Poems That Flow to the Brim

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. 

Flashback Fridays with Tinesha Davis

This is the way it starts.

I’m writing a new book and like my last book (and probably the next book) it is set in the neighborhoods where I grew up.

This is how it begins. The reminiscing. The going back in the day, the urge to visit where I came from, the obsession to get it right.

This time my childhood friend, Tamika, is with me. I pick her up and the plan is to just hang out, but like all good hanging out we soon find ourselves laughing over the “old” days, the “way” it used to be. Over fried chicken liver and Texas Pete hot sauce at Pollard’s Chicken, we go over the people we knew. The people who lived in the same neighborhoods as us. 

            “He’s dead. He is too. He just got outta jail, and she – oh she works at the Wal-Mart over there.”

            We leave the restaurant known for its gizzards and buttery puffs and without Tamika knowing it I take her on the drive that I usually make alone. The same drive my character Dominique takes in my novel Holler at the Moon.

            “Mika, is The Scotsman still there?” I ask fully planning to stop and purchase something from the store housed with slightly irregular clothing. Back in the day, I got many-a-ill-fitting-outfit there. I planned to buy something in tribute.

            “Nah, but they have one in Janaf.” I nod my head. Another Scotsman won’t do. I grew up with the one in the Southern Shopping center.

            At Northside Park we share memories of walking the mile from our homes in Ocean Air Apartments to stand in a line that at times wrapped around the pool building. Once inside, we’d swim thirty allotted-minutes before the whistle blew signaling our time was up and it was a new batch of kids turn to frolic.

            We drive some more and share more memories that others would find depressing and dark. To us, they’re merely our childhood.

            “When they put these gates up in Hallmark?”

            “Its not Hallmark its Hallmart, I used to live here. Have no idea why they called it Hallmart though.”

            “That was the apartments’ name.”

            “Well damn, why didn’t they put up a sign?”

            “They did. They tore it down.”

            “Who tore it down?”

            “Mike, Shawn and ‘em.”

            As for the gates, I tell her they went up around ’91. The cops got tired of the drug boys, also known as the guys we grew up with, running through them and escaping. So they sealed off all escape routes. I remember. I remember Jamal got shot and killed when those cats from that other neighborhood were chasing him. Those gates stopped him from escaping them too.

            And I remember Ocean Air, now the face-lifted Mariners Watch. We point out the courts we used to live in. Me in the front, her towards the back. We point out the old candy store we used to frequent. In my novel I named it Sunny’s. Tamika reminds me its name was Crows.

            “That’s right.”

            “Girl, why didn’t you call me? I could’ve helped you with the details.”

            I look at her and for a second I am amazed.  I met this woman somewhere between the fifth and the sixth grade while trudging through the swampy land of “the creek” We were looking for an escape from our Ocean Air lives. We excelled at playing adventure. This woman who has witnessed it all up close and personal from back alley drug transactions where everything was traded but cash, to crap game stick-ups where shots were blasted before the robber realized the “kids” were playing with imagination and not money. She witnessed it all, from drug busts to murders to Russian-Roulette suicides (RIP Linwood).

Knowing what I know about our lives, I am amazed because Tamika should be hard. She should be damaged and mean and broken but she’s not. Instead, she sits beside me laughing and offering me her help. She has a sharp mind filled with the details of the neighborhoods I write about. This woman, my friend, Tamika has light in her voice and shine in her eyes and she reminds me why I am astounded by girls like us who grew up in neighborhoods like ours and still manage to come out hopeful.

Tinesha Davis is the author of All Black Girls Ain’t Got Rhythm, a collection of poetry and a debut novel Holler at the Moon. You can visit Tinesha at www.TineshaDavis.com

Discovering Literary Black Britain

It all started with a postcard: “Think you know British Lit? Think Again” so read a  black-and-white photograph of a pensive bespectacled young man. A private conversation began with that picture. What do I really know about British Literature? And where is the black voice(s) in that narrative?

When Courttia Newland (www.courttianewland.com) was invited to Georgetown University to participate in the UK writer-in-residence program a few years ago, he’d authored of six novels, a short story collection, articles for magazines, and written for television and stage. After some research, it became clear that Newland is a star in the ever-growing constellation of black British writers. This writer isn’t at all like what one might imagine a black British writer to be. There’s a Caribbean cadence to his British accent and his gait has the swagger of an MC who just went platinum.  

Music for the Off-Key, a short story collection, is Mr. Newland’s most recent book. Kevin Le Gendre, a book reviewer for The Independent, a popular newspaper in London writes “while black characters are at the heart of each story, they are not confined to “standard” black contexts.”  

Mr. Newland’s current project is co-editing an anthology titled Tell Tales Volume 4: The Global Village (www.telltales.co.uk/)

I met Newland at a reading on the campus of Howard University; He was invited to speak to my class about his work and that of several others across the Black Atlantic. Since then, he and I have maintained a regular correspondence. When Newland returned home [London]  he got married to his Sharmila Chauhan, also a writer, and their son, Senenti, soon followed. 

What follows is an excerpt of a larger conversation Newland and I had about his life and the political consequences of being a Black writer in Britain.

Courttia Newland: I just want to say something about the whole black British cultural thing. We’re always a little hidden as a culture. If you watch The Wire, Idris Elba, a main actor in the first few series is black British. Also the actor in Spike Lee’s film Inside Man, performing beside Denzel Washington, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Melanie Brown (aka Scary Spice) of the Spice Girls.

We’re there. People don’t really know what it means to observe a Black British person. We’re quite diverse.

Q: Can you tell me a bit about what your initial reception to your visit at Georgetown and Howard Universites?

CN: I’d have to say every time I’ve been to the U.S., I found it brilliant…I [went] to a U.S. high school [Duke Ellington School of the Arts] talking about English slang, black British slang, trading words back and forth, and they were excited.. I read stories about working class black Britains and they connected. It’s amazing to me.

Q: What was it like growing up in London in the 1980s?

CN: By the mid-1980s, I grew up inner city London, Shepherd’s Bush, West London, where the BBC buildings are. W12′s the postal code. I was born in Hammersmith, West London. My mum moved me to a suburb, Uxbridge, which was predominately white. Then we moved back to Shepherd’s Bush when I was around 8 or 9. I loved growing up there; I spent my teenage years living in Shepherd’s Bush.

It was a really happy time. I lived through the Golden Age of hip hop. It was an amazing time. It was obviously a different experience than being in New York. It wasn’t that concentrated. But I remember when Eric B and Rakim first came out. And a lot of people came to London. A Tribe called Quest. Public Enemy.

 Q: In your younger years you visited Barbados where your mother’s side is from. They called you “British” and you said, “No, I’m not.” Tell me a bit about how you define your identity?

CN: It’s a strange thing. In the 70s and 80s there were no black British. I was Afro-Caribbean. I always called myself West Indian or Caribbean. It was only going to Barbados where my mum is from that open my eyes. This experience is shared by a lot of black British people. When you visit the West Indies they don’t see you as West Indian at all.  There was the shock of, wow. . . I’m actually not West Indian. So who am I? I think people are still grappling with that. Though I have to say, not all of us in Britain are from the Caribbean. Some are African, European, South American, etc.

 Q: Why do you believe many of us have heard of Zadie Smith but not necessarily you?

CN: The reason you hear about Zadie is largely because of promotion. And partly, because, in the publishing industry there’s only one black editor that I know of.  People who are published are mainly handpicked from the big universities, Oxford and Cambridge … They are deemed to speak to “other” people and they’re pushed for that ability.

 Q: So they are viewed as “cross over”?

CN: Absolutely. We have a black fiction section in London but Zadie is never featured in that section because she won’t talk about being black in that way. It’s better if you don’t talk about race over here. Things are different. They say we don’t see color in England, which is rubbish. England has a very difficult time dealing with its colonial past. Not to say, the States doesn’t have its problems but at least in the States you will say, this has happened. If you mention race or the like in the UK, you will be looked at as a troublemaker.

Q: What are some ways that American readers and art lovers can discover your work and the work of your peers?

 CN: It’s a weird time for black British writers in this country. In some ways, more of us are being published. But, it has a more commercial slant. Mid-1990s, it was in fashion so publishing houses were publishing a lot of writers. Of that wave of writers that came out in the mid-1990s there’s maybe two of us still getting published. It’s hard to follow writers when they stop at book two.

 I can give you a few names to look up, Alex Wheatle, Stephen Thompson, Leone Ross. A new writer, Gemma Weekes (her book is set in Brooklyn and London) whole genre thing. Some people make a difference between literary fiction and popular fiction; I think it’s all valid as long as it’s good.

Abdul Ali is the editor of Words Matter.  He resides in Washington, D.C.

 

Where It’s Not Happening

courtesy of Laura Hartmark

Where it’s Not Happening: Thoughts on Looking for the Place of Inspiration

It was Friday night. I was 20. I was going to bed, reluctantly, because I was exhausted. “I am going to my room,” I lamented to my roommate, “but I think I should be out somewhere conquering the world instead!” My roommate didn’t miss a beat. “You can conquer the world from your room, Laura!” she opined in her know-it-all fashion. I couldn’t fathom what she meant. But later, as I grew older, I began to understand that making an impact or making a life had little to do with making the scene. That was something I could not understand at 20. You see, I had dropped out of school with two hundred dollars, two suitcases and two phone numbers and took off to Berkeley, California because I was sure that was where it was “happening.”

In graduate school the poet Carolyn Forché would also tell me that where you are does not have to define who you are. In graduate school, we were all drooping and wilting like tropical flowers plucked from our ecosystems and pinned to a bulletin board. Kaki missed playing the flute on the streets of New Orleans, Graham missed his girlfriend in Wisconsin, Joe Ray missed the Southwest, Kenneth missed his long talks with Yusef Kumunyakka in Hoosier Indiana, and I missed the organic markets and self-conscious hipsters of Berkeley California…all of us were leaking out vital drops of culture and memory, connection and belonging as we slowly wasted away in this new and antiseptically homogenous suburban Northern Virginia. This was Jerry Falwell’s neighborhood, not ours, and we were stuck on the Beltway becoming less and less sanguine by the hour. But Carolyn fixed her eyes on us and commanded: “If you do not see the world you need around you, you must create it within yourselves.”

So in those years that felt like exile in the cultural wasteland of Northern Virginia, I set out to create an interior world to compensate for my anomie and culture shock in this strange new place. I dated a man from Afghanistan, and, through his and his brothers stories, I imagined Afghanistan. Eventually, my poetry thesis became about Afghanistan, a place I had never been. It was ridiculous escapism, of course. But it prevented me from being too deeply in Fairfax Virginia, and I was grateful for the escape.

It was this escapism (the naughty drug of those who imagine too much) that helped me coast through the next few years. When I turned 30, I wondered what I could do as a single woman with no kids. “I could travel anywhere I have ever wanted to go!” I thought. So I did. I traveled to Morocco. I thought I had braved for myself the best escape to an exotic place in which I could “find” myself. But in Morocco I was swarmed by Moroccans, all asking the exotic American why she would be alone when no-one should be alone. So, caving to the pressure, and failing to gaze at another culture when the other culture was determined to gaze at me – I came back from Morocco with a husband –plucked from his homeland to follow me back to New York City –and undoubtedly his dreams of a green card as his ticket to the American dream.

Perhaps I traveled to Morocco to find myself, as they say. Of course I did not find myself, I found other people. It was the beginning of my understanding of the Gnostic statement, “Wherever we go, there we are.”
II.
In escaping my tiny cockroach infested apartment in Brooklyn, and the exhaustion of teaching as an adjunct in three boroughs of the city, (sleeping on the D train in between) I thought I had found heaven when I sat on rooftops in the Atlas Mountains where one could literally count the stars and feel drugged by the scents of olives and mint in the night air. Despite this Biblical era landscape, this little slice of heaven, every last Moroccan: Berber or Arab, longed to escape to the exotic other place called New York City. They would not believe me when I assured them New York City was hard, and the distant Middle Atlas village of Sefrou, Morocco was sweet. One man’s insufferable small town is another’s exotic distant destination. Truly: wherever we go, there we are.

In Brighton Beach Brooklyn, I watched my new and near-stranger husband droop out of his natural environment like I had so many times before. I watched a young boy from the mountains become mean as the hardest streets in South Brooklyn. We lived in Brooklyn, miserably, until I had my daughter. Then, it was time to come home, alone with my child to the hometown that had not been my home for twenty years.

So here I am, in an old forgotten textile factory and government town, now the Capitol of New York State. It is a big town or a small city. It has just the thinnest pond-scum of culture necessary to pass for a city. It is not as big as Philadelphia or Baltimore. It is not as shiny as Toronto or Boston. It is dumpy and tattered around the edges.

I know this, but I don’t feel that I am missing much. I have lived in big glamorous cities. I have been on the scene, “where it is happening.” Those places offered a lot, asked a lot, and somehow left me empty.

I have experience living in unglamorous places, like Fairfax Virginia or Albany NY, with little to offer a poet or artist. Only this time, it is not escapism that will see me through, it is watching where my feet land, and honoring the efforts and dreams of generations of souls who have been exactly where I am.

Feeling abandoned and broken by my fate as a single mother and the sudden return to my hometown, I felt a deep empathy with the boarded up old buildings I saw everywhere around me in Albany. They had beautiful 19th century architecture: they were made with love, clearly, and housed countless years of life and good intentions, now shut down. I empathized with those buildings far too much. To me, they looked like the single mothers I saw in line at the welfare office, in rooms at the YWCA: broken and abandoned, unloved instead of loved, but housing history, stories and worth beyond measure. So I began to look in front of me at where I was, perhaps for the first time in my life. I decided that if the dreams and hopes of those who first built these buildings mattered, then I would matter too.

So I live in a forgotten old town standing vigil to the town itself as someone who has not forgotten her hometown (at long last). I refuse to live in the “good” neighborhoods, the places where the streets are empty at night and there are no boarded up buildings. To me, refilling my heart goes hand-in-hand with refilling the heart of this little forgotten city.
III.
I have spoken to people boasting about building their green eco-houses out in the country. But that is just more building. There are structures right here a block away begging to be repopulated and remembered. I have spoken to people wearing “One Less Car” T-shirts. Well, I am “One Less Suburbanite.” I am “One Less White flight.” And because I am not here to resell and don’t have the money to renovate, I am “One Less Gentrifier,” too.

I don’t gain much convenience by living downtown in a forgotten little city like Albany. It has half the conveniences of a ghost town in the Wild, Wild West. I have to drive to the nearest grocery store. The nightlife consists of the corner liquor store and the corner bodega. And just like in the Wild, Wild Western ghost towns of old movies, sometimes there are gunshots on the streets at night.

I suppose I can live here as a writer because I rely little on external culture to define or encourage me. I bring it from within. My engagement with language needs little accompaniment since I can hear the music of language in birds, in traffic, in thunder and in overheard conversations and patterns of speech. I do not need to hear the newest music, just music. I do not need to read the newest novels or hear the coolest poets. I just need to listen to sounds around me. I scarcely need someone to appear on the street wearing an orange feather in her hair before I dare try it myself.

What I gain here in dumpy frumpy Albany is a sort of quietness, and undisturbed authenticity. There are no crowds rushing to buy or define or swipe out from under me any place, peace, piece or perspective. People give me space, kindness, and consideration. The air is clean here, and it is easy to breathe.

And so, in being here, and exploring here, and re-imagining here, and reaffirming here, I have finally come home to somewhere. I pay attention to people. I pay attention to history. I know when the drunk on my street is back to drinking again. I know when the couple with the kids has split up again just by watching their kids for five minutes. I know where the free bakery for poor folks was in the previous century. I know who built it, who ran it, and who lives there now. I bought garlic from their garden yesterday, and will email them asking advice about herbal medicine just as soon as I finish writing this. I know in my bones how hard the community organizer had to work to save the public pools for the kids in the seventies. I know how hard the community organizers on my block work now. I know that I am part of a life whirring around me that has been whirring, unglamorously, for centuries here.

It is not the great big lights or large numbers of people that make life matter. Life matters because one person makes it matter.

Here outside my house in the “bad” neighborhood of a forgotten little unglamorous city sits a pot of purple flowers from a little boy named Yabisi. He brought them for my daughter. When Yabisi’s mom asked him why he brought them, he just looked down at the pavement and mumbled, “Because I love her.” And that, right there, is history in the making. This is the house where Yabisi said he loves Sofia. And so this little bad side of town in this little forgotten town matters. And is refilled, right here, in the heart of Albany.

Laura Hartmark received her MFA in poetry from George Mason University. She has taught writing at Lehman college, Hunter College, Russell Sage college, The State University of New York and in Morocco. Her poems have appeared in The Boston Review, International Quarterly, Staple Magazine, and several other publications. She currently lives in Albany New York where she is able to engage in the radical idea that justice is possible and that the world can be changed by human beings with the spitfire and vision to do so. Laura frequently engages in making rainbow colored pancakes with butter, eggs, flour, milk, food coloring, and honey.