Poetry

I'm currently reading through two poetry books. During the Forensics season I compete in Poetry Reading so I suppose you could call this research for "the" performance piece this season. The books I'm reading are Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry edited by Gary Glazner and Close to Death by Patricia Smith. The poems range from short haikus to lengthy narrative poems. I'm adding some of them to this post knowing you probably aren't familiar with them.

This poem is from Poetry Slam. It is a very strong piece (and better read out loud), similar in style and theme to a poem from Close to Death. Themes in these poems include (sudden) death, street violence, and sacrificial love.

Untitled
by Cass King

There is a kind of silence
That strengthens
As time lengthens
And Silence left unshattered is more golden than
That matter that the alchemists invented.

There is that silence where the I love you too bird
used to live.
I love you! I love you too...
I love you. I love you too.
I love you? I...

There is a silence that lives
Finely sliced between venetian blinds
A silence that separates a stranger's cries from the quickening glances
of safe, good people.
And as the rocks start to fly
a baby lies wailing on the quicksand sidewalk.
reached Mark Hi, you Andrew, and the home of Paul...
call We can't take yours
you we can't take right now.
Call
Home of

If you're calling about what happened...
what happened
what happened
what happened?

Stop! Silence. Full stop.
After that gauntlet lies dropped
In the valley of the gutter
In the alley
By the window
Where the mother and the daughter were huddled
Who knew his last word would be ________
A summing up silence of violence interrupted.

Behind a dumpster
as three young men were
beating him, kicking him...
and then there was one.
and the silent observation of two
was as deadly as the knife that slide into
My bleeding fresh/man of twenty one.

My air band Frank-n-furter,
high school principal kisser,
Unrequited lover
and forever, ever
anchor.

and now the Toronto Sun is blaring
"GOOD SAMARITAN" at me
and, staring out from the newspaper box
His eyes are forgiving
where mine are not.
I stick my
coins
into
the slot
and pick up
my copy of
Paul.

I will convince myself at his funeral
That we gather for his wedding
Expecting him to Lazarus down that aisle any minute, to throw over that casket like Jesus
And tell the carrion cameras to go to obstetrics
And report someone new, for a change.

He throws me on his Kawasaki
And his family sings turn, turn, turn
We sacrifice maple leaves under our tires
And his family sings a time to every purpose under heaven
And I scream
I love you.....
I love you.....
I love you.....

And from somewhere from through these years
I hear that little bird return.
I love you too.


http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2551/3825029571_dd3d090709.jpg

Undertaker
–For Floyd Williams
When a bullet enters the brain, the head explodes.
I can think of no softer warning for the mothers
who sit doubled before my desk,
knotting their smooth brown hands,
and begging: fix my boy, fix my boy.
Here’s his high school picture.
And the smirking, mildly mustachioed player
in the crinkled snapshot
looks nothing like the plastic bag of boy
stored and dated in the cold room downstairs.
In the picture, he is cocky and chiseled,
clutching the world by the balls. I know the look.
Now he is flaps of cheek,
slivers of jawbone, a surprised eye,
assorted teeth, bloody tufts of napped hair.
The building blocks of my business.

So I swallow hard, turn the photo face down
and talk numbers instead. The high price
of miracles startles the still-young woman,
but she is prepared. I know she has sold
everything she owns, that cousins and uncles
have emptied their empty bank accounts,
that she dreams of her baby
in tuxedoed satin, flawless in an open casket,
a cross or blood-red rose tacked to his fingers,
his halo set at a cocky angle.
I write a figure on a piece of paper
and push it across to her
while her chest heaves with hoping.
She stares at the number, pulls in
a slow weepy breath: “Jesus.”

But Jesus isn’t on my payroll. I work alone
until the dim insistence of morning,
bent over my grisly puzzle pieces, gluing,
stitching, creating a chin with a brushstroke.
I plop glass eyes into rigid sockets,
then carve eyelids from a forearm, an inner thigh.
I plump shattered skulls, and paint the skin
to suggest warmth, an impending breath.
I reach into collapsed cavities to rescue
a tongue, an ear. Lips are never easy to recreate.

And I try not to remember the stories,
the tales the mothers must bring me
to ease their own hearts. Oh, they cry,
My Ronnie, my Willie, my Michael, my Chico.
It was self-defense. He was on his way home,
a dark car slowed down, they must have thought
he was someone else. He stepped between
two warring gang members at a party.
Really, he was trying to get off the streets,
trying to pull away from the crowd.
He was just trying to help a friend.
He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Fix my boy; he was a good boy. Make him the way he was.

But I have explored the jagged gaps
In the boy’s body, smoothed the angry edges
of bullet holes. I have touched him in places
no mother knows, and I have birthed
his new face. I know he believed himself
invincible, that he most likely hissed
“Fuck you, man” before the bullets lifted him
off his feet. I try not to imagine
his swagger, his lizard-lidded gaze,
his young mother screaming into the phone.

She says she will find the money, and I know
this is the truth that fuels her, forces her
to place one foot in front of the other.
Suddenly, I want to take her down
to the chilly room, open the bag
and shake its terrible bounty onto the
gleaming steel table. I want her to see him,
to touch him, to press her lips to the flap of cheek.
The woman needs to wither, finally, and move on.

We both jump as the phone rattles in its hook.
I pray it’s my wife, a bill collector, a wrong number.
But the wide, questioning silence on the other end
is too familiar. Another mother needing a miracle.
Another homeboy coming home.


http://www.bowdoin.edu/news/events/archives/images/Patricia_Smith_100.jpg

Both poets use similar tools to make their poems successful. Their use of free verse is just incredible. The pieces maintain a beautiful sense of rhythm through alliteration and assonance. “A silence that separates a stranger's cries from the quickening glances /of safe, good people” (King). “In the picture, he is cocky and chiseled, /clutching the world by the balls. I know the look. /Now he is flaps of cheek” (Smith). They also masterfully use repetition to incite emotion in the audience. “If you're calling about what happened.../what happened/what happened /what happened?” (King) “begging, fix my boy, fix my boy/…./ Fix my boy; he was a good boy. Make him the way he was” (Smith).

I also really like how they play with words. It is more apparent in other works (Sweet Daddy, Building Nicole’s Mama, Biting Back) by Smith. At the end of “Undertaker” she plays with the word “home”, “Another homeboy coming home”. King, however, plays with words and phrases experimenting with order and punctuation. My favourite example of this is in the phone message, “reached Mark Hi, you Andrew, and the home of Paul.../call We can't take yours/you we can't take right now./Call/Home of.” This word play is just like in The Handmaid's Tale when Offred starts with a word and then has a paragraph or so of stream of consciousness thought about the various forms of the word.