Knowing Your Place

IT'S FUNNY HOW THE subconscious operates. Often, I find it speaking to me through other people.

Recently, Dr. L_dley asked me to judge a student poetry contest at Cl_yton State University for Cygn_t, their campus literary magazine. After the magazine editors screened the entries, I received a stack of 20 or so poems to select 5 honorable mentions, and 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize winners for $250, $125, and $75.

Again, this was not a slam, but a written poetry contest.

When I judged this same contest last year, I felt there was an obvious first place winner. But this year, it was a bit more challenging. The quality of the entries was much more even. I read; I re-read; I re-re-read, and after much deliberation, I narrowed the field down to three.

One entry had strong imagery ("in her jolted zombie shuffle") and a good sense of music, but it lacked in gravitas and was a little longer than needed. Another entry made brilliant use of puns and had strong wit, but it struggled with thematic clarity. And the last of the three had a strong sense of voice, thematic clarity, a good ear for music, but wove in and out of didacticism - it was clearly a

dum, dum, dum, dummmmmmm....

'spoken word' piece.

The step child of academic poetry, the spoken word piece rarely ever sees its way into print. But here was one fairly well-written alongside two other also fairly well-written 'page' pieces. Giving it a place at all might be considered controversial.

So, which poem would I choose for first place?

I should add that, in addition to the prize money, the top three finishers and the honorable mention would read their pieces during an award ceremony, which happened this past Wednesday. This complicated matters.

Why complicated?, you may ask. Well, this was a written poetry contest; so I was to make my assessment based on the writing alone. But the audience's first exposure to the winning pieces would be at the award show in an oral reading. The audience wouldn't have the benefit of seeing the text in print. So, if one of the poets happened to be a poor reader, it might - to the audience - reflect poorly on my judging.

I can hear you saying

F*ck the audience!

But that wouldn't be me, now would it?

Page-oriented poets can have a tendency to be less performance-savvy. In some cases they may actually sabotage their work with less-than-engaging presentation skills.

In all likelihood, the spoken word performer would be the best presenter of his work and would completely outshine the other presenters. As the winners would be reading in order from 3rd place to 2nd place to 1st place, if I gave the performance-savvy spoken word poet a lower place, the audience, experiencing the poems orally, might perceive the award presentation as anticlimactic, unfair, and whatthef*ck? - especially if the other two poets wound up being poor presenters, even if those poets' poems might have been written better.

So, what did I do?

I f*cked the audience. I gave 3rd place to the spoken word poet.

And what happened? Exactly what I feared.

Keeping in mind that this was a written contest, I prefaced the award to the spoken word artist, _a__ _n___y by pointing out his piece's sound composition, the heavy use of internal rhyme, contextualizing it in the tradition of 19th century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins' "sprung rhythm." I'd felt the need to justify giving him an award, but the justification was unnecessary.

The poet, before reading his piece, justified again, "I know this piece is a lot different that the other pieces you're used to seeing in the campus literary magazine..."

And then, of course, he ripped it.

Uh oh, I thought.

Then Now, whose award was I worried about justifying again?

Then, the 2nd place entrant, __ll, who I, in his introduction, praised for his sense of wit - got up and said sarcastically, "Thanks for making me follow him."

...

Now, I'm not going to rag __ll. He doesn't need ragging. He rags himself. Clearly, he hates public speaking. He rattled off his piece, mumbling - completely destroying the ability for the audience to appreciate his puns; completely sabotaging his strength - his use of language.

I wish that I had an opportunity to coach him - to tell him to slow down, to enunciate, to pause, to breathe, to let the poem come to life. I'm not asking for him to be Laurence Olivier, just for him to present in a way that he doesn't stand in the way of his own work. Poor, __ll. He's such a promising writer. I felt bad for him.

Fortunately, the first place entrant was a good reader. She read at a good pace, made eye contact, paused for the audience to laugh. In other words, she let her poem breathe. I felt redeemed about my choice.

But then it happened. The spoken word artist brought an entourage.

No, not like you might think. Not a performance posse, not a slam consortium: It was his wife and children.

_a__ _n___y, himself, was very humble and almost apologetic about receiving 3rd place. He shouldn't have felt that way, but he recognized the tension between performance and print.

His loving wife had a different idea.

Not even 30 seconds after Dr. L_dley made the closing remarks, _a__ _n___y's wife marched - and I do mean marched - over to him.

In typical sistagurl fashion she looked him dead in the face and said, "You know I'm mad, right?"
"What?" Dr. L_dley said, gathering his papers.

"You know I'm mad."

"About what?"

"You know I'm mad," she repeated. "Now, I just sat here and listened to all these poems. I just sat and listened to all these people read, and... you know that ain't right."

"I'm not sure what you're talking about," Dr. L_dley said.

And he probably didn't. But I knew what she was talking about - because I live it. Somewhere along the way, I have become a part of the machine. I am becoming a part of the Academy.

_a__ _n___y's wife knew something which I, too, knew. A poem is not just words on a page. It lives. It breathes. It is a spirit.

Am I helping to carry it? Or am I helping it to die?

If you thought you were having a bad day...

Things could be worse.
You could be the posterchild
for Constipation.

Ayo Goes Visual

AS IF I DIDN'T HAVE ENOUGH on my plate these days, I've now taken up painting. This was my first. It's now about a year old. I call it "Z." In 4 parts, the total composition is about 40 in. tall x 30 in. wide. The inspiration was three-fold:

1) A Tribe Called Quest's "Low End Theory" album cover (Oh, the lost art of album covers!)
2) South African visual artist/writer Peter Clarke, who asked, What's the worst that could happen?
3) a huge bare space on my dining room wall that could have cost over $1000 to fill with a professional framed painting!

Necessity is the mother of invention!

The Beginning

I’D BEEN TAPPING MY FOOT in the temple waiting room for five hours. My “appointment” was at 3, and I’d watched half a dozen others enter and exit—in dashikis and geles; hugging and prostrating, laughing and singing; arriving well after me and leaving long before. Earlier, it was unseasonably warm, but by this time January was reasserting herself, pushing through the door like an evicted tenant gathering her belongings. By the time Bale called my name, the temple was practically empty. If it had been summer, I would have heard crickets. I was a lone pot of hot peppers ready to boil over.

“Balé will see you now,” smiled the attendant, draped in white, in some accent that hinted of a Spanish colony.

I couldn’t be mad at her, but I could be mad at him. When I crossed the threshold into the temple room, I saw Bale seated cross-legged on the mat and it suddenly occurred to me that I should be bowing or bending or kissing the ground—anything but what I was doing, which was standing before him.

“Alafia,” Bale said as he rose to embrace me. “Thank you for being so patient.

“Have a seat. Please. What can I do for you today?”

The voice in my head said, It’s not day anymore; it’s night.

But the voice in my mouth said, “I came to get my name.”

Subversion of the Sonnet Form to Dramatize Content in Hayden's "Frederick Douglass"

A sonnet, Robert Hayden’s “Frederick Douglass” memorializes the former slave-turned-abolitionist of the same name. The poem opens stately with the loaded clause: “When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty…” The phrase “when it is finally ours,” in modifying “this freedom…” indicates that “this freedom” 1) has not yet been obtained, 2) has been long awaited, and 3) is a collective, not an individual, freedom. Announcing content of a “freedom deferred, one might expect the poet to assert freedom from shackles by employing free verse. So, it is rather ironic that the Hayden chooses to compose “Frederick Douglass within the restrictions of the sonnet form.

But in the 1884 report, “Southern Slavery and Northern Religion” collected in the The Frederick Douglass Papers (New Haven; Yale University Press, 1979), abolitionist Nathaniel P. Rogers wrote of Frederick Douglass, “He said he was not a fugitive from slavery—but a fugitive slave. He said he was not a fugitive from slavery—but in slavery.” Likewise, the poet Hayden works in the sonnet form to create a sort of poetic liberation in the same way the subject, Frederick Douglass, worked within the American political system to obtain political liberation.

Let us examine Hayden’s particular formal choices to this effect:

With fourteen lines, Hayden retains the line requirement of the sonnet, which is perhaps the only sonnetic element he keeps. Hayden’s stanzaic construction adheres neither to the Petrarchan nor the Shakespearean archetypes. Rather in an outright defiance of the form, Hayden’s “Frederick Douglass” is not broken into stanzas at all.

Also, Hayden’s end rhyme scheme deviates from classical sonnet models. Allowing for very liberal approximate rhymes (particularly, equating beautiful, all, and systole; and alien, man, alone, and thing) yields the scheme: abaa cdec ffgf hf.

Scanning the lines themselves, which we would expect to be iambic pentameter in a sonnet, we find that not a single line scans as such. In fact, the lines’ syllabic counts vary from eleven to eighteen.

But this is not rebellion without a cause. While the number of syllables per line varies widely, the number of stressed syllables per line is more consistent, varying from five to seven. While on one hand Hayden is breaking a particular social order—having only one stanza, deviating from a classical rhyme scheme, and abandoning the iambic pentameter—on the other hand he is building a new social order through rhetorical devices – particularly anaphora.

Opening the sonnet, the anaphoric “When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful and terrible thing” creates a momentum which will sustain this sentence for eleven lines. The next clause in this sentence switches the anaphora from “this” to “when it” with: “when it belongs at last…, “when it is truly instinct…, “when it is finally won…,” and “when it is more…” Expanding and expanding “this freedom,” these temporal clauses amplify the inevitability and the weight of it, thus deepening the pathos of the poem.

The subsequent clause – line 7 of the poem – switches the anaphora back to “this” with the introduction of Frederick Douglass, the man, whose life purpose was “this freedom”:

this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien...

The anaphora sustains the momentum. Eleven lines: one sentence. There is a unity, a oneness here which demands one stanza – an order which trumps the schism of octet and sextet, a new American order which supersedes antebellum ideas of what order should be.

And having exalted “freedom” over the first six anaphora-heavy lines, Hayden now gives Frederick Douglass, the man, the same elevation with five anaphora-heavy lines of his own. Here, the poet says, This is how great the virtue is; this is how great the man concluding the dramatic first sentence with: “this man/ shall be remembered.”

Using just two sentences, the poet suggests that he is following the binary dynamic of classical sonnets. In fact, while Hayden provides no stanza break to indicate such, the composed and measured rhetorical diction – “diastole,” “systole,” “needful,” “logic”—erupts in an ecstatic interjection in the middle of line 11, “Oh.”

This is a volta, if there ever were one. And the content of “Frederick Douglas” does turn at this point. After expressing the magnitude of the man’s cause, and the magnitude of the man, Hayden resolves this sonnet of Frederick Douglass with a couplet which recalls the Shakespearean model but, in spanning four lines, is clearly its own:

…Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful needful thing.

As Frederick Douglass, the man, required a new America to comprehend his manhood, Hayden institutes a new sonnet to memorialize Douglass’ legacy. And it is not a legacy to die frozen in the statues of the status quo, but to live actively in the flesh, in “the lives grown out of [Douglass’] life,” in the ideas of the African-American poet, Robert Hayden.