This semester we’ve read a number of poems that reflect upon what poetry is, what poetry does, and why and how to write (and read) poetry.
Last week we read Dawn Lundy Martin’s “Negrotizing in Five: Or, How to Write a Black Poem,” which obviously deals with these kinds of questions about poetry yet puts some new issues on the table.
It’s not an easy poem to grasp right away, so this week we’re focusing on parts of it and writing speculatively on what each of these parts might be about. When we have assembled and read these fragmentary interpretations, we’ll see if we’ve arrived collectively at a more complete understanding of the entire poem.
“My fingers obtund with effort. One asks about stuff, considers what comes next, is maddened by possibility.”
In the section “Formlessness” the narrator’s fingers “obtund with effort,” meaning to blunt or dull, but with implications of a depletion of essence or life, signifying a wearing down of the self in trying to create structure or meaningful wholesomeness out of something that is truly destructive and a turmoil. This section depicts damage to a person and also the draining struggle of processing and dealing with racism or oppression, especially in terms of trying to produce poetry from these troubles. Next, the lack of certainty, shown in “One asks about stuff, considers what comes next,” expresses an inability to conceive a future or hope out of this senselessly bigoted society, which has essentially trapped the narrator in deadening and maddening disorder.
“You want to be rid of the black. And you want to embrace the black.”
Dawn Martin’s poem paints the image of the African American struggle in these lines; her narrator in the section “Mutilation” wishes to “mutilate” who she is, to cut out the part of her that is is race. But simultaneously, she wishes that she could connect with this part of herself and use it to express herself and her experiences. These lines evince a struggle between resenting a black identity and wanting to show the world what it means.
“You want to be rid of the black. And you want to embrace the black. You write, Grandmother, and cross it out”
(from “Mutilation.”)
The unspeakable, indescribable pain caused by the cruel reality scraps everything that’s left. I found out that ‘to be rid of’ is slightly different from ‘to get rid of’ in a sense that the former has something gone, rather than making that something go, as the latter does. So the subject is being passive, not actively ‘getting rid of’ something on her own. She cannot ever ‘get rid of’ the black. Even if she tries to want to, her subconscious will refuse to. So she wants to ‘be rid of’ the black. She wants it to be gone on its own, if that’s even possible. And she wants to embrace the black. This is what she truly wants and it’s what she has been doing. However, she is facing a crisis (of wanting to be rid of the black and wanting to embrace the black). Grandmother often serves as a being that you turn to, whether she is deceased or not. She often stays in your memory and mind, answering to your questions and fulfilling your spiritual needs. Grandmother is often a metaphor and a provider of comfort. And she is writing, “Grandmother,” which can be interpreted as her display of weakness. Then she crosses the word out. She does not want to acknowledge her weakness. Although I didn’t completely understand them, this is my understanding of three lines in the section, “Mutilation.â€
“Tell me of the exact moment you slashed through your surprisingly tough skin with a pocketknife and how it felt like rain.”
This passage, to me, depicts a moment of letting one’s guard down and how that moment can be shocking and vulnerable. The “tough skin” being slashed with a “pocketknife” serves as an interesting paradox pointing out how fragile we are as people, despite our best efforts. This charade becomes exhausting, leading to the “exact moment,” that “felt like rain.” Rain here feels like a type of salvation, or something that feels freeing. Overall this poem points to an incredible amount of vulnerability and release, speaking to the degree of humanity that is compromised in the face of racism.
“One enters an unforgiving, inchoate world. No mold to make, fossilizing.”
I find the opening two lines of “Negrotizing in Five” to be particularly opaque, and it seems to me that the key to understanding these lines lies in how the reader interprets the words “inchoate” and “fossilizing.” The opening section from which these lines are excerpted, titled “Formlessness,” underscores the difficulty of writing a poem in a subgenre that is ill-defined and still developing. Without a long, studied history and without established, distinguishing conventions, the poet enters an “inchoate,” or not fully formed literary world. The challenges presented by the nascent qualities of this literary territory leave the poet without a “mold to make,” or, in other words, without a repertoire of forms to follow, experiment with, etc., and thus the new world of Black poetry already stands in danger of fossilizing–not in the sense of turning to stone through old age, but rather by becoming “incapable of change or development” (New Oxford American Dictionary). Put simply, the sheer potential of Black poetry strikes the author with a sense of paralysis; he or she lacks models and a set of conventions in this “inchoate world” and therefore finds creation to be uniquely difficult.
“Tell me of the exact moment you slashed through your surprisingly tough skin with a pocketknife and how it felt like rain.”
This line is striking because it elicits pain and endurance, as well as the notion of rebirth. The action described is particularly violent, made even more so by the crudeness of the pocketknife and the toughness of the skin. However, rather than describing pain and agony felt from the wound’s infliction, the sufferer likens the sensation to rain. This suggests that the individual goes through great suffering and achieves a sudden realization from it, indicating that survivors of violence may sometimes use their experience in order to understand a concept or emotion that they had not felt before.
‘Some castigating black marks condition the body, soften the skin, open into sepulcher. But the body will not be buried there. It will put down a thing on a page, emancipated (nearly) by the imagination.’
The use of “castigating” to describe the “black marks” relates to the struggles the African-American community has faced over previous centuries; it’s literal meaning is to “punish or reprimand, to chastise.” Combined with the idea of the black marks which condition the body, suggesting burns or more specifically branding, the word instantly brings slavery to mind as being the issue at hand. The relevance to death that is present here (“sepulcher”) reiterates it. The idea of the body not being buried suggests that it is not given the respect it deserves, and instead is only remembered in other people’s words. The last sentence, I think, emphasizes the disappearing knowledge of the struggles faced by the African-American community, and of the need to teach it truthfully, sincea their history is rewritten as a much less s horrific situation than it was.
“You want to be rid of the black. And you want to embrace the black. You write, Grandmother, and cross it out.”
I thought these lines beautifully captured a person’s warring desires of identity–between recognizing and being proud of their ancestors, and the instinct in contemporary society that to be different is wrong. The indirect characterization with the speaker’s actions of writing a word and then crossing it out does a lets the reader interpret the situation without strong guidance from the author. I liked the way the speaker writes the word “Grandmother,” which links us back to the title– this poem is about writing a poem. Perhaps it suggests that poetry is a safe place in which to celebrate aspects of yourself that others denounce.
“One enters an unforgiving, inchoate world. No mold to make, fossilizing. Here is the secret: I cannot tell you because it is not known.†(from Formlessness)
The opening lines of this poem intrigue me because they pose an interesting answer to the question in the title, “How to Write a Black Poem.†I think they attempt to say that there is not yet an established way to write a Black poem because there are not enough truly Black poems written; therefore, these lines also answer why it is important to write Black poems: to sing the songs of Black society that have not been sung before. The first line, “enters an unforgiving, inchoate world,†describes the ignorant white world that is prejudiced and racist, and therefore has not developed or progressed to one that can understand and appreciate Black poetry. This is why there is “no mold to make†and “I cannot tell you because it is not knownâ€: there is no established way to tell how to write Black poetry because it is formless, as the title of the section suggests, because it is unsung and has not been created yet.
“One enters an unforgiving, inchoate world. No mold to make, fossilizing. Here is the secret: I cannot tell you because it is unknown.”
This poem has several layers to it. These lines from “Formlessness” ask the question: How does one write a poem? And as we delve deeper into this section, we peel back a layer that helps narrow the question to: How does one write a black poem? How does one write a poem against an “unforgiving, inchoate world,” where there are hardly any examples to mimic, or to help understand. The speaker relents to the question by saying that the answer is an unknown secret, in turn suggesting that the task of writing a black poem is not only daunting but nearly impossible.
“You are hollowing in, coarse carving a sound to resemble that which must be said. You drag your canvas over and finally write with whatever fluid has spilled.”
The narrator says that Grandmother is trying to find the words “which must be said” which I believe refers to the struggle of defining her racial identity in America. She is beginning to find the words, but is struggling to truly translate the feeling into language. However, the connotation of words like “hollowing” and “carving”, as well as the use of “peel” in the preceding lines, indicate that the feeling is painful rather than enlightening. Finally, she begins to write about this struggle “with whatever fluid has spilled”, whether that is blood, sweat, or tears. Ink cannot communicate the struggle of the race the way some bodily fluid could, so the narrator uses whatever fluid has leaked from the skin, which is presumably from the mutilation that has been inflicted upon the narrator.
“A maw, a silence. I wanted to say, I am, but instead I said it was.” These lines, to me, are representative of the struggles of racially segregated peoples to find a voice and be proud of it. The title of the stanza “Sing a song that cannot be sung” weighs down on me and chokes at my vocal chords. I can’t imagine a world where the very things you wish to say, the things that validate yourself, are stripped from you by a mere stigmatization, by the ignorance and malice of those too careless to evaluate themselves. The gravity of the poem is increased by its form. As each stanza highlights the trials of racism, it also adds to an ever-present and fearful depiction of how difficult it is to formulate an identity in a world where people attempt to strip it from you because of an arbitrary physical distinction. That is the real fear of this poem, I believe, the demoralizing reality of a life lived without identity that can take form in poetry.
“You write, Grandmother, and cross it out. You peel. You acknowledge the pain of peeling”
In my opinion, writing “Grandmother” is an attempt by the author to draw the reader back to a past generation. Interestingly, the author then negates this action by crossing it out. There is a pain in returning to the memory of the grandmother. Indeed, it would seem there is always a unique relationship to the past when a black author writes a poem- perhaps the inescapable burden of racism. This is also how I interpret the “peeling” and “pain of peeling.” The author is stripping back layers of time to arrive at a truth; it is the truth of racism that is both painful but necessary to acknowledge.
“All that threatens the legitimacy of that which is attempting to be said. Phonemic struggle — I’ll call it a precursor to blathering.” – Section “Completion cleaved”
The speaker continuously struggles with his identity as an African American by the fifth (last) section, but manages to write a poem nonetheless. However, the words he or she has written/spoken “threatens the legitimacy of that which is attempting to be said†– meaning none of the words he has written are true. They are not valid and more importantly, they invalidate what the speaker truly feels within him/her. The speaker calls this the ‘phonemic struggle’ — phonemic from phoneme, the “perceptually distinct unit of sound in a specified language that distinguish one word from another†(Wiki), thus meaning that the speaker wants to say one thing (for example, “boyâ€), but his/her ‘hand’ or lack of identity/racial self-awareness writes another (for example, “toyâ€). This is the phonemic struggle he/she is going through while writing a Black poem.
The speaker further discusses what he/she means by the next line: “I’ll call it a precursor to blathering†— (last two lines: “Blath, said by mistake, and begun again. Blath, said clearly. But, in the end, blath returned more persistently [unofficially], because it was dirtyâ€); to ‘blather’ means to ‘talk nonsense’, hence I think that the speaker is trying to express the fact that whatever comes out of his/her mouth is just a jumble and does not make any sense, even if he/she wants it to make sense. To say that it is a ‘precursor’ to blathering makes me think that maybe writing the poem has been the beginning of what is now the speaker’s identity. I think there is a hidden subtle message on the importance of what the speaker says shapes his/her identity; thus to say that it’s a precursor to blathering is to say that his/her identity is wrongly viewed in society, it is ‘nonsense’ and the speaker does not understand his/her own identity. I think it is also important to note that this is happening against the speaker’s will; so even though the speaker wants to say the write words, such as “bath”, all he/she can say/write is blath. Hence, the ‘phonemic struggle’ — the struggle of not being able to write down what he/she truly believes/wants is a precursor to the African-American race, or the majority of African-American poems. It is important to note that this poem is in the form of a poem masked by a ‘how-to guide’ or ‘tutorial’ for the reader. Thus one can say that Martin uses the form of a poem (a socially recognized structure) in order to explain how to write a Black poem which turns out to be extremely restricting and silencing, and ultimately untrue.
“A maw. A silence. I wanted to say, I am, but instead, It was.â€
This line from “Negrotizing in Five; Or, How to Write a Black Poem,†demonstrates the internal conflict of a black poet to speak her mind yet not repeat her thoughts as a generalized conception of blackness. The poet suffers a silence that comes from an inability to successfully express what she wants to say, fearful she may fall into the stereotypical category of “black poetry.†She is having difficulty expressing herself personally, as a member of the black community but also as an individual independent of the black poems written before her. Her struggle is to separate herself and her experiences from a collective “it,†a generalized idea of what black poetry is, does, etc. Her struggle concludes in silence for fear that she may sound too familiar to other black poets.