Continued from “Poetry and Leadership: Part I.”
In thinking about reading and writing poetry as part of a practice of engagement, there are a few poems that have become touchstone poems for me in starting conversations in person and on the page.
Audre Lorde’s 1973 poem “Who Said It Was Simple” is a moving poem to prompt discussion of intersectionality, and the way that intersectionality can be overlooked even within activist communities. Beginning with the figure of a tree, Lorde writes:
There are so many roots to the tree of anger
that sometimes the branches shatter
before they bear.
The poem goes on to describe what some might now call “micro-aggressions” that occur even in the poem’s context of fellow activists—the daily manifestations of white privilege and bias. Lorde, who described herself as “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” turns from description to reflection: “But I who am…,” asking “which me will survive / all these liberations.” Each time I discuss this poem with others, it prompts conversation about its continued relevance, as well as conversation about nuances of language and implication—questions of tone in the second and third stanzas, the loaded nature of the word “girls,” the subtle echoes of “bound by my mirror” and “causes in colour,” the emotional sense of the introductory figure. In my most recent conversation with participants at the Imagining America National Conference, a young woman unpacked the figure of the “tree of anger” beautifully, noting that the poem implies that anger is supposed to bear fruit, if we nurture it, remain patient with it, and don’t let it become too much for us to endure. Considering that Lorde herself wrote elsewhere, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare,” this reminder to read carefully enough to note that it is not as simple as “anger = bad” seems especially apt here.
While Lorde’s poem starts powerful conversations in person, Lucille Clifton’s 2004 poem “mulberry fields” can start powerful conversations on the page. Mulberry Fields is the name of a historic (and once slave-owning) home built around 1763 on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. In the site’s “National Register of Historic Places Registration,” after a detailed description of the physical appearance of the property, the registration includes a quote from the Somerville family papers at the Maryland Historical Society (William Somerville was the nephew of the original owner):
Shortly before his [William Somerville’s] death, he increased his slave labor force from 46 to 180 men, women, and children by 1806. An old brick Quarters . . . could not accommodate all, and frame quarters had to be built to house the newcomers. Most, of course, worked in the fields, cultivating mainly corn, wheat, flax, and cotton . . .
Inside the house, the rooms were comfortable if somewhat over furnished with the accumulations of at least two prosperous generations of Clarks and Somervilles.
This specific background information is not entirely necessary, but the detached language of slaveholding can help contextualize the personal, individual utterance of Clifton’s take on the property, in which a litany of what “they say” and “they did” (gathering stones marked by enslaved persons to build a wall around the manor) is contrasted with Clifton’s impassioned voice:
i say the stones marked an old tongue and it was called eternity
and pointed toward the river i say that after that collection
no pillow in the big house dreamed i say that somewhere under
here moulders one called alice whose great grandson is old now
too and refuses to talk about slavery
The poem crescendos to lyrical beauty and a kind of one-line manifesto on survival:
. . . wild
berries warm a field of bones
bloom how you must i say
Here, as in a poem like Jamaal May’s “There Are Birds Here,” the classic rhetorical move of contrasting what “they say” (statements that reveal the perspective of a specific or general other) with what the speaker or author believes or knows weds the urgency of argument with poetry’s lyrical power of imagery and language. (I taught rhetoric using Graff and Birkenstein’s They Say / I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing,” and thinking of those “moves” still shapes how I read not only academic writing, but poetry as well.) Clifton’s poem invites writers to write, and then share, their own views and perspectives on a subject by framing them in conversation with (or opposition to) existing statements or assumptions. The lyricism and un-punctuated flow of Clifton’s poem also gives a kind of permission to not feel constricted by academic argument, but to write from a place of personal engagement and individuality.