A timely poem to end the week. The poet is Franny Choi, author of the poetry collections Soft Science (Alice James, 2019) and Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014). She is a Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow at Williams College, a member of the multidisciplinary artists of color collective Dark Noise, and a cohost of the Poetry Foundation’s podcast, VS. Links to more of her writing can be found here.

The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

By Franny Choi

Before the apocalypse, there was the apocalypse of boats:
boats of prisoners, boats cracking under sky-iron, boats making corpses
bloom like algae on the shore. Before the apocalypse, there was the apocalypse
of the bombed mosque. There was the apocalypse of the taxi driver warped
by flame. There was the apocalypse of the leaving, and the having left—
of my mother unsticking herself from her mother’s grave as the plane
barreled down the runway. Before the apocalypse, there was the apocalypse
of planes. There was the apocalypse of pipelines legislating their way
through sacred water, and the apocalypse of the dogs. Before which was
the apocalypse of the dogs and the hoses. Before which, the apocalypse
of dogs and slave catchers whose faces glowed by lantern-light.
Before the apocalypse, the apocalypse of bees. The apocalypse of  buses.
Border fence apocalypse. Coat hanger apocalypse. Apocalypse in
the textbooks’ selective silences. There was the apocalypse of the settlement
and the soda machine; the apocalypse of the settlement and
the jars of scalps; there was the bedlam of the cannery; the radioactive rain;
the chairless martyr demanding a name. I was born from an apocalypse
and have come to tell you what I know—which is that the apocalypse began
when Columbus praised God and lowered his anchor. It began when a continent
was drawn into cutlets. It began when Kublai Khan told Marco, Begin
at the beginning. By the time the apocalypse began, the world had already
ended. It ended every day for a century or two. It ended, and another ending
world spun in its place. It ended, and we woke up and ordered Greek coffees,
drew the hot liquid through our teeth, as everywhere, the apocalypse rumbled,
the apocalypse remembered, our dear, beloved apocalypse—it drifted
slowly from the trees all around us, so loud we stopped hearing it.

Notes:“Bedlam of the cannery” is borrowed from Martín Espada.

Here she is on a PBS NewsHour reciting and discussing another one of her poems filled with courage not drowned out by anger.

Photographs are from my 2017 photomontage series The Refugees’ Dreams.

Music today by Aram Khatchaturian. It, too, has courage.

This week’s juxtapositions will end with a contrast of time frames. The photographs were taken within a window of 2 hours and mostly through the window of the car, across a space of some 25 miles, driving up the Pacific Coast from Newport, OR to Lincoln City, OR. The weather changed from sun to rain to hail and back multiple times. The color of the water alternated accordingly, sometimes three bands of different color simultaneously, unusually vivid in the cold air.

Today’s poem, on the other hand, spans seemingly all of historical time and the geographical space between Africa and the Caribbean. It looks into the pit of despair and emerges with renewed determination to look forward and resume a rightful place in history, or start history altogether – which is my own goal after yet another week of this interminable flu.

Walcott, who won the Nobel prize in literature in 1992 as well as a MacArthur Foundation genius award, died this month two years ago. He taught at various ivy league institutions, dividing his time between Boston, NYC and St. Lucia, the caribbean island where he was born. A lot of his poetry deals with the consequences of colonialism, slavery, and displacement. The work asks questions about memory in the absence of the typical memorial markers found in nation states, and the broken links of tribal narratives that come with forced exodus.

His poem The Sea is History weaves biblical and historical events together in wonderful ways, showing the parallels in lack of established “factual evidence” and yet richness in assumed underlying truths. You can just hear how the colonial interrogators are defied by the persistence of memory, however drowned in the sea, its return to power and will towards a new history, a right to place by the person who answers, representing all those who were subjugated far too long.

The Sea Is History

Derek Walcott

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that gray vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is History.

First, there was the heaving oil,
heavy as chaos;
then, likea light at the end of a tunnel,

the lantern of a caravel,
and that was Genesis.
Then there were the packed cries,
the shit, the moaning:

Exodus.
Bone soldered by coral to bone,
mosaics
mantled by the benediction of the shark’s shadow,

that was the Ark of the Covenant.
Then came from the plucked wires
of sunlight on the sea floor

the plangent harp of the Babylonian bondage,
as the white cowries clustered like manacles
on the drowned women,

and those were the ivory bracelets
of the Song of Solomon,
but the ocean kept turning blank pages

looking for History.
Then came the men with eyes heavy as anchors
who sank without tombs,

brigands who barbecued cattle,
leaving their charred ribs like palm leaves on the shore,
then the foaming, rabid maw

of the tidal wave swallowing Port Royal,
and that was Jonah,
but where is your Renaissance?

Sir, it is locked in them sea sands
out there past the reef’s moiling shelf,
where the men-o’-war floated down;

strop on these goggles, I’ll guide you there myself.
It’s all subtle and submarine,
through colonnades of coral,

past the gothic windows of sea fans
to where the crusty grouper, onyx-eyed,
blinks, weighted by its jewels, like a bald queen;

and these groined caves with barnacles
pitted like stone
are our cathedrals,

and the furnace before the hurricanes:
Gomorrah. Bones ground by windmills
into marl and cornmeal,

and that was Lamentations – 
that was just Lamentations,
it was not History; 

then came, like scum on the river’s drying lip,
the brown reeds of villages
mantling and congealing into towns,

and at evening, the midges’ choirs, 
and above them, the spires
lancing the side of God

as His son set, and that was the New Testament.

Then came the white sisters clapping
to the waves’ progress,
and that was Emancipation – 

jubilation, O jubilation – 
vanishing swiftly
as the sea’s lace dries in the sun,

but that was not History,
that was only faith,
and then each rock broke into its own nation;

then came the synod of flies,
then came the secretarial heron,
then came the bullfrog bellowing for a vote,

fireflies with bright ideas
and bats like jetting ambassadors
and the mantis, like khaki police,

and the furred caterpillars of judges
examining each case closely,
and then in the dark ears of ferns

and in the salt chuckle of rocks
with their sea pools, there was the sound
like a rumour without any echo

of History, really beginning.

*

And as the most effective anti-depressant ever, let’s hear it for caribbean music, dreaming ourselves into the lesser Antilles.

After passing unanimously in the Senate last year, yesterday the house passed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act , with 4 House members voting No – Amash (I-MI) Gohmert (R-TX) Massie (R-KY) Yoho (R-FL) –
which makes lynching a hate crime. It only took 120 years!

Let us celebrate with a poem that transcends time.

Antebellum

By Gregory Pardlo

Unfinished, the road turns off the fill
from the gulf coast, tracing the bay, to follow
the inland waterway. I lose it in the gritty
limbo of scrub pine, the once wealth
—infantile again, and lean—of lumber barons,
now vested in the state, now sanctuary for renegades
and shamans, for pot growers and moonshiners,
the upriver and clandestine industries that keep
mostly to themselves.

Misting over a lake-front terraced lawn, evening’s pink
tablet, japanning lawn and lake, magnolia leaf,
ember easing, dips and gives gilt to the veiled
nocturne vanishing in the view: the hint of maison
through the woods faint as features pressed on
an ancient coin. Swart arms of live oaks that hag
their bad backs surreptitiously, drip Spanish moss
like swamp things out of where a pelican taxis limp-
legged across the lake, pratfalls awkward as a drunk
on a bike. The bat above me, like a flung wristwatch

Gregory Pardlo is the author of Totem, which received the APR/ Honickman Prize in 2007, and Digest, (Four Way Books, 2014). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, Tin House, as well as anthologies including Angles of Ascent, the Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, and two editions of Best American Poetry. He is the winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The Pulitzer judges cited Pardlo’s “clear-voiced poems that bring readers the news from 21st Century America, rich with thought, ideas and histories public and private.” In 2017, Pardlo was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is poetry editor for the Virginia Quarterly Review and teaches in the MFA program at Rutgers University, Camden.

And here is someone we hear too rarely.

Hand on my heart, this poem followed me into my dreams. Beneath the I-5 underpass near our house lives a homeless person, who does not even own a tent. He sits in piles of garbage, for weeks, months now and we all drive by.

Meditations in an Emergency

by Cameron Awkward-Rich

I wake up & it breaks my heart. I draw the blinds & the thrill of rain breaks my heart. I go outside. I ride the train, walk among the buildings, men in Monday suits. The flight of doves, the city of tents beneath the underpass, the huddled mass, old women hawking roses, & children all of them, break my heart. There’s a dream I have in which I love the world. I run from end to end like fingers through her hair. There are no borders, only wind. Like you, I was born. Like you, I was raised in the institution of dreaming. Hand on my heart. Hand on my stupid heart.

Cameron Awkward-Rich, both a poet and a critic, is the author of Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016) and Dispatch (Persea Books, 2019), winner of the 2018 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award. His poetry has appeared in Narrative, The Baffler, Indiana Review, Verse Daily, The Offing, and elsewhere, and he has received fellowships from Cave Canem and The Watering Hole. Cam holds a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University and is Assistant Professor in Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

It is Tuesday morning after the debacle in IOWA. We don’t know the caucus results yet, but the delay and the mistrust after the screw up with the data transmission hurts the potential frontrunners and helps the laggers. Make of that what you will. More frighteningly, it has given rise to tons of conspiracy theories, and adds worry to scenarios where technology is all we have in the election – not the paper trail that is still there to count in IA. Most frighteningly, the voter turnout, by the information we have at this time, was not as high as expected. If that translates into the general election, we have reason to be fearful. Clouds hanging over us.

Sunday morning’s walk at the riverfront took place with the clouds coming in. Or going out, who knows in this crazy weather world anymore.

The mood expressed by the graffiti was dark as well.

Some fearful:

Some angry.

Knowing how I could go home to a dry house, a filled pantry, a privileged life, made me feel ashamed while thinking about the youth or whoever it is who express their rage and fear for us to see, mostly unheard. Watching the homeless shuffle along the Esplanade, trying to keep warm, caused a sense of continued helplessness.

Thinking about how many people I know who feel for those who suffer, but also increasingly express compassion fatigue, when they deal with the detritus or the shootings at night or the dangers of garbage fires. There was a moment there, on that walk, where I just longed for peace. For all. Which is, of course, unobtainable without justice. So we must be allies in the struggle. Thoughts just in time for the beginning of Black History Month as well.

Here is a text poem by Jamaican born Claudia Rankine, echoing the sentiment,

from Don’t Let Me Be Lonely

By Claudia Rankine

Mahalia Jackson is a genius. Or Mahalia Jackson has genius. The man I am with is trying to make a distinction. I am uncomfortable with his need to make this distinction because his inquiry begins to approach subtle shades of racism, classism, or sexism. It is hard to know which. Mahalia Jackson never finished the eighth grade, or Mahalia’s genius is based on the collision of her voice with her spirituality. True spirituality is its own force. I am not sure how to respond to all this. I change the subject instead.

We have just seen George Wein’s documentary, Louis Armstrong at Newport, 1971. In the auditorium a room full of strangers listened to Mahalia Jackson sing “Let There Be Peace on Earth” and stood up and gave a standing ovation to a movie screen. Her clarity of vision crosses thirty years to address intimately each of us. It is as if her voice has always been dormant within us, waiting to be awakened, even though “it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, (and) through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech.”

Perhaps Mahalia, like Paul Celan, has already lived all our lives for us. Perhaps that is the definition of genius. Hegel says, “Each man hopes and believes he is better than the world which is his, but the man who is better merely expresses this same world better than the others.” Mahalia Jackson sings as if it is the last thing she intends to do. And even though the lyrics of the song are, “Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me,” I am hearing, Let it begin in me.

Let us be uplifted.