Sky. Pond. Mouth.
Monday, September 2, 2024
Sky. Pond. Mouth.
Tuesday, July 9, 2024
What Small Sound
Francesca Bell, who has been writing luminous poems for decades, published her sophomore poetry collection, What Small Sound. As in her debut, Bright Stain—also from Red Hen Press—Bell studies the complexities of womanhood, motherhood, violence, loss, sex, and beauty. Bell’s speaker grapples with varieties of loss as her hearing fails and her children struggle. At every step, she plumbs depths of grief, often framing it with excruciating beauty, bringing her losses into sharp relief. Finally, the speaker appears to sit quietly, to breathe into her mix of pain and pleasure, to accept what she cannot change.
The text opens with a tough poem with a lovely name, “Jubilations.” The first line tells us, “Every two minutes, an American woman is raped.” Sexual assault happens in the time it takes to “tear / this organic tomato to its pulpy center and bite in, / letting juice run down my chin, stinging.” For five more stanzas, acts of violence are braced against moments of joy and appetite, but the final image, with a nod to Whitman, settles the argument: “OMG. OMG.” says the speaker, “Thank You for this world of green grass and suffering.”
“Jubilations” sets the book's tone, a kind of radical acceptance, an existential openness that is acutely aware of both trauma and ecstasy. Often, the final lines of her poems enact this acceptance, as in “Proofs,” where another mother contemplates her helplessness to save her son:
No woman who had lain after fullness and felt love tickle out of her
could have said, Let it be done to me according to your word.
a wide wound, as her body closed, she would never have said,
Give me the child already nailed in place, destined to run with the scissors of His life
skin and force His way out of this slit husk. Behold.
In this poem, awareness of parental helplessness is brought into the archetypal, the mythic, zooming out to wider history and culture, which is not only poetry’s great work, but also a way to grapple with unthinkable loss. As always, the speaker acknowledges physical pleasure—if not god-like awe—that may precede or exist alongside hardship. Despite the mother’s archetypal suffering and ambivalence, she has “lain after fullness and felt love tickle out of her.”
Other poems in the collection are more focused in the first-person voice of the speaker. As in “Right to Life,” which appears shortly before the poem above and is in conversation with it:
It’s like hiring a hitman
—Pope Francis on abortion
little hitman, little cherub,
swum past my barriers,
takes a person hostage from the inside.
and my body bursts into symphony,
breasts swelling in fiery crescendo.
just like your father liked me:
I’m on my knees, little one, surrendered,
I know, O, I know the life you’ve come for.
This speaker relents to harsh realities, finding ways to express the difficulty (and sometimes joy) of being shoved against the immutable. Whether it is facing hearing loss in the titular poem “What Small Sound,” where Bell exquisitely compares approaching deafness to the spectral moons of Jupiter, and “bears witness to this deafness / that expands imperceptibly, the way the universe, they say / is expanding.” Or when discussing her daughter’s return from the mental hospital in “Taking Your Place,” the speaker admits she is irrevocably altered—perhaps possessed—by her daughter’s illness and suicidal ideation, saying, “But though you’ve returned, / I’m not coming back.” This helplessness and openness in the face of what is works well when contemplating the realities of motherhood, aging, illness, and death. As devastating as it might be, we understand we often cannot change our children’s suffering, cannot stop them from doing their worst. Indeed, constructing incisive metaphors and narratives from such experiences is a way to wield some control through deeper understanding.
At one point, Bell’s narrator wields this acceptance, this lack of agency, while contemplating stereotypes of social-justice culture. In “Containment,” a syntactically masterful one-sentence prose poem, the speaker enacts a fragile inner narrative in the face of imagined, tweet-like accusations of her white culpability.
When the man sat down next to me at Starbucks, need coming off of him like a pheromone, I was quiet, having read, more than once, God save me from the well-meaning white woman, for he was a person of color—I wasn’t sure which color, but not a fucking white person like me—and maybe I was profiling him, maybe I was an asshole and had already offended the black woman who said I could share the table but packed up her things when I sat down, leaving me to chew my dry, multigrain bagel thoroughly like the stereotype it was … until the man asked quietly, from his place to my side, if I could buy him a cup of coffee, his face open the way a wound is open … I worried he was hungry, my son is always hungry … I had an appointment to get to and handed him twenty dollars from the stack in my purse and heard him order coffee and his bagel with cream cheese, and the black woman came back and sat down just as I walked out, my tears overflowing like clichés.
Perhaps this could be an opportunity to challenge or explore social containment, the speaker’s feelings of helplessness in the face of it. It can feel like people are defined by their mistakes, ostracized, more than ever, and that is terrifying. After all, all of us— caught in a racist system—are more than clichés, but the speaker’s fears combined with the current divisive milieu have transformed a seemingly benign situation into something nefarious.
It is easy to see how the poems in What Small Sound speak to each other as the speaker grapples with accepting what happens to her and the ones she loves. The speaker comes to terms with different modes of nurturing, the marks that giving leaves on the giver, and how we are shattered by life and reformed. Perhaps my favorite moment of radical acceptance occurs in one of the final poems, “Perimenopause,” where the aging female speaker shaves her chin—as many older women do—while contemplating her changing mind and body, both of which are increasingly prone to break open, her “tears / unchanneled and at the slightest provocation.”
Last week, in the produce aisle, a man
I’ve never been drawn to hugged me,
his hands warm the way a pilot light
is warm, its staid flicker merely dependable
in the dusty window of a hot water heater,
but I danced to life like a kerosene
slick touched by the sweet carelessness
of a match and stood there, helplessly burning.
Francesca Bell’s speaker is often ‘helplessly burning’ in the fires of life; in the heat of pleasure; and in the unthinkable pain of death, aging, sexual violence, or a child’s mental illness. These poems are a lesson in crafting the “sweet carelessness of the world” to remain, despite everything, completely alive to it.
Monday, July 8, 2024
Seraphim
Angelique Zobitz’s debut poetry collection Seraphim is a singing, searing book. It centers on the experience of Black women in the US, weaving an intergenerational text of suffering transformed, of survival, and of sanctity. In a white supremacist society bent on regulating and subjugating women’s bodies, especially Black women’s bodies, Zobitz affirms that what is deemed profane has been sacred all along: Black women’s lives, their words, their desires, their sexuality, their spirituality. Her work actively combats Misogynoir, a word coined by Black feminist Moya Bailey in 2010 to describe the combination of misogyny and racism aimed at tearing down Black women. Zobitz’s poems dismantle Misogynoir by depicting, again and again, the complexity and multidimensionality of Black women, and by following bell hooks’ proclamation that self-love and loving Blackness are radical, revolutionary acts. Zobitz gives her readers the gift of a poetics of love and praise for Blackness, particularly the Black women who raised her and whom she is in the process of raising (i.e., her daughter, a.k.a. “The Revolution”).
The collection is divided into four sections, following a loose chronology, from the birth of the central speaker in these poems, through her childhood, young adulthood, and into adulthood and motherhood. The first three poems, “Sister/Seraphim, Inextinguishable Light,” “Angelique, an Origin Story,” and “Love Letters to The Revolution No. 1,” introduce readers to the main characters of the collection: the seraphim, the central speaker’s mother, the speaker herself, and the speaker’s daughter, “The Revolution.” We also get a sense of the questions at the heart of this book: who/ what is holy, and who gets to decide?
The first poem readers encounter seals the notion that Black women are the seraphim to whom this book is devoted. In “Sister/Seraphim, Inextinguishable Light,” the speaker describes “Black Barbies backlit by gas station fluorescence // stunning—singing holy, holy, holy.” Here we see Zobitz unifying the ordinary—or what has been labeled ordinary or profane—with the holy. The speaker in the poem not only describes the gas station seraphim as sacred as they dance in a sensual way, but also her own desire. She observes:
She—her—they—they blazing.
This could be worship.
Loud and exuberant as every light-
leached club where I once got hot and sweaty
to reggae, rubbed underneath some body
as vigorously as kindling before catching fire.
It could be easy to forget how
good adoration feels (I can’t forget),
what good feels like (paradise).
They so flame and I see it.
In this first poem, not only do readers meet the seraphim, but we’re given to understand that the “elevative” purifying fire they bear is exuberant, joyous, musical, and sexual. Their fire is powerful enough to spark a reaction in the speaker, but also bears destructive potential. The speaker continues:
It could be heaven.
This lot of half-leveled bumpy concrete
glittering full jeweled with bottle shards and
wrapping paper confetti.
They could burn it all down.
But—Glory.
They invite us to join the chorus.
We as readers are invited to join the chorus, too, invited into this maybe “heaven,” this potential “worship.” We’re invited into Zobitz’s enactment of Black love and anti-misogynoir.
Subsequent poems “Angelique, an Origin Story” and “Love Letters to The Revolution No. 1,” introduce the reader to the central speaker, “Angelique,” and the speaker’s daughter, grounding the collection in the speaker’s literal and figurative ancestry. In “Angelique, an Origin Story,” there is a sort of Black Mary in the speaker’s mother, but this Mary “didn’t need divine / messenger to convince her of what she carried, knew immediately // that I didn’t need to be brought into this world by virgin or conceived // as sacrifice. Didn’t need a sign—she knew a good thing coming.” Even though the mother is a teen “nearly as young as Mary,” she recognizes divinity in her child: “My mama said, a punk // girl can dream of angels and know when one manifests. / She said she looked into an angel’s eyes and claimed it as her own.” Thus, we have a central speaker named after angels in a book about angels. Her young mother’s fierce love and act of naming and claiming holiness reverberates in numerous poems in which Zobitz names, claims, and pronounces holiness: from family members to memories of former lovers, from pop culture icons like Wendy Williams and Whitney Houston to the ambrosial delight of Big Ma’s buttermilk biscuits.
Another crucial figure in this poetry collection is the speaker’s daughter, “The Revolution.” In “Love Letters to The Revolution No. 1,” and in a companion poem that appears at the end of the collection, “Love Letters to The Revolution No. 2,” Zobitz establishes a literary ancestry for herself and her daughter (and, by extension, all Black women). In both poems, she braids together, cento-style, the words of Black feminist writers and thinkers into what reads as advice letters to a young Black woman, representative of a future generation of Black women. Zobitz draws lines from poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, Toi Derricotte, Nikki Giovanni, Margaret Walker, Sonia Sanchez, Rita Dove, bell hooks, Ntozake Shange, Lucille Clifton, and Audre Lorde—powerhouse matriarchs. These poems remind us that, in the words of Rita Dove, “If you don’t look back, // the future never happens.” Zobitz affirms, by looking back herself, that she is built on the words and ideas and love and community that came before her, and she extends that love and community to her readers.
Throughout Seraphim, Zobitz offers poems of Black love, including self-love. In “Sermon: On the Sanctity of the Beauty Shop,” the speaker declares:
I’m a whole broken woman. And just because I came in one way
don’t mean I’m not God-made woman, don’t mean I can’t be
transformed, don’t
mean I don’t sit at the right hand of the Father—look at this
crown on my head.
In “Aide-Memoire,” the speaker echoes this same affirmation of worthiness, of sacredness: “the body is flesh imperfect yet unbroken / here now made for slow soft worship, good and worthy as gospel / resilient as negro spirituals sung next to the one you love.”
As a white woman reading Zobitz’s work, I acknowledge that I will never fully understand what it’s like to be a Black woman, especially in the US in the era of #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName, where police violence and brutality disproportionately affect Black people; where hate speech and discrimination are common, even celebrated in some parts of our country. That said, reading and rereading the poems in Seraphim move me closer to empathy and compassion, and help deconstruct my received notions of divinity and the sacred. Through the pyrotechnics of her poetic voice, combined with her wisdom to name, claim, and pronounce holy numerous aspects of her life and history, Zobitz invites readers into revolutionary/revelatory Black love.
Sunday, July 7, 2024
Women’s Voices from Kurdistan: A Selection of Kurdish Poetry
This slim, elegantly presented bilingual volume of Kurdish poetry translated into English and created by the Exeter Kurdish Translation Initiative is likely to appeal to anyone interested in women’s lived experiences and how they has been woven into the memorable lines and resonant images of poetry. It is worth noting in advance that it also includes two male Kurdish poets, who wrote positively about Kurdish women’s experience and served as important proponents of feminist values: Hêmin (1921–1986) and Fayeq Bêkes (1905–1948). If Kurdish women’s lived experience is often distinguished by a sense of oppression, then it is also one that engenders female solidarity and fortitude. This is perhaps summed up in one of the final poems in the volume, “The Secret,” which moves deftly between the metaphorical and the literal.
Gulîzer (1979–), a Turkish Kurd, uses a deliberately non-patriarchal pseudonym and has published several collections with Avesta in Istanbul. She remarks in her lyric “The Secret” (“Raz”):
I entrust each of my broken parts
To a woman close to me
I know
Women always have a chest
For the safekeeping of these parts cherished and broken.
For those interested in assessing this marginalization, Ghaderi and Scalbert Yücel’s useful introduction offers notes to various PhD dissertations and critical essays on the subject of Kurdish women’s poetry for the English reader. The volume demonstrates not only the poets’ attention to issues such as war, conflict, and oppression (an unavoidable aspect of the Kurdish experience), but also a focus on gender discrimination, as well as themes drawn from everyday aspects of female experience, such as family, intimacy, fantasy, and romantic love, which are arguably less predominant amongst the concerns of Kurdish poetry written by men.
Kurdish is a minority language. It has only relatively recently become recognized as an official state language in Iraq. Little has been translated into English and, in addition, literary translation is hindered because its native speakers fear they lack fluency in the target language of English. Ghaderi and Scalbert Yücel organized workshops around a co-translation model in which Kurdish native speakers of different dialects worked with a translation editor or a co-translator to polish the English versions of the poems produced. This is a productive model for the translation of literary texts from minor languages into major ones and where the number of native bilingual speakers is restricted.
Even if we have thousands of clear-watered rivers like Zê, Gader and
Lawên, life’s springs will be muddy if women are not free.
Slavery is outdated, dear Kurdish girl!
Rise, awaken—it is not the time to sleep!
Break the door, rip the veil, run to school.
The remedy for the Kurdish malady is education, education.
Fayeq Bêkes (1905–1948) was from Iraqi Kurdistan, near Sulaymaniyah. In the poem “Nasrin,” the speaker addresses a woman he empathizes with because her subordinate position fills him with a burning sense of injustice because the Kurdish project of inclusive nation-building cannot simply ignore and leave women behind. The speaker warns Nasrin that she is “chained, your life is oppression-filled” and implores her to “throw away the veil, there’s no shame in that.” He views the Islamic veil as an emblem of her oppression by patriarchy.
Jîla Huseynî (1964–1996) from Iran wrote in both Persian/Farsi and Kurdish and is
represented by both a dream poem about a man she loves, or could love, “When I Dream About You” and “Question,” a poem about what it means to be a woman across the generations:
My mother’s worn scarf
Does not leave my head alone.
It says: ‘I am your grandmother’s.’
It might have been her grandmother’s too.
Diya Ciwan (1953–present), was born in Turkey and moved to Syria in 1975, but she now resides in Iraq. “The Needle” is a humorous poem, seizing on an object associated with women’s work (by implication the so-called trivial nature of such domestic work in men’s eyes), which Ciwan turns by an extended argument into a powerful symbol of affirmation. The needle for her is empowering and more valuable than one of the famed Damascene swords traditionally beloved by male warriors:
For as long as there is light in my eyes
I shall never leave her,
Tîroj (1959–present), a pseudonym of the Iraqi Kurdish poet Hana Mohamed, has written in both Arabic and Kurdish. She is represented here by two passionate love lyrics that depict the speaker’s state of mind and challenge the idea of the woman as being only a passive, decorous object of love for man. In “From the Glow of Imagination” the speaker remarks:
I broke my pen
I tore up my pages
And set them on fire
Trîfa Doskî (1974–present), also from Iraq, writes in Bahdinani Kurdish and offers daring and often passionate lyrics, several of which are represented here. However, she also channels love poems into elegiac depictions of the grief and survivor guilt that inhabit Kurdish culture after the Anfal and the calamity of the wars against Saddam Hussein’s regime. In “Widow’s Hopes,” a woman laments her dead lover:
The homeland has become a mass grave,
and I cannot put down by my foot anywhere, I fear I’ll step
on your head; oh, you who once slept in my arms.
So I panic.
Viyan M. Tahir (1983–present) from Duhok Iraq, is probably the most contemporary of the Kurdish poets represented here, as her first volume was only published recently in 2020. Her two poems are visceral explorations of the conditions of love from the woman’s point of view and the difficulties and passion of amorous relationships. The female speaker is caught in the tumult between the desire for amorous surrender and the preservation of her identity. In “Ego,” she remarks to her lover:
Every second of my life
Is clogged with your colour.
I try so hard to empty myself of you,
I want so much to rob you of myself,
So you get drunk on my cupful of love.