Poetry is the center of my critical, creative and professional practice. Trained as a poet, I’ve had the honor of studying with Thylias Moss, G.E. Patterson and Elizabeth Alexander amongst others. I read poems, write poems, write about poems, teach poems, preach poems and try to open poems up in new ways as embodied performance. The first poems that impacted me were “well made things,” poems often ending with that “epiphanic Ah!” And I still have some fondness for those.
Poets I loved early were Rita Dove (whose books I carried in my purse), Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Frost, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Li-Young Lee, ntozake shange, sonia sanchez and Larry Levis (whose “Poet at Seventeen” I found on the eve of my 17th birthday.) Strangely I loved T.S. Eliot whom I had no idea was famous. (I was sure “The Hollow Men” was about my hometown Detroit—which I still think it is).
Later I found Jayne Cortez, Leslie Scalapino, Kamau Brathwaite, Alice Notley, Cecilia Vicuña, Aimé Cesaire, Anne Carson, Carole Maso (whose poems are novels) and Jacqueline Beaugé whose work especially added new possibilities for my imagination. Poet-friends you should also check out include, Purvi Shah, Eléna Rivera, Juliet Patterson, Sun Yung Shin, Wang Ping, Rachel Moritz, Eric Schwerer, Stephen Burt, Crystal Williams, Michelle Naka Pierce, Mark Nowak, Maria Damon and Angela Shannon.
Here are two of my poems—one old and one relatively new.
Static
Tonight, the sheets twine around my legs
tangled, like the thick bush of my hair.
I am brushing hard strokes,
trying not to think of you
and the man you saw get a bullet in his face
and your eyes’ glare like t.v. light,
their wideness inside mine
keeping me sleepless. Coiling for you,
in the dark, even the sparks from my hair are blue.
from glints
at night
the sound of grace
tinkling keys
the return to poetry is
to flesh allowance
to wear white—
greased knees refusal
polished ash
* * *
if i say this fuschia
consistency
paper does mean
writing
already covered skin
a chaplet of Glints is available for $1.39 from WinteRed press. (Go to http://www.winteredpress.blogspot.com for more info)