Almost two years ago, I wrote an essay for The Root about my twin struggle to be both an artist and a good “single” father. This may well be one of my most celebrated pieces. I got invited on NPR with Mark Anthony Neal to discuss my experience. So, now I thought that for Words Matter, I’d create a space, leading up to Father’s Day, for anyone to join the conversation about fatherhood in all of its many textures and colors and arrangements. This is something new for Words Matter, doing a series.
Since I left college, I’ve learned that sometimes the professor who always offered honest critiques helped you grow as a poet much more than those who praised you and made you feel great. I caught up with Jon Woodson, Ph.D and asked him a few questions. His perspectives about art—poetry in particular— are always interesting and earth shattering.
AA: What do you consider good poetry?
JW: When I was eleven years old I was taken to see Carl Sandburg read. It was a tremendous experience, and I was probably never the same. Sandburg was the most interesting person I had ever seen. He had imagination, conviction, personality, and he was completely convincing and captivating. And despite the fact that he was an old man, he was a better child than I was. He was a great showman and his material was poetry. That is my standard, and I now see that it is very high because often I am amazed that poets are so lacking in nearly everything that they need to bring to the endeavor of poetry. Now that I am an adult, I see that he was a very serious man with very deep concerns, but he knew that if he was a bore he was not getting anywhere. He was smart enough to know that if you are not able to communicate with children you are just kidding yourself. There is that primal element of amazement that is the foundation of poetry, and that is what has to be present so that the poet and the audience are on the same vibration of rapture, vision, dream, and discovery.
AA:What’s your criteria?
JW: All over the place I keep coming across the same idea—that poetry has to be interesting—that old idea that it should make the hair on your neck stand up—that it’s autonomic and involuntary. In general art is a realm that gives you access to areas not otherwise available in life. I just watched two women get drunk on Bloody Marys while eating a huge brunch, and something like that brings home to me the pathetic nature of ordinary consciousness. One of them said—“Babies are cool, that’s why you like them.” That is typical of the level of ordinary consciousness. People are robots, and they need to have access to more authentic moments of consciousness: that is the role of art and the function of poetry. I mean it’s obvious that in the example above somebody needs to explain to them what a baby is. Of course, there is the problem that most poets don’t know either, so poetry is not automatically of any usefulness most of the time. Poets are as robotic in their poetry as most people are at brunch. So, you have to be careful not to give yourself too much credit for knowing what you are doing.
AA: And what do you perceive to be some challenges for poets coming up today?
JW: It’s not possible for most people to be human beings. They buy into all of the forms of modern insanity, and thus they are unattractive and uninteresting, often dangerous or merely exhausting to deal with. We live in a dark age. Most people do not seem to realize the darkness of this period of history. I am not sure there are any special things about barbarians who consider themselves to be poets. I imagine that a real poet can be expected to be badly misunderstood by the robot poets. It’s a struggle to be an artist at any age, but we have all sorts of delusions, so many things get undeserved credit. Gurdjieff called this “word prostitution” and I think that I ought to do a t-shirt and make it possible for that concept to enter the culture more widely. Perhaps the challenges are always the same—in fact nobody knows. If anyone were able to actually know how to develop into an artist, perhaps we would be making progress as a planetary culture. But this is not one of the things that seriously engages us: instead we just give ourselves credit for nonsense and are content with mediocrity.
JON WOODSON is the Graduate Professor of English at Howard University, received his Ph.D. from Brown University. Woodson is a scholar and teacher of Modern American literature with interests in poetics, the novel, and the long poem. In 2006, Woodson was a visiting Fulbright lecturer in American Literature at the University of Pecs and at ELTE in Budapest. His articles have appeared in Obsidian II, African American Review, The Furious Flowering Of African American Poetry, The Dictionary of Literary Biography, Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, The Harlem Renaissance: a Gale Critical Companion, and The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing. His critical studies are To Make a New Race: Gurdjieff, Toomer, and The Harlem Renaissance (1999) and A Study of Catch-22: Going Around Twice (2000). Anthems, Sonnets, and Chants: Recovering the African-American Poetry of the 1930s is forthcoming from Ohio State University Press. Recent work is directed toward a study of the Egyptian materials in Z. N. Hurston’s fiction. Jon Woodson’s chapbook, Cage with a Live Mouth, has just been translated into Hungarian and is forthcoming in a bilingual edition. His poems have been published in Poet Lore, Northeast Journal, Arjuna Library, Baltimore City Paper, and Manzanita Quarterly. He has also published two chapbooks, I Slept Like Liquid Paper and Worry Dolls.
This week with all of the hoopla about snowfall, deadlines, and fleeting meltdowns, I had the distinct pleasure of not only meeting a new poet but encountering her work.
Antoinette Brim’s debut collection, Psalm of the Sunflower was a delight. We had an opportunity to correspond about her debut collection.
My first question is– Psalm of the Sunflower reads almost like a requiem. What losses and perhaps gains are you celebrating/remembering in this manuscript?
I hadn’t thought to use the word requiem. However, I like all that it implies. There is a melodic, sometimes liturgical quality to my book. And, though these poems were born in a time of divorce and the loss of loved ones, it was also a time of amazing personal growth. Subsequently, I learned a reverence for the pain that brings wisdom.
The book remembers how I lost myself, despite my very best intentions. I had expectations of myself that eclipsed me. I wanted to be a good wife and mother, as the poem A small house by the sea explores. Unfortunately, I believed that this required martyrdom, a level of self-denial that I was unable to maintain.
And, of course as I was going through this epoch, life continued on around me. I lost a dear friend, who left behind beautiful children and unfulfilled dreams. I lost my dear, dear uncle unexpectedly. I was broke and afraid. I was confronted with loss on all fronts. It was a painfully raw time. My poetry became a soothing balm for me.
Nature is featured prominently in your poems. You refer to nature throughout. How did the natural world engage your imagination as you were writing?
Nature will always figure heavily into my work. It is ripe with metaphor for perseverance, wisdom and beauty. Often, I find nature in travail with humanity; whether flowering branches are being forced to bloom out of season, or a wounded cherry tree is droping her leaves. Nature loses, dies back, and flourishes again. When I discovered that a sunflower will drive its roots as much as eight feet into the ground to find water, I knew that I wanted the sunflowers’ tenacity to be my talisman. Nature doesn’t have all of the answers. I am not a Romantic in that respect. But, it has a wisdom that lends itself to parable and fable in its process and systems. I realize that there is so much that I do not understand, so I am eager to find meaning wherever it presents itself. This has birthed in me, a reverence for nature and its desire for interconnectedness and order. So, I sit and watch. I research. And, somehow, nature makes sense of my very human existence.
What were your challenges, struggles in writing this manuscript? How did you organize it?
I began the manuscript in my MFA program (Antioch/LA). At that time, I didn’t realize that I was writing a book. I was writing because I wanted to learn how to become a better writer. I was writing my way through my pain. And, for a long time, the manuscript was just a compilation of everything I was seeing and feeling at the time. It wasn’t until I began attending my Cave Canem retreats that I began to see the possibility of creating a cohesive collection. The challenge then was to sit with the work and relive the experiences it chronicled. I was eager to move forward and forget. But, these poems deserved more of me. I had to engage the poems on their own terms, as if they contained revelations that I hadn’t yet discovered. I was pleased to find the manuscript created a narrative of hope and transcendence. I learned while assembling the collection that I had survived with my joy intact.
With so many references to music– Jazz, Blues, and Folk– in Psalm of the Sunflower, do you see yourself dedicating a future manuscript to musical influences?
Now, there’s an idea! However, my understanding of music is purely visceral. When I reach for musical metaphors, I am searching for a shared language. I don’t have a word, but perhaps the reader and I have a song in common and when I invoke that song, the reader understands. For example, we feel blues in our bones, and when I invoke the blues in haiku, I am hoping that the brevity of the form will read as resignation and the simple statement, Down so low/Don’t believe in up, will resonate with despair. Actually, my first forays into musical references began after I read Cornelius Eady’s Victims of the Latest Dance Craze back in grad school. I was in awe of how he created music and movement in his work. I thought, Wow! You can do that with words? Then I read his you don’t miss your water. The ironic juxtaposition of the titles of Motown hits with the poignantly stark reality of death and estrangement and reconciliation showed me the power of image and musicality imaginatively layered and scored. I have been playing with musical form and references ever since.
Antoinette Brim teaches Creative Writing, World Literature and Composition at Pulaski Technical College in North Little Rock, Arkansas. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry from Antioch University/ Los Angeles and a Bachelor of Arts in Literature and Language with an emphasis in Creative Writing from Webster University. She is a Cave Canem Fellow and a Harvard University W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow, (the National Endowment of the Humanities Summer Institute) and is a recipient of the Archie D. and Bertha H. Walker Foundation Scholarship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize nomination, her work has appeared in various journals, magazines and anthologies. Psalm of the Sunflower (Willow Books, 2009) is her debut poetry collection.
Tzyna Pynchback, one of my good writer-friends and I decided to have a conversation about 2009 in all of its beauty and ugliness. We examine the personal and the public and what I think this blog is all about–interrogating culture. What it all means and what can we gather from the music, films, and books that build our cultural lives. This will be the last post for 2009.
abdul ali: Tzyna, thanks so much for talking to me about 2009. We’re less than three days out of this year….decade!
Tzynya: and i want to say good riddance, but with love and respect for all the decade has taught us
aa: what are some of those things this almost decade have taught you? I’ve learned so much about faith–not so much in an institution but in the divine and how we’re a part of that spirit world. We have the power to manifest our visions
t: this decade has been one of personal transformation. i think it’s important for individuals and for artists to be aware of their ability and need to be a changeling, and to embrace reinvention.
aa: can you speak more on the idea of changeling?
t: at the start of this decade I was a messy twenty-something– half wife, half mother, leftover daughter–even worse, I was a messy writer without focus.
aa: I always feel like a messy writer without focus
t: at the end of this decade, I am a better writer because I better understand who I am and who I am not.
aa: that’s awesome…
t: tell me, do you feel 2009 was a profound ending to this decade or just more of the same?
aa: hmm…well as my friend says, 2010 is the actual bookend to the decade but I think there’s always the changing same. There was so much hope and excitement around Obama and it’s difficult to see so much of that waiver. But, I’ve always felt that New Years offers a sense of possibility
t: I think 2010 will be the birth of some collective awareness for people globally (and now I sound like a new age wanna-be guru). I started to feel this way at the year’s half way mark. 2009 was ripe with tumult: hope riding shotgun with fear, despair, and longing.
aa: I suppose it’s what we make it (or don’t make it) i the end. But, you have to admit there were so serious things that happened this year. Michael Jackson’s passing was huge and it was interesting to reflect on why it was so huge.
t: his death came around the time I reconnected with my first love from high school. I learned of MJ’s death via txt message sent from a friend in St. Louis, just as I had been found by a former lover on Facebook. That first night of his death, I sat up most of the night singing all the songs from his Thriller album with my brother.
t: I remembered sitting in the living room of my parents house waiting for the world premier of the music viedo
Thriller, I remembered my brothers, my excitement at being the only family on the block to record that video on VHS.
aa: What does his songs mean/represent to you? For me, they signal the slow co-option of black culture by cultural forces. That’s what his life reminds me of. But his music celebrates life. I really enjoyed it. Still do. He was a genius.
t: MJ’s songs were the soundtrack of my tweens–that wonderful time when you just aware of everything around you and everything is still beautiful. MJ reminds me of being 12 years old and having a crush on the boy across the street and daydreaming of my first kiss, before I understood this world is not safe.
aa: I remember black and white. Thriller was played on TV when music videos began to take off but what I recall most was how lavish his lifesyle was. He seemed bigger than anyone, even himself. I wonder was that the media’s doing or his own orchestration?
t: Maybe both? There has to be a comfort hiding behind spectacle.
aa: ha ha. MJ reminds us of the images of black people on and off the camere.I continue to be unimpressed with what’s happening with Black Cinema, at least as far as American black movies go. Skin was an indie film about a South African situation that was compelling.
t: Recently I saw the film Yesterday, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film (note: i will check the exact award title) amazing story of a woman in a small African village living with AIDS and trying to get her young daughter into school.
aa: Why is it films about black folks in other spaces seem more compelling than what’s happening here in the states?
t: I am underwhelmed by what passes as Black Cinema in this country.
aa: Absolutely, by why is this? Black Americans are a dynamic people. Why isn’t our film showing this?
t: I watched The Jefferson’s the other night on television, and George replied to another character, “Nigga please!”, I was shocked, and then suddenly I was not. So much of what is on television, in fiction, on film today is a high-tech rehash of the same outcry from three decades ago.
aa: I’m not so bothered by “Nigga please! I am, however, disturbed to see improvements in so many aspects of black American living but with our art it seems as it it’s frozen, stuck in a time machine. I rarely see myself reflected in film. In fact, I see more of myself in the films like “Revolutionary Road” and “The Reader” that have no black people in the film. This is painful to admit.
t: I look at performers like George Lopez and consider the arc of his comedic career and what that reflects for Mexican-Amercians. Lopez’s new late night show is the spin on the Arsenio Hall show from the 90′s, almost twenty years later how far has Black entertainment evolved?
We talk about film often, the two of us, and so often the films we discuss, we love, are not Black films.
aa: Not very much. There’s been a paradigm shift. You cannot assume that just because you throw a script together with some black actors that ALL black people will love it.
We’ve become more sophisticated as an audience. I wonder if black writers and directors should eventually stop writing “black” stories as they’re so ridiculous.
t: Yes!
aa: and just write good stories. which will mean we need more visionary casting directors so that a black actor can get casted in a script that calls for an actor not black person necessarily
t: one of my favorite films this decade was “Closer” with Natalie Portman, Julia Roberts, Judd Law. The dialogue is sexy and the characters and their relationships and interactions with one another are loving, and wretched, and loathsome–real. I am so immersed in the film, and the characters, the fact they are not black is of no concern or consideration. I see the faces of my friends, of myself in these characters and situations.
Often when I am watching a black American film, their blackness never leaves me, it’s always worn on the top layer of skin. Publisher’s Weekly recently had an article that speaks to that in publishing.
aa: do you mean that their humanity dosn’t show—only their blackness?
t: I think the writing formula for too long has been: 1)black; 2)woman/man/child/
aa: So, after all is said and don what do you think as writers can do in our small way to contribute to the change we want to see?
t: There are too many stories on screen, on page where the emphasis is how, why, when this black man/woman responds to a particular catalyst.
Tell the stories we want to read.
aa: or maybe we should write the stories we want to read and see to quote Toni Morrison.
t: yes, you know i stole that quote from ms. Morrison lol exactly
Publishers Weekly printed a great article on AA Books in Today’s Marketplace. http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6711430.html
t: Highlighting what some refer to as the ghetto of publishing: major publishing houses with black imprints. books by, for, and about black people.
t: I do think it comes down to change, reinvention. Black art is ready, dying for reinvention.
aa: I wonder if it needs to die in order to have a rebirth or renaissance…
t: a little death is not always a bad thing. it has not gone gentle into that good night, lol
