Anastacia-Renee
I grew up with dictionaries, encyclopedias and research books as my siblings. The kind of books you could hold and say, “This is so heavy” as you heave it on a kitchen counter or a plastic covered couch and thumb through it with a librarians thumb cover. I reveled in the idea that I was “being my mom,” who was a research librarian. I felt electric company power knowing that I was holding “the books” that teachers, librarians and scientists were using in their lives. What a weird aquarian child I was! Still—there is something in my DNA that keeps traveling the same spiral in my work. I created a form called “The Nines,” which is comprised of 9 stanzas, 9 lines, 9 section heads and a series of 9 “things.” For example, nine days, nine hours, nine lovers, nine miracles, nine wars, nine doors, etc. This particular poem was born out of me deconstructing that form but wanting desperately for the poem to maintain its potentiality as long poem in general and an “epic” poem for me because most of my poems are one to two pages.
Beyond form, the roux of the piece, is an interrogation on the definition of “Black Woman.” I envisioned the black woman as multiple patches of story, lineage and memory sewn together like a coded quilt. I desperately wanted to create a recipe for the black woman metaphorically and realistically and ponder what some of those ingredients might consist of. Then I thought about the black woman as both the created and the creator. As a hybrid writer who is drawn to mixing/meshing/messying up traditional forms like the haibun, sonnet, or epistolary, and poetic devices with footnotes, short editorial essays, and research I am always drawn to teetering around with music as its own source of hybrid infusion to poems. Truly the final draft did not arrive at the “ending point,” as I am still excavating what might be a definition for the black woman as no black woman is the same. But this “final” piece is where I am comfortably ending and calling it a poem—for now.
< draft 1 >
Entomology (1): Black Woman
the b stands
for brains
for bandages
for beloved
for beauty
for before & after
for beyond to yonder
for bad bitches
for burnt biscuits
bar hopping & blessings
(lack)
she lacks nothing
she lacks the luxury of living
(ack) when she cannot fix it
k could be Kareema or Kristina
lack to lag if you are from the midwest; you lacking
you laggin’ behine
lack in the text books
lack of color is—
(bla)
b l a c k
a permanent marker
multitasking preposition
inside outside
over there under
the color of my true loves hair
blackity black ass black
midnights mouth gaping
spools of thick hair
black like caution
as the winds wife
black like blank
(c) a (n)
black god//dess
the universal fabric: the cosmos
wrap black
rap black hip hop black
bars
bars
bars
pipeline to prison black
black pipes breaking black
black ancestors
black-ing
black-out /slay/ out-black
/slay/
/slay/
the berry juice
black butterfly- deniece williams (black)
black magic woman-Santana (black)
young gifted & black-nona Simone
(black)
woman
whoa!
a can of woop ass waiting
a chunky belt of love holding us together
om
a blazing moon cratering
time at warp speed slowed down
for the rest of us to see
< final version >
Etymologies: The Black Woman *Mainly B’s*
Eloisa Amezcua
This poem began as an assignment I received while serving as a visiting artist for the Pages program at the Wexner Center for the Arts in the fall of 2020. I was asked to respond to pieces from a new exhibition and share my response with a group of high school students. Tomashi Jackson’s work drew me in. Her creations center historical voter disenfranchisement and suppression in Ohio’s Black communities. Contradiction (1948 Head of Voter Registration Line) (1965 Clarence Mitchell, Patricia Roberts Harris, and others watch the Signing of the Act), 2020 captivated me.
The title and its use of traditionally complimentary colors (red and green) are compelling. The faces in the painting, some obscured, some vivid, and the other elements asked me, the viewer, to reckon with the idea that something can be granted as a right and at the same time be suppressed. Perhaps in our country, for many communities, the granting of one thing followed by suppression of that very thing has only ever existed in tandem.
As a lover of words and linguistics, I thought of contranyms—that a single word can carry contradictory meanings. And while I understand that this happens because our language pulls from various etymologies or over time nouns are verbed into new meanings, I am still confused. I am still reckoning.
The first draft was me working my way through these opposite meanings. As I sat with it longer, I knew the form needed to inform the content more, to play with the opposing and doubling which is why I whittled it down to the bare language in a contrapuntal, a poem that can be read in more than one direction—horizontally and vertically. This form allows for the points of tension to shift and multiple meanings to exist depending on how it is read, just like a contranym’s intended meaning depends on the context of the entire sentence.
The poem found its way into a manuscript in progress called The God Poems, where none of the poems have titles. Often titles aim to contextualize or situate, and my objective for this collection is to create a bit of discomfort.
< draft >
CONTRADICTION
I don’t know if I have it in me to understand
how bound can mean both moving and restrained
how the lights can go out and there is darkness
then the stars come out and there is light
we can hold each other up in support
or hold each other up as obstruction
I have been left and I have been all that is left
we wear on until we are completely worn
< revision >
(no title—part of a manuscript where poems do not have titles)
Courtney Faye Taylor
I wrote this after reading Larry Levis’ “The Poet at Seventeen,” the first poem in his collection, Winter Stars. I loved the narrative meandering in that poem. It brought to mind an imagined life, a life I felt I could fit into Levis’ structure. So I began this imitation.
I’m amazed at how much of a complete spill of ideas the first draft was. I’m not sure I write this wildly or freely anymore. I think my editor brain is a little more involved from the beginning now, which at times bars the surprise or revokes permission to be wild and wrong. This is a good reminder to get back to the wildness. I like how, in this first draft, I let images take me wherever. The draft resembles a haphazard monologue or the rant of a speaker who’s trying to explain a world they don’t have precise sense of yet. But they know its feeling. They know its truth.
I forgot who told me this, but writing a poem is like forming an ice sculpture. The first draft—a plain, square ice block. Revision—the chiseling. And the final poem—the swan or whatever you’ve set out to sculpt (though really, the best poems don’t ever end up being what you’ve set out to sculpt. Their final form surprises you, as this poem did). This poem went through about eighty-four sessions of chiseling until I decided I had a sculpture. I say “a” sculpture because a draft has many possible poems. I’m even seeing here, in this draft, lines I deserted that I want to pick up and carry into life elsewhere.
< draft 1 >
after Larry Levis
< final version >
blooms exactly
after Larry Levis
My youth? I spent it all between
the knees of hairbraiders, begging kanekalon
to name me a debutante or mistake me
foreign. Those knees I matured between
worked weeks at the Kween of Kinks
Braid Boutique, which was an old U.S. Cellular, behind
which my boyfriend’s Chevrolet vanished under sleet. And
southern magnolias in hibernation pulsed like sea channels, or
seemed to channel, a yearly seedy casualty all over. I cleaned
for the braiders on Fridays. They sprawled
their slippered feet on the shampoo bowls whenever I
brought the vacuum around and hummed my 2010 urbanite
tunes: Bedrock, Bottoms Up, No Hands—the sexist verses I saved
for the bathroom while lemon-scenting the shitter and
spritzing some Chanel No. down my bloomers, blooming
where you know it blooms exactly. Still even when
I smelled good, I smelled busy. And I hated high school.
Novembers I rode the 60 to Wauwatosa Mall just to sniff
the food court’s teriyaki and auntie sugar pretzels. Those
bus rides were so boring that I pretended to smoke candy
canes, clicking an inkpen in front of the sucked pointy end to
imitate igniting. Sometimes boys with flies undone
jittered past me towards the Rosa seats
without my noticing. And from my window
I watched trashcans of all purposes blow their hearts out
across crosswalks. I had a knack for telling city garbage
from residential garbage: Tampons, Crown Royal, tattered Crisis mags
or playbills for Fences, gold minute hand of a wristwatch,
jaybird bones. So why not admit it? I was petrified
then. I had the sort of shoulder chip this nation usually
only nicks into eugenicists who break news, who
arrive at megaphoned fame just to disrupt or
distrust it. I didn’t trust my boyfriend driving past
Decorah where the boy scouts camped. His Chevy
must’ve seemed Xzibit-pimped to the fist-
headed campers whose kickballs and cameraphones too
often sought the hood. Curiosity left no dent, but say
it had; no boy would pay. Our hood wasn’t their hood
to heal. Hella girls at my high school from hoods unhealed
aced parabolas, sailed me on by to ivies and housewifery.
All night they enthralled my jealousies with nothing on
but the height of their nipples. Mine, Eiffel-tall
in my father’s chilly condo, which stayed chilly so that
my hardness gave a show as I lazed
towards the kitchen in a camisole for some Minute
Maid. Had I known what my upper half
was making this man do for temperature
I would’ve laughed. I was a damn good merry maid.
Bleach licks. Pocketed fro picks. Egregious tips. A life
like that? It seemed to kill me forever.
Margaret Rhee
I drafted this poem in 2017, a year after Trump was elected. I had feelings—despair, fear, anger. Poems didn’t seem to be able to hold it all, but “Intersectionality” was an attempt. At the time, I had nostalgia for the Bay Area, where in the aughts I came of age. The Bay Area in the 2000s was fiercely queer, anti-racist, and intersectional within the living, loving, and dancing in my communities. By the time I moved away from Berkeley to Los Angeles in 2014, almost all the lesbian bars had closed and artists had moved away due to the second Tech Boom. The Bay became a different space for a new time.
Activists and artists who I love and am still in community with, like Ralowe T. Ampu and others, taught me about building community across race, gender, class, and sexuality. After Trump was elected, I moved from Berkeley to Eugene, Oregon. While the Bay was diverse, Eugene was predominantly white, and people of color were neither familiar nor fully welcome in the predominantly white city. It was in Eugene where I began reflecting on intersectionality more intensely. So I wrote this poem on Facebook one day, where I often wrote poems without much thought for publication nor revision (I’m a terrible submitter). Writing publicly to a group of a thousand friends I know feels more meaningful than privately writing and then publishing the poems for people I do not know. I still do this, but I don’t post on social media as often. In this case, the poem resided there, like so many of my poems, written and tossed digitally aside.
When I began to revise my current poetry manuscript Body Maps, a collection of political poetry inspired by women poets such as Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Carolyn Forché, I wanted to include “Intersectionality.” The revision turned out differently. I felt that the poem as a block text works for a Facebook status but not necessarily on the page as the lines seemed to ask for more space and movement across the enjambments. In the first version of the poem, the intimacy of intersectionality as a process of learning and care between two people that I wanted to describe didn’t seem to come across. Being aware of intersectionality on a personal and structural level takes work. To help address this, I took more time to remember and describe across bodies and experiences.
When I revised this poem recently in early fall, I thought about the structure and mechanics of an intersection—after all, the feminist term is based on the everyday traffic configuration. Could the mechanical language of an intersection provide some structure to the poem? The newer version is questioning, less sure of herself. I think she is more like what intersectionality is as a process. I’m still not sure if the revised poem works or if it completely betrays the first version. Perhaps that’s what the work of intersectionality and poetry is—a practice of continual revisitation and re-imaginings of what could be.
< DRAFT 1 >
< final version >
intersectionality
An intersection or an at-grade junction is a junction where two or more roads converge, diverge, meet or cross at the same height
Traffic Signal
I don’t see race when I look into your eyes, but I see race when I see the
curvature of your nose. Do you see my nose?
Feel me. Deeper. Without abandon.
I don't ask you about your race when we first fuck. I do not want to.
But I want to understand how you move through the world and how it confronts you, or lets you through.
I want to see you/me.
I want to learn about racism because I want to/you.
Crosswalk
I want to learn about your bank account. I can share the numbers of mine. The legacy of wealth in your family tree. The working class labor in my own and the inheritance I don’t have. The inheritance you decided to give away at 25. Bones break through blue collar work.
Pedestrian Safety Islands
Can I tell you? Will you delight in my skin and call me (Asian) trash? Will I delight in your skin because you do have?
Corner Radii
I admit how I enjoy my designer jeans. I admit I like you most naked, especially your thick thighs.
Coordinated Signal Timing
I want to learn about Palestine, Gaza, anti-Semitism, war, and trauma because though it is not my own, it is your story.
Your story has become part of mine.
I need to see.
__
I pray to our ancestors that as we kiss, we ease more than the tension of our lips into some softness, but we ease the hurt like the edge of a salve. It does not disappear, this pain, but we recognize it. Sometimes that's enough.
Fixed Signalization
I want to feel you as I cup my fingers there, feel your wetness, and please you.
I want us to sleep together, and dream together, even though nightmares of violence seeps into us.
I want to understand our bodies. Hold me. Dance with me. Press your forehead into mine thorough the night. We snore. We sleep. Oh, I love the way you dance. I love the way your chest feels against mine. I love how your crutches move.
Traffic Control
To keep you safe in the bathrooms. I want to take a can of spray paint and X out all gendered signs. I want to protect you. I walk with you and stay outside the stall. I do.
Buttons
Fuck fatphobia and his rules. I love your belly, I love that you see and lick my fat belly with glee and moans.
Cars, Bicyclists, Pedestrians, and Dogs
Walk with me. Sing with me. Tell me about ableism, curb cuts, street lights, and scent sensitivities.
I want to know.
Red Green Yellow
At the intersection, the lights stop and start differently for you and me.
It is my suspicion that race, gender, sexuality, gender, class, ability, and size shape our worlds differently but
we curl into one another as we sleep,
making sense.
Thank you for seeing me.
I'm intent on seeing you too. I want to.
Brian Teare
Poem Bitten by a Man is a book-length collage. Its primary source materials are my journals and notebooks from 2007 to 2022. The book began in response to a paid commission from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which invited me to write a poem in conversation with the work of the queer American artist Jasper Johns in honor of his career retrospective Mind/Mirror. While researching him and his work, I discovered published excerpts from his sketchbooks, which I liked quite a lot. Almost from the start, I intuited two things: the basic measure of the poem would be the page, and on almost every page I would inset phrases from Johns’ sketchbooks as lines within a prose-based collage.
But writing a poem is largely letting it reveal to me its form; that’s true even when the poem is a book and the process of revelation is protracted. My poetics—my theory of making—is only articulated through making. I can’t be willful or hurry this; I have to be patient, alert to the emergent patterns of form-content relations that will guide later revision. For instance: the book’s first title was Association Copy, which I chose as a way to describe both Johns’ process and my own early instincts about the book I was writing. His iconic early paintings of flags are “copies” whose meaning is changed, distorted by their transfer to canvas, and I was initially interested in the way copying and pasting written material similarly distorts its meaning, leaving it more open to associative interpretation.
This page was, from early on in the process, the book’s first. It begins by borrowing quite a lot from a notebook entry about visiting San Francisco Museum of Modern Art with an art critic friend, though after the excerpts from Johns’ sketchbook its narrative focus drifts to medicalization. For a while it stayed in this first form, but I always knew it would have to change. As my research into Johns’ life and the Cold War period deepened, I discovered resonances between our lives embodied in his Painting Bitten by a Man, which he made in the wake of breaking up with Robert Rauschenberg: queer love and the frustrating failure of care. Looking at the book through the lens of Painting Bitten By a Man and its relation to Johns’ life, I began to see my writing process differently, and understand: 1) the cut that instigates collage is like a bite, and 2) the pasting that comes after is an attempt to repair it.
After I chose the book’s true title, I returned to this opening page. I was now dissatisfied with the dominance of the museum scene and decided to foreground the frustrating medicalization that had become one of the book’s central narratives. Re-writing this page meant taking the first cut-and-pasted version and cutting it up again. In doing so, I didn’t want to get closer to something intrinsic in that early draft; I wanted to turn it into raw material for a new poem closer in spirit to the book as a whole. I re-arranged its order, omitted and compressed material about the museum visit, and added more phrases relating to the collage process and the intent behind it. Now it begins by laying out through collage my own theory of collage: “to pursue meaning through its displacement. To understand change, remarkable or hidden. To go on—” Which is, in many ways, my theory of revision, too.
