RIP + Poem: Carolyn Rodgers

This weekend, a friend at AWP passed on to me the sad news that Carolyn M. Rodgers  had passed away. She was either 65 or 69*. A few years ago, in the fall of 2007, I wrote about a mini-symposium that my colleague Ed Roberson had hosted at the university focusing on the Chicago branch of the Black Arts Movement. One of the revelations for me and others at that event was Rodgers, whom Ed described as one the BAM's "metaphysical" poets. Rogers had studied with Pulitzer Prize-winner Gwendolyn Brooks, and had helped to found the Third World Press, before starting her own press, Eden Press, some years later.  A graduate of Roosevelt University and the University of Chicago, she had taught at a number of schools in the area, including Malcolm X and Harold Washington Colleges, and Columbia College Chicago. Though less well known than many of her peers, she was an accomplished poet, and published 9 books, including Paper Soul, Songs of a Black Bird and how I got ovah.  At John Murillo's book party, poet Randall Horton told me he was working with Rodgers on putting out a new chapbook of her work, and spoke of how excited she was that and other, future projects.

According to the Huffington Post, there will be a memorial celebration for her on May 4 (6 p.m. , at the eta Creative Arts Foundation, 7558 S. South Chicago Ave., Chicago), during which poets will read her work, and I hope to attend it.



*Though one obituary lists her age as 69, this site lists her birth year as 1945.

In honor and memory of her, I'm posting one of her poems below. Like so many of her poems, it focuses on the lives and experiences of black women, speaking directly about and to them. As the poem suggests, the pressures on black women are tremendous, and one of the results is a refrain of the poem, "we are lonely"; this isn't news, but Rodgers' skill endows it with power and beauty, undercutting the pain with sly humor and a cold recognition that one answer to this plight is acknowledge of the pain, of the stresses and struggles, the coping behavior and its results--one answer is knowledge, and recognition, that this is what so many black women go through, and it's that knowledge that Rodgers's work so often imparts, in its distinctive way. And so:

Poem for Some Black Women

i am lonely,
all the people i know
i know too well
   
there was comfort in that
at first but now
we know each others miseries
          too well.
 
we are
          lonely women, who spend time waiting for
          occasional flings
we live with fear.
we are lonely.
we are talented, dedicated, well read
          BLACK, COMMITTED,
 
we are lonely,
we understand the world problems
Black women’s problems with Black men
          but all
we really understand is
          lonely.
 
when we laugh,
we are so happy to laugh
we cry when we laugh
          we are lonely.
we are busy people
always doing things
fearing getting trapped in rooms
loud with empty…
                              yet
knowing the music of silence/hating it/hoarding it
loving it/treasuring it,
          it often birthing our creativity
                              we are lonely
 
being soft and being hard
supporting our selves, earning our own bread
soft/hard/hard/soft
knowing that need must not show
                              will frighten away
knowing that we must
walk back-wards nonchalantly on our tip-toeness
          into
happiness,
          if only for stingy moments
 
we know too much
we learn to understand everything,
to make too much sense out
of the world,
of pain
                              of lonely…
 
we buy clothes, we take trips,
we wish, we pray, we meditate, we curse, we crave, we coo,
we caw,
 
                              we need ourselves sick, we need, we need
we lonely we grow tired of tears we grow tired of fear
we grow tired but must always be soft and not too serious…
                              not too smart not too bitchy not too sapphire
                              not too dumb not too not too not too
a little less a little more
                                        add here detract there
                                                  .lonely.

Copyright © Carolyn M. Rodgers, 1992, 2010. All rights reserved.

Goodbye to Ai (1947-2010)

I learned today that the poet Ai (born Florence Anthony, in 1947), passed away on Friday. Perhaps she isn't as well known these days as many of her peers, but when I was in my 20s, she was a poet many writers I knew talked about, with excitement and awe. Her mastery of the dramatic monologue form; her vivid, searing poetic images and narrators, who included murderers, lusty spouses, people on the very brink of life, as well as famous historical figures; the visionary quality of her voice; her lyric consistency; and her control of the line all thrilled the writers and readers I knew. We would wonder to ourselves and to each other: how does she inhabit these disparate voices so? How does she balance the beauty and pain in them so well? Who is she and where did she come from? What would it be like to hear her read her work live, to talk with her, to study with her? What is she like as a person?



There was an air of mystery about her, beginning with her single name, a dipthong, an exclamation, a breath, which was Japanese and meant "love," we'd heard, and the images of her (she looked to be very beautiful black and mixed-race woman), and her productivity (she had written 3-4 flawless books), and her skill (she knew her way into and out of a lyric moment, how to sketch in a historical backdrop in just a few lines, how to create pathos in a detail or two). Though I'd not seen a single poem of hers in class, he was one of the poets whose books I bought as soon as they hit the shelves and I could afford them. It seemed poetic justice, then, when she finally received the National Book Award in 1999, for her collection Vice: New and Selected Poems, after having received an American Book Award (which once represented a special seal of approval) for her 1986 volume Sin. During my literary journal years, I had the good fortune to communicate with her directly, though I did not get to know her, nor did I keep in touch with her after those days ended.  But I still kept an eye ready for her poetry, which has lost none of its power, and which testifies to the gifts she wielded during her career. Her books also include the poetry collections Cruelty, Houghton, 1973; Killing Floor (Lamont poetry selection), Houghton, 1979; Fate, Houghton, 1991; Greed, W.W. Norton, 1993; and most recently Dread, W.W. Norton, 2003. Additionally she published the novel Black Blood (novel), W.W. Norton, 1997.

Goodbye Ai; your voices will still haunt and disquiet us for years to come.

Here is one of her very fine early ones, on none other than Leon Trotsky (i.e., Lev Davidovich Bronstein).

KILLING FLOOR

by Ai

1. RUSSIA, 1927

On the day the sienna-skinned man
held my shoulders between his spade-shaped hands,
easing me down into the azure water of Jordan,
I woke ninety-three million miles from myself,
Lev Davidovich Bronstein,
shoulder-deep in the Volga,
while the cheap dye of my black silk shirt darkened the water.

My head wet, water caught in my lashes.
Am I blind?
I rub my eyes, then wade back to shore,
undress and lie down,
until Stalin comes from his place beneath the birch tree.
He folds my clothes
and I button myself in my marmot coat,
and together we start the long walk back to Moscow.
He doesn’t ask, what did you see in the river?,
but I hear the hosts of a man drowning in water and holiness,
the castrati voices I can’t recognize,
skating on knives, from trees, from air
on the thin ice of my last night in Russia.
Leon Trotsky. Bread.
I want to scream, but silence holds my tongue
with small spade-shaped hands
and only this comes, so quietly
Stalin has to press his ear to my mouth:
I have only myself. Put me on the train.
I won’t look back.


2. MEXICO, 1940

At noon today, I woke from a nightmare:
my friend Jacques ran toward me with an ax,
as I stepped from the train in Alma-Ata.
He was dressed in yellow satin pants and shirt.
A marigold in winter.
When I held out my arms to embrace him,
he raised the ax and struck me at the neck,
my head fell to one side, hanging only by skin.
A river of sighs poured from the cut.


3. MEXICO, August 20, 1940

The machine-gun bullets
hit my wife in the legs,
then zigzagged up her body.
I took the shears, cut open her gown
and lay on top of her for hours.
Blood soaked through my clothes
and when I tried to rise, I couldn’t.

I wake then. Another nightmare.
I rise from my desk, walk to the bedroom
and sit down at my wife’s mirrored vanity.
I rouge my cheeks and lips,
stare at my bone-white, speckled egg of a face:
lined and empty.
I lean forward and see Jacques’s reflection.
I half-turn, smile, then turn back to the mirror.
He moves from the doorway,
lifts the pickax
and strikes the top of my head.
My brain splits.
The pickax keeps going
and when it hits the tile floor,
it flies from his hands,
a black dove on whose back I ride,
two men, one cursing,
the other blessing all things:
Lev Davidovich Bronstein,
I step from Jordan without you.

Ai, “Killing Floor” from Vice: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 1999 by Ai. Reprinted with the permission of W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., www.nortonpoets.com.

Source: Vice: New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1999)