Rethinking Love

The Starbucks story has me deep in my feelings. (I’m sure this comes as quite the surprise to everyone.) And then this morning I came across this article in my FB feed. Professor Yancy’s experiences aren’t mine. I have never — yet … and thank goodness — had to endure the kinds of attacks he has, but I have had feelings of rage and despair similar to what he describes, have questioned why I bother to keep trying to force a conversation about race, push people to see the world that I live in. The faster my heart beat as I read his essay, the more I knew I could stop looking for today’s source text.

Rethinking Love
(An erasure of Professor George Yancy’s op-ed in the Times.)

I needed a witness
needed help to carry what I was feeling,
my emotional response
to a different kind of threat.
The kind of threat
that will inevitably impact my loved ones,
that impacts me,
my body
my spirit.

I cannot take this hatred anymore.

They bore witness
to my vulnerability,
my suffering,
the sting of hatred.
They saw the impact,
and the space between us was not the same.

I wanted them to internalize
philosophy, love,
wisdom in the face of danger.
Yet, I seemed to have lost my bearing.
I was pushed to rethink love,
the kind that refuses to hide
and requires profound vulnerability.

Being weary, fatigued, pained
mixed with outrage.
Do I give up on white people,
on white America,
or do I continue to fight?
America suffers from white racism,
lack of courage,
spinelessness and indifference.

For many white Americans,
I am disposable,
more beast than human.
And yet, a braver white America
took off their masks.
They entered that space of risk
and honesty
to tell the truth about whiteness.

We are prepared
to be wounded,
to be haunted by love
and vulnerability,
step out into the water
feel the perpetual achievement
of the impossible.

__________

I’m still struggling with this form. Struggling every day. I had thought it would be a little more malleable in my hands than it has turned out to be. I thought I could use the words in the source text, stretch them to fit my ideas. Instead, I am having to stretch myself. Stretching myself isn’t a bad thing, sure, but it’s exhausting.

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It’s National Poetry Month! Every year, I choose a specific form and try to write a poem a day in that form. This year, I am trying erasure poems and I want to use news articles as my source texts. I’ve practiced a few times, and it’s already feeling difficult! We’ll see how it goes.

Here’s an edited version of the Wiki definition of this form:
Erasure Poetry: a form of found poetry created by erasing words from an existing text in prose or verse and framing the result on the page as a poem. Erasure is a way to give an existing piece of writing a new set of meanings, questions, or suggestions. It lessens the trace of authorship but requires purposeful decision making. What does one want done to the original text? Does a gesture celebrate, denigrate, subvert, or efface the source completely? One can erase intuitively by focusing on musical and thematic elements or systematically by following a specific process regardless of the outcome.
Also, Robert Lee Brewer at Writer’s Digest has some good points to add about ethics and plagiarism:
Quick note on ethics: There is a line to be drawn between erasure poems and plagiarism. If you’re not erasing more than 50% of the text, then I’d argue you’re not making enough critical decisions to create a new piece of art. Further, it’s always good form to credit the original source for your erasures.

Washington International School

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Saturday Night Social

I spent today busy with the 24 Hour Project. I wasn’t sure I could handle the non-sleeping, body-punishing walking, photo- and story-finding work of that challenge and make a poem, but Jezebel saved me.

I worked my erasure differently today. I’m not sure the result does what it should, but I have a poem and I’m sticking to it!

Saturday Night Social
(An erasure of a Jezebel article about Sotheby’s auction of a codpiece.)

White House hoopla fades
into the drunken oblivion of evening.
(After intense bidding, I suppose.)
But when you turn it around,
maybe it’s just the kind of gag item
the wealthy pass around.
Shit has its way
of making you examine
things that are essential —
and things that are not.
Career stuff, stuff collected,
stuff in general.
Boxes in the spirit,
a collection of stuff.

 

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It’s National Poetry Month! Every year, I choose a specific form and try to write a poem a day in that form. This year, I am trying erasure poems and I want to use news articles as my source texts. I’ve practiced a few times, and it’s already feeling difficult! We’ll see how it goes.

Here’s an edited version of the Wiki definition of this form:
Erasure Poetry: a form of found poetry created by erasing words from an existing text in prose or verse and framing the result on the page as a poem. Erasure is a way to give an existing piece of writing a new set of meanings, questions, or suggestions. It lessens the trace of authorship but requires purposeful decision making. What does one want done to the original text? Does a gesture celebrate, denigrate, subvert, or efface the source completely? One can erase intuitively by focusing on musical and thematic elements or systematically by following a specific process regardless of the outcome.
Also, Robert Lee Brewer at Writer’s Digest has some good points to add about ethics and plagiarism:
Quick note on ethics: There is a line to be drawn between erasure poems and plagiarism. If you’re not erasing more than 50% of the text, then I’d argue you’re not making enough critical decisions to create a new piece of art. Further, it’s always good form to credit the original source for your erasures.

Washington International School

The Violent Male Gaze

Tonight, I stepped away from the Times and over to Jezebel for my source material. Found an excellent piece by Clover Hope to use for my poem. Definitely worth reading the full essay. She has a lot to say and says it well. Thank you to everyone who suggested I switch up my news source. Of course that was a great idea. I’ll be doing more of that.

The Violent Male Gaze
(An erasure of the Jezebel article on the #MeToo movement and film)

This is a cycle.
It’s happened her whole life
sexual assault, rape, domestic violence –

Public attention has escalated
acknowledgment of violent sexual behavior,
reflection and reinforcement of prevailing views,
our pessimism about change remains.

Violence has worked for decades,
the link between real-world sexual violence
and depictions of violence
confirming violence as a sexual stimulant for men.
Violence exists within a continuum
of culturally sanctioned, ritualized aggression,
a continuum from the symbolic, cleansing, and cathartic
to the desensitizing, exploitative and profoundly hypocritical.

What’s been robbed of women
is the privilege of complexity.
Consideration
of how we respond to or reject violent imagery.
We are inundated with images
of women as victims,
images of murdered women’s bodies.
They are the narrative background,
acted upon rather than acting.

Men in power have stalled the course of evolution.
The issue of violence begins with how women are seen –
unconscious indoctrination.
Awareness of these images,
pointing out that women are sexualized,
made into sexual objects,
an overpowering message that you’re constantly seeing,
a consciousness created about what women are here to do.

Advancement of women is one obvious solution.
One of the clearest ways to combat sexual harassment:
Some enlightenment …
And a lot more women.

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It’s National Poetry Month! Every year, I choose a specific form and try to write a poem a day in that form. This year, I am trying erasure poems and I want to use news articles as my source texts. I’ve practiced a few times, and it’s already feeling difficult! We’ll see how it goes.

Here’s an edited version of the Wiki definition of this form:

Erasure Poetry: a form of found poetry created by erasing words from an existing text in prose or verse and framing the result on the page as a poem. Erasure is a way to give an existing piece of writing a new set of meanings, questions, or suggestions. It lessens the trace of authorship but requires purposeful decision making. What does one want done to the original text? Does a gesture celebrate, denigrate, subvert, or efface the source completely? One can erase intuitively by focusing on musical and thematic elements or systematically by following a specific process regardless of the outcome.

Also, Robert Lee Brewer at Writer’s Digest has some good points to add about ethics and plagiarism:

Quick note on ethics: There is a line to be drawn between erasure poems and plagiarism. If you’re not erasing more than 50% of the text, then I’d argue you’re not making enough critical decisions to create a new piece of art. Further, it’s always good form to credit the original source for your erasures.

Washington International School

50 Years to Today

A coworker and I started a lunchtime discussion group at work. When Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay, “The First White President,” appeared in The Atlantic last October, my coworker decided it was time for us to expand our conversation about race beyond the two of us. I’m so glad he had that idea.

We put up flyers in the building inviting people to come start a conversation about race. We included a link to the article so folks could come to lunch prepared to talk. I was afraid the day and time would come and it would just be the two of us sitting in the conference room with our lunches, talking to one another the way we always do.

The folks in our building surprised and pleased me by turning out — we had 30 people for that conversation! The discussion was good, and we decided to meet monthly to keep it going.

We’ve read some Michael Eric Dyson, some Audre Lorde. And in January we started meeting every other week because we were working through The New Jim Crow.

We took a break in the middle of our Jim Crow read because it was mid February and we needed to talk Black Panther (of course!).

The group hasn’t stayed enormous, but, but it has been consistent. There is a regular group of attendees, and the quality of our conversation continues to grow as a result.

Today wasn’t a regularly scheduled lunch talk. We met last week and will finish The New Jim Crow next week. But today marks 50 years since the assassination of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. Fifty long-short years. And I won’t call this an “anniversary,” as that sounds like something we’re supposed to celebrate. No.

Fifty years. My coworker and I decided to invite the group to a conversation about King, about his legacy, about civilrights and racism, about where we are as a nation today. Yeah. A light, lunchtime chat.

We also wanted to talk about the Undoing Racism workshop that is offered by The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. We’ve both taken the workshop multiple times and are both now working toward becoming facilitators. We’ve talked about how much we’d like the discussion group members to take the workshop, so we introduced that idea today.

The conversation was good, left me wishing we could have had another hour to keep it going!

__________

For today’s poem, instead of taking a news article as my source text, I used Dr. King’s final speech, the “been to the mountaintop” speech. I always think of this speech as King’s marching orders, telling us what we need to work on because he’s not going to be around to work with us. Distilling this poem from his words felt both comfortable and uncomfortable. It seems almost blasphemous to erase a single word, but it was certainly nicer than poking at the news articles I’ve used these last few days.

We Are Going On
(An erasure of Martin Luther King’s final speech)

Something is happening –
the world is messed up, sick.
Confusion all around.
But only when it is dark can you see the stars.

Something is happening in our world.
Masses of people are rising up.
The cry, always the same:
“We want to be free.”
We have been forced to grapple
with problems men have been trying
to grapple with through history.

We are determined to gain our rightful place –
determined to be people.
We are saying
we don’t have to live like we are forced to live.
We are masters in our movement,
a fire no water could put out.

Somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly
Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech
Somewhere I read of the freedom of press
Somewhere I read that the greatness of America
is the right to protest for right –
articulate the longings and aspirations of the people.

It’s alright to talk about “streets flowing with milk and honey,”
but be concerned about the slums down here,
and children who can’t eat three meals a day

We must redistribute the pain
We’ve got to give ourselves to this struggle until the end.
Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness.
Let us rise up tonight with a greater readiness.
Let us stand with a greater determination.
Let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge
to make America what it ought to be.

We’ve got difficult days ahead.
And I don’t mind.

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It’s National Poetry Month! Every year, I choose a specific form and try to write a poem a day in that form. This year, I am trying erasure poems and I want to use news articles as my source texts. I’ve practiced a few times, and it’s already feeling difficult! We’ll see how it goes.

Here’s an edited version of the Wiki definition of this form:

Erasure Poetry: a form of found poetry created by erasing words from an existing text in prose or verse and framing the result on the page as a poem. Erasure is a way to give an existing piece of writing a new set of meanings, questions, or suggestions. It lessens the trace of authorship but requires purposeful decision making. What does one want done to the original text? Does a gesture celebrate, denigrate, subvert, or efface the source completely? One can erase intuitively by focusing on musical and thematic elements or systematically by following a specific process regardless of the outcome.

Also, Robert Lee Brewer at Writer’s Digesthas some good points to add about ethics and plagiarism:

Quick note on ethics: There is a line to be drawn between erasure poems and plagiarism. If you’re not erasing more than 50% of the text, then I’d argue you’re not making enough critical decisions to create a new piece of art. Further, it’s always good form to credit the original source for your erasures.

Washington International School

Mother of a Nation

Winnie Mandela has passed. May she rest in power and peace.

I understand the need to tell a “whole” story, to share the bitter with the sweet and all that. However, when I read the article about Mandela in the New York Times, I was pretty much only annoyed. To start and end what should have been a remembrance and celebration of a great woman by calling her out as a problem is disgusting. Is it really so hard to give a woman — a woman of color, an outspoken woman, a powerful woman, an African woman — her due? Is it?

I made an erasure poem using the Times piece as source text. It felt like writing a correction, like something I should send to them with the note, “Fixed it for you.” I found a better article from the BBC and pulled bits from that into the poem.

The only lovely thing about the Times article was learning Mandela’s given name and what it means. Certainly, her parents knew too well the world they were bringing her into. Did they also see something in her infant eyes that made them know to name her “Nomzamo”?

She who must endure trials / Nomzamo
(An erasure of the Times’ flawed remembrance … inter-cut with a much more appropriate BBC News article)

 

A voice of defiance.
Charming, intelligent, complex,
fiery and eloquent,
a natural constituency
among poor and dispossessed,
a champion of justice and equality,
a primacy.
Her credentials eclipsed by her husband’s stature
her contribution wrongly depicted.
Her burning hatred
rooted in years of mistreatment, incarceration, banishment.
Her reputation, her private life,
a victor’s clenched fist salute.

She was arrested,
held in solitary confinement,
beaten and tortured.
A living symbol of the country,
a living symbol of white man’s fear.
An abiding symbol of the desire to be free.
Her home a place of pilgrimage.
To the end, revolutionary and heroic,
icon of liberation struggle.
Deeply grateful for the gift of her life.
Remember.

__________

I won’t lie and say that I’m enjoying making these erasure poems. As I worked on today’s attempt, I realized that I find them frustrating because I’m not using my own words, when of course using someone else’s words is the entire point. When I’ve written erasure poems in the past, I’ve written poems about things I’m thinking or feeling and simply mined the source text for the way to say what I wanted to say. The poems I’ve written so far this go-round have been more like condensations of the source texts, and I think that’s what’s on my nerves. I need to work on moving away from that. I’m supposed to be creating something new, not distilling some other writer’s ideas.

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It’s National Poetry Month! Every year, I choose a specific form and try to write a poem a day in that form. This year, I am trying erasure poems and I want to use news articles as my source texts. I’ve practiced a few times, and it’s already feeling difficult! We’ll see how it goes.

Here’s an edited version of the Wiki definition of this form:

Erasure Poetry: a form of found poetry created by erasing words from an existing text in prose or verse and framing the result on the page as a poem. Erasure is a way to give an existing piece of writing a new set of meanings, questions, or suggestions. It lessens the trace of authorship but requires purposeful decision making. What does one want done to the original text? Does a gesture celebrate, denigrate, subvert, or efface the source completely? One can erase intuitively by focusing on musical and thematic elements or systematically by following a specific process regardless of the outcome.

Also, Robert Lee Brewer at Writer’s Digest has some good points to add about ethics and plagiarism:

Quick note on ethics: There is a line to be drawn between erasure poems and plagiarism. If you’re not erasing more than 50% of the text, then I’d argue you’re not making enough critical decisions to create a new piece of art. Further, it’s always good form to credit the original source for your erasures.

Washington International School

Totally Predictable

Utterly exhausted … again … still. I’ve started three different slices and can’t focus enough to make it through any of them. Instead, I’ve turned to poetry practice. April is breathing down my neck, and I’m not yet sure-sure about my choice of news-sourced erasure poems for the month. So I tried another one tonight.

Totally Predicatable
(An erasure of an article about Fox News host Laura Ingraham’s latest craptastic nonsense.)

Laura Ingraham apologized for her show,
rejected and whining.
Companies pulled advertising,
boycotts began.
Personal remarks went too far,
these statements cross the line,
are not consistent
with open dialogue and debate,
with our values.
A series of controversies
ignited a firestorm.
There’s going to be consequences,
as someone once said.

I’m not particularly encouraged by the fact that this one was harder to write than the previous two … but I’m going to say that’s because I’m so tired tonight. I was pretty pleased with getting to pull that first line by way of strategic erasures, however, and that kind of makes the whole poem for me.

Despite my trepidation, I think this poem is sealing the deal for me: I’m going to go for a 30/30 that’s all erasure poems taken from news articles. I’ve got two days to sleep and get my brain ready!

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It’s the annual Slice of Life Story Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers! With hundreds of folks participating, there’s more than a little something for everyone … and plenty of room for you to join in!

The Most Important Thing

I decided to try another erasure poem taken from a news article, see if this is really a thing I’m going to spend a month doing. After listening to stories from several angles on my morning news, I chose as my source text a Times interview with Mr. Facebook.

The Most Important Thing
(An erasure of a Mark Zuckerberg interview in response to the Cambridge Analytica data breach.)

Facebook embroiled, prone to abuse.
Privacy issues, important responsibilities.
At their most basic level,
everything that happened
was more important, the most important.
There were certainly other things.
Going forward, are there others out there?
A full investigation,
a large amount of information,
policies, suspicious activity
capacity to make sure.
It’s really important.
You may have forgotten you’ve connected.
We’re going to tell,
we’re going to be conservative,
we’ll build.
We’re going to have to grow.
The important thing –
it’s a high-touch process.
The specific point, I guess technically
would be the point, a situation
a real person-to-person relationship,
sensitive, sexual, clear.
The first thing is community.
There’s no wrongdoing here.
That’s the basic driver –
access, responsibility, community.
It’s not good.
It’s a clear signal.
This is a major trust issue.
This is an incredibly important point –
we feel a responsibility.
You’re the first I’m telling.
I feel a lot better now.
This is a massive focus, really important.
We want to unify.
This is a really important question, really important.
Our mission
is to build community in the world.
Really important.
We’re doing something unprecedented,
building community all over the world,
connect across boundaries, new challenges.
We have a real responsibility, seriously.
I’ve made all kinds of mistakes.

This was an interesting exercise. When I started reading the interview, I thought I’d make a fairly short poem because every clip I’d heard from the interview seemed fairly empty and devoid of poem fodder. But as I kept reading, I realized that was kind of the point: Zuckerberg talks and talks, his responses performative rather than substantive. Yes, of course that’s an “of course,” but it surprised me how little he tried to paint something pretty over that.

And then there’s how not accepting of blame or responsibility his answers are, how he spends so much time making sure to tell us how revolutionary and innovative and community-centered his work is, blah, blah, blah.

This is surely another “of course!” I’ve never read so carefully through anything Zuckerberg has said, so I find myself surprised. This poetic form forces me to read the words differently as I search for the phrases that need pulling out.

There was a lot here. The repetitions, the self-promotions, the clear effort to distance himself from anything that could look like guilt. Made for a much longer poem. And I’m sure MZ wouldn’t be happy with the choices I’ve made here, with my final line maybe especially.

I may have to try this a time or two again before April rolls around.

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It’s the annual Slice of Life Story Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers! With hundreds of folks participating, there’s more than a little something for everyone … and plenty of room for you to join in!