to the early Dark Room Writers Collective days, when he read with Martín Espada. His delivery of his poems that night was as unforgettable as the lead up to the event, when several Dark Room members had to go fetch him, I think, and later, as his inimitable entrance into the Dark Room house, with a little entourage. Every reading thereafter I always measured by that first one, and he rarely disappointed.

Even before I'd met him in person, I'd heard about him as a teacher, including the good--his brilliance in finding ways to help poets reshape and perfect their poems, his many nuggets of wisdom, his sharp eye--and the bad; the year before I started college, he was called out for having sexually harassed an undergraduate student, and he was called out again a few years later for the same behavior. His life's complexities and complications are there in the work, which drew upon a range of traditions, including English formalism and Caribbean orality and its trove of storytelling and myth-making. The rich fusion of this poetics is apparent from the very beginning; Walcott's first book, In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960, was more accomplished than the second or third books of highly praised poets. It reaches its apogee, I think, in the later work, particularly his masterpiece Omeros (1990), which stands as one of the great long poems of all time in English, and a landmark in Anglophone, Caribbean and Black Diasporic literature.

Here is the 1lth section of "The Schooner Flight," another of my favorite Walcott poems. You can find the entire poem here, on the Poetry Foundation's website.

From "The Schooner Flight"

11 After the Storm

There’s a fresh light that follows a storm
while the whole sea still havoc; in its bright wake   
I saw the veiled face of Maria Concepcion   
marrying the ocean, then drifting away
in the widening lace of her bridal train
with white gulls her bridesmaids, till she was gone.   
I wanted nothing after that day.
Across my own face, like the face of the sun,   
a light rain was falling, with the sea calm.

Fall gently, rain, on the sea’s upturned face   
like a girl showering; make these islands fresh   
as Shabine once knew them! Let every trace,   
every hot road, smell like clothes she just press   
and sprinkle with drizzle. I finish dream;   
whatever the rain wash and the sun iron:
the white clouds, the sea and sky with one seam,   
is clothes enough for my nakedness.   
Though my Flight never pass the incoming tide   
of this inland sea beyond the loud reefs   
of the final Bahamas, I am satisfied   
if my hand gave voice to one people’s grief.   
Open the map. More islands there, man,   
than peas on a tin plate, all different size,   
one thousand in the Bahamas alone,   
from mountains to low scrub with coral keys,   
and from this bowsprit, I bless every town,   
the blue smell of smoke in hills behind them,
and the one small road winding down them like twine
to the roofs below; I have only one theme:

The bowsprit, the arrow, the longing, the lunging heart—
the flight to a target whose aim we’ll never know,   
vain search for one island that heals with its harbor   
and a guiltless horizon, where the almond’s shadow   
doesn’t injure the sand. There are so many islands!   
As many islands as the stars at night
on that branched tree from which meteors are shaken
like falling fruit around the schooner Flight.   
But things must fall, and so it always was,   
on one hand Venus, on the other Mars;   
fall, and are one, just as this earth is one   
island in archipelagoes of stars.
My first friend was the sea. Now, is my last.   
I stop talking now. I work, then I read,   
cotching under a lantern hooked to the mast.   
I try to forget what happiness was,
and when that don’t work, I study the stars.   
Sometimes is just me, and the soft-scissored foam   
as the deck turn white and the moon open   
a cloud like a door, and the light over me   
is a road in white moonlight taking me home.   
Shabine sang to you from the depths of the sea.

Derek Walcott, “The Schooner Flight” from Collected Poems 1948-1984. Copyright © 1990 by Derek Walcott. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, http://us.macmillan.com/fsg. All rights reserved. Source: Poems 1965-1980 (Jonathan Cape, 1980)