WHAT IS RRR? Reading Resolution Round-Up.
WHAT IS RRR? It's a challenge to myself and to you. In 2017 and beyond, let's read more inclusively. Let's be better allies.
BUT WHAT IS RRR? Each month I'll will be actively seeking out poets whose voices have been historically marginalized (EX: PoC, LGBTQIAP+, women, immigrants, Muslims, refugees, ETC.) and I will share a round-up of what I've been reading. Expect relatively little commentary from me. This series is about their voices, not mine. Read more about this project in January's Letter from the Editor.
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JANUARY: Christopher Soto, Ocean Vuong, Warsan Shire, Danez Smith, Sandra Lim, Kristiana Rae Colón, Samiya Bashir, Natalie Diaz, Oliver Baez Bendorf, and Monica Youn.
Christopher Soto's chapbook, sad girl poems (Jan. 2016, Sibling Rivalry Press), was sent to me from a stranger through "Secret Stanza". The introduction (as well as the poems of course) is so necessary.
Start here: [Somewhere in Los Angeles] This Poem Is Needed, via The American Poetry Review. Here's an excerpt from the poem:
Mothers are getting // handcuffed & harassed. Homes are being
Crushed [like cigarette butts]. Everyone I know
Hates the racist police & wants a revolution. // But we seldom
Aim the gun... Have you heard // how the bullets
Sing their anthem // throughout the body?? // It sounds like
God shutting the door— Bang. Bang.
Like pretty much everyone in the poetry community, I read Vuong's Night Sky With Exit Wounds (Apr. 2016, Copper Canyon Press) and died a million tiny deaths because it was so, so, SO good. You need to read it. If you can't afford the collection, start with Aubade with Burning City, via The Poetry Foundation. I honestly can't choose which part of the poem to quote as a teaser because I love every syllable of it. You'll just have to take my word for it and read the poem. The Poetry Foundation also has a recording of Vuong reading the poem available. He has additional poems published online that are accessible. Find them on his website.
Warsan Shire has long been one of my favorite poets since I discovered her work in college. I even had the incredible opportunity to take an online class about poetry and trauma through The Poetry School. Her collection Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth (Dec. 2011, flipped eye publishing limited) is incredibly powerful and I highly recommend. I thought I'd share her poem The House, via The Poetry Foundation, which I recently found and have already read ten times over. Here's how it starts:
i
Mother says there are locked rooms inside all women; kitchen of lust,
bedroom of grief, bathroom of apathy.
Sometimes the men - they come with keys,
and sometimes, the men - they come with hammers.
I found Danez Smith's poem From "summer, somewhere", via The Poetry Foundation, in the Ecopoetics issue of Poetry. I was on a plane home from Los Angeles, and I wept openly. (Note: not saying that to elicit sympathy for myself; only to showcase the raw power set loose in the poem.) Here's an excerpt from the first section:
...here, there is no language
for officer or law, no color to call white.
if snow fell, it’d fall black. please, don’t call
us dead, call us alive someplace better.
we say our own names when we pray.
we go out for sweets & come back.
I had the great pleasure to hear Sandra Lim speak and read from her latest collection
The Wilderness (Sept. 2014, W.W. Norton) when she visited George Mason University. Before that, though, I had the even greater pleasure of reading and living with her wonderful collection. Here's a good place to start:
Vous Et Nul Autre, via Drunken Boat 18. This is how it starts:
I have hung our dwelling with enormous
nets, crackerjack feeler though you are.
But nets don’t help us in the awful
enormity of the emotion of thinking.
The electrifying interiors keep
turning their faces from the light.
I found Kristiana Rae Colón while seeking out Latinx poets. I stumbled upon a remix for remembrance, via The Poetry Foundation, and was instantly captivated. She has many, many other talents outside of poetry as well. (Read more about that on her blog.) Here's a stanza from her poem "a remix for remembrance", dedicated to her students, that I found particularly lovely:
Speak away the limits to heights of your existence
Be a witness, be a record, be a testament, a triumph
Set your poems flying in the glitter of the planets
Feed open mouths with truth, the truth is we are famished
The Universe is starving for the symphonies you play
Clarinets and thunder and the syllables you say
are the instruments: you are infinite. Stretch your hands to heaven
Samiya Bashir is another poet that I found within the pages of Poetry's Ecopoetics issue. Her poem Blackbody Curve, via The Poetry Foundation, had my brain churning in a million directions with its innovative structure.
Here's how it starts:
Stairs: a rushed flight down thirty-eight; French doors unlocked always.
Always: a lie; an argument.
Argument: two buck hunters circle a meadow’s edge.
I know I'll be keeping an eye out for Bashir's forthcoming collection, Field Theories (left).
I heard Natalie Diaz speak and read at the Fall for the Book festival in Fall 2016 and she was incredible. The entire audience sat in stunned silence every time she finished reading a poem. If you aren't paying attention to her voice, you're not doing this whole "poetry thing" right. Start with this poem:
My Brother at 3 A.M., via The Poetry Foundation. This is another one where I can't decide on an excerpt, so just take my word for it and go read the full poem. I'm currently in the process of buying a copy of
When My Brother Was an Aztec (May 2012, Copper Canyon Press), so perhaps...more poems from Diaz to come on RRR!
I also discovered Oliver Baez Bendorf through the Fall for the Book festival last year. He read in the same session as Natalie Diaz, and was also absolutely incredible. I left this reading last night swimming through their poetry. The Spectral Wilderness (Jan. 2015, Kent State University Press) is another collection on my wish list. Bendorf's work is important and resonant on so many levels. Natalie Diaz introduces his work beautifully and selects two great poems ("Queer Facts About Vegetables" is a very memorable one from his reading in Fall 2016) to feature in this article from Poetry Society.
I missed Monica Youn when she came to read at Fall for the Book (argh!), but I did catch her episode on the New Yorker poetry podcast. Her collection Blackacre (Sept. 2016, Graywolf Press) has been kicking ass and taking names lately. Yes, this is another collection on my wish list. You can start with the collection's namesake poem, Blackacre, via The Poetry Foundation. Here's an excerpt from the second section:
A wide-eyed girl is extreme in her unliddedness, her bare membranes flinching at any contact, vulnerable to motes, to smuts, to dryness. A wide-hipped girl extends the splayed arches of her body to bridge the generational divide. A wide-legged girl unseals a portal between persons; she is disturbing to the extent that she is open to all comers, a trapdoor that must be shut for safety’s sake. A wide-eyed girl is often thought desirable; a wide-hipped girl is often thought eligible; a wide-legged girl is often thought deplorable. A wide-legged girl is rarely wide-eyed, though she may have started out that way.
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WHAT'S NEXT? Share this post. Then share it again next week. Use your platform to make sure these voices are heard. Listen more and talk less. Support the featured poets -- buy their books, go to their readings, shake their hands, and thank them. Resist the urge to make their work about you. Reflect and listen some more. And of course, never stop reading better.
See you next month.
