Dumbly and Divinely Stumbling*

listen children
keep this in the place
you have for keeping
always
keep it all ways

we have never hated black

listen
we have been ashamed
hopless tired mad
but always
all ways
we loved us

we have always loved each other
children all ways
pass it on

— Lucille Clifton

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And more Sonia:

And into my desire to keep negotiating some kind of peace with the rhyme royal, Raivenne introduces me to another form, the nove otto (a nine-line poem wherein each line has eight syllables.).  It’s another rhyming form (a/a/c/b/b/c/d/d/c), so I suspect it would give me as much heartache as the rhyme royal … but I’m intrigued now and want to give it a try.  We’ll see.  For tonight, it’s still rhyme royal:

 It’s a lie —
deep in the bone
I feel it — the idea that I
have set myself apart, alone
in my head, a buffer zone
so broad nothing touches me.
It’s a lie only the careful see.

Feh.  Despite Raivenne’s kind words yesterday, I’m still frustrated.  The title of this post is a half-accurate description of my process and progress with this form.  I’m trying to do what Sanchez suggested — using form to bring something chaotic under control — but I just don’t care for the results.  I’m not giving up yet, but I’m far from love yet.

_____

*  Thank you Dylan Thomas and “The Seed-At-Zero”

Big Sister’s Clothes

in the inner city
or
like we call it
home
we think a lot about uptown
and the silent nights
and the houses straight as
dead men
and the pastel lights
and we hang onto our no place
happy to be alive
and in the inner city
or
like we call it
home

— Lucille Clifton

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And here’s a little more Sonia:

How happy am I that I figured out how to upload that?  I have another one, one of her reading a haiku series.  For some reason, it’s being fussy about uploading.  Maybe tomorrow.

And speaking of tomorrow, maybe that’s when I’ll get a better idea of what to do about this rhyme royal.  What is it about rhyming that’s throwing me so off kilter, that feels so forced?

here I am always
visible and invisible, seen and unseen
what is true, who I am, stays
inside me, clean
and hidden behind an obscene
grimace, a mask, this face
this touch of, “Don’t look!” of commonplace

Still not in love.  I don’t know.  With the tanka, I felt like I’d come home.  Even when I wasn’t quite getting them right, they were right … if that makes any sense.  The rhyme royal really feels like trying on someone else’s clothes.  Awkward.

Sanchez talked a lot about poetic forms, said that we should try them out, really try them out.  I think she would have liked my tanka-a-day exercise from last year.  It’s very similar to what she did when she discovered haiku.  So, given my experience last year and her comments last week, I want to try to stick with this form for a while, as uncomfortable as it feels today.  Who knows?  May it’ll turn out that big sister’s clothes fit me after all.

And just as I was about to hit ‘publish,’ I remembered:

Can’t Be Helped

why some people be mad at me sometimes

they ask me to remember
but they want me to remember
their memories
and i keep remembering
mine

— Lucille Clifton

__________

It’s National Poetry Month.  Last year I posted a poem a day and chose poems by all kinds of poets.  Thirty days isn’t enough to cover all the poets I love, and certainly not enough for all the poems I love.  This year, because we lost her so recently and because my heart still aches for it, I’m going to post a Lucille Clifton poem every day.  I have to say I’m a little surprised and saddened that I didn’t hear her name more at the conference last weekend.  We didn’t hear about too many poets at all, actually.  It was definitely a fiction-heavy weekend.  And ok, I’m a fiction writer, so maybe I should be happy and be quiet, but I also love poetry, and we also have many, many outstanding poets who are black.  Maybe next time?

Last year I also set for myself the utterly insane challenge of writing a tanka every day for the month of April.  Let me just say for anyone who’s new here: I am not a poet.  I write poems (or things that can pass for poems), but I am not a poet.  That I set out to write a poem a day for a month still amazes.  The fact that I’m setting myself up to try it again convinces me that I’m just plain nuts.

When I attended the so-wonderful-I-still-haven’t-fully-processed-it workshop with Sonia Sanchez on Sunday, she introduced me to the Rhyme Royal (a/b/a/b/b/c/c), and she talked about the need for us all to go out and buy a rhyming dictionary if we didn’t already have one.

Can I just admit to you now that, if I ever knew there were such things as rhyming dictionaries, I had forgotten.  And it certainly would never have occurred to me to wonder if such a thing existed.  Sanchez said that when she tells her students to get one, someone invariably asks: “Isn’t that cheating?”  She laughed, said that was just silly, why would we be expected to remember all the rhymes?  Such a good point.  Why wouldn’t I ever have thought about a rhyming dictionary?

So when I went to the bookstore the other night, I bought one.  It’s a cute little thing.  Have you used one of these?  It took me a second to get how it works.  I kept trying to look up a word, but then realized I needed to look up the sound I want to rhyme (yes, you can say “Duh!” right about now).  So clever. 

Oh.  And yes, I’m stalling.  I should be posting my first attempt at a Rhyme Royal and instead I’m yammering on about the cleverness of rhyming dictionaries.  I’ll just say that I hope this gets easier.  If it doesn’t I might have to go back to tanka.  I may not have written the most brilliant poems last year, but that form really clicked for me.  This one hasn’t (yet).

the chill grey of rainy spring nights
settles in me a nostalgic sadness
a lifetime of remembered slights
simmer and almost rise to madness
so many hurts, so much stress
whisper my name, shout out, call —
why do I still hold each, all?

I won’t lie. I don’t care for that much. And it was like performing my own abdominal surgery to get it out. Ok, the first try. Let’s see where I am in 30 days.