For February 7 2022, I selected poet Charlotte L. Forten Grimke in honor of Black History Month. This US poet who lived until the First World War is important as a writer, political activist and one of the founders of the National Association of Colored Women. Read her biography.

I chose her poem "The Angel's Visit" because it recorded how she felt at the loss of her only child's life and is the most heartfelt. Other poems she wrote are dedicated or cite famous works of art or people like Wordsworth.

"The Angel's Visit" is written as ten stanzas of eight lines and tells a story of a mother grieving. It has two major turns in the poem, one when grief is answered by an angel, and a second turn when grief departs. Charlotte L. Forten Grimke's life changes as she goes on to be politically active, beginning a new life in Washington, DC. What is apparent in the poem is that she exhibits honest faith and real loss. Yet her poem is able to be measured and careful to convey meaning without sacrificing form.

The picture above is from the bridge of Angels in Rome, Italy at sunset. Below is an alternate use of an Angel by a modern band. It is one of the valuable aspects of poetry is it makes music lovely.

Writing Assignment: Write about an Angel that visits you for some reason. Use a fixed form but convey strong emotion.

In honor of Black History Month February 6, 2022 I chose to write about Mary Weston Fordham who lived during the reconstruction era following the Civil War, read her biography.

The image below was the closest photo I have of washer woman since I will write about Mary Weston Fordham's poem "The Washer Woman". The photo below was a carving in jade shown at the Brazil National Museum in Rio de Janeiros, Brazil. I'm not sure what it is meant to convey, maybe a stylized frog, but the posture is similar to a woman scrubbing clothing in a river that I watched in Belize, scrubbing the clothing with rocks.

Mary Weston Fordham's poem "The Washer Woman" appears in her collection of 66 poems titled Magnolia Leaves. The poem is written as seven stanzas of eight lines, with lines two and four and six and eight rhyming in each stanza. What is apparent from the poem is that Mary Weston Fordham had washed clothing and sympathized with the woman she was memorializing.

In the poem, she explicitly cites physical parts of the body affected by scrubbing clothing, the hands, the back, the arms, the legs, and the motion and the action and the sound. She repeats these traits to emphasize their tiredness when the poem makes a turn to God. Her glorifying Sunday shows how precious a day of rest could be and her homage to God for this break is heartfelt. 

Writing Assignment: Write about a job that you did repetitively until exhausted.

​See a modern poem about Washer Women below:

For Black History Month February 5 2022's Poet of the day, I selected Laban Erapu from the "Poems of East Africa" Collection. Laban Erapu is a poet and professor of Literature from Uganda.

Below is an image many of us encounter on the streets that remind me of Laban Erapu's poem "Guilt of Giving".

​Writing Assignment: Write a street poem showing what you see people do including yourself.

One of the reasons that I chose "The Guilt of Giving" is that it uses good imagery about people's reactions. The poem is told by a narrator and the reader sees what the narrator sees, in other words the camera follows along with the narrator. But the narrator encounters a beggar, and then the camera follows how the beggar reacts. But the camera then returns to the narrator and he's seeing people on the street and watches their reactions. Then once more the camera returns to the narrator and he makes another choice and the camera follows. Camera changes are another way of saying point of view. A camera on the narrator will feel his thought and see his motions. Camera changes to others will witness their physical responses and actions.

​Also with this poem, count the number of verbs. This is a highly active poem based on observation.

​Find more Ugandan poets on Youtube below:

In honor of Black History Month I decided to write about poet Georgia Douglas Johnson and Alice Dunbar Nelson because they were colleagues with different life histories but shared poems about their lives. The image below is of a grindstone, the means of making flour or a metaphor for work, and they share work imagery in their poems and share the frustration of working at work that seems beside the point. Both writers eventually write about racism, but their first frustration stemmed from their role as a woman. I found poems by both women in "Great Poems by American Women".

Georgia Douglas Johnson's poem, "My Little Dreams," uses language that conveys the sense of a woman wrapping up her embroidery or crochet for the night and putting it away, while talking about her dreams. Looking at other of her poems, she writes about a child and her worries for it, so the dreams could be construed to be about having a child but more likely wanting to write and being discouraged as a woman, a writer, and a black woman. Her poem is quite short, two stanzas of four lines with the second and fourth line of each stanza rhyming.

Alice Dunbar Nelson's poem, "I Sit and Sew," is a longer poem and dwells on the frustration of a woman sewing while the men are off at war. Her poem is written as three stanzas of seven lines. Each stanza had six lines with paired rhymes followed by a one-line refrain. It is a good poem to compare with Georgia Douglas Johnson's poem because both show frustration in different ways while doing similar tasks. 

Writing Assignment: Write about a task that frustrates you and show the action of the task in the poem. This is a good way to show emotion, transferring it to a task.

​Both women were leaders in the literary community and shared the bond of a shared workshop. 

In honor of Black History Month February 3 2022, I have chosen poet James Edwin Campbell who is known for popularizing southern black American dialect known as Gullah in his poems. Use of dialect in poems was a popular way to show the common man at work, play or life and poets like Paul Laurence Dunbar and Carl Sandburg continued the tradition Campbell started. 

During James Edwin Campbell's life, the US was in a period of building population, states, and expanding westward while dealing with reconstruction issues post-Civil War. 

At My Poetic Side there are many examples of James Edwin Campbell's dialect poems, but I would like to discuss "Mors et Vita" which I first read in the Dover Thrift Collection of African American Poetry. "Mors et Vita" is a simple poem of two stanzas of matching sets of lines. There are five lines that match in both stanzas but the last stanza has a final line that some might say he should have cut his darling. The last line is really optional but helps to cut the sing song nature of the poem and end triumphantly with a discovery.

Song is the reason I chose to discuss "Mors et Vita" because many of James Edwin Campbell's poems could be sung and are full of joy. It is the reason he was very popular, because if you can sing a poem, it can be used to entertain. In the growing Midwest, entertainment was much appreciated as the distances can be far between households.

His use of rhyme is inconsistent and appears in different lines, but the listener can perceive the rhyme as it is read. The rhythm combined with the rhyme makes it like a song.

What I like about James Edwin Campbell's story is his apparent education, success, broad appeal and happiness. His poem "A Memory Tone" could be about meeting his wife. 

Writing Assignment: Write a Poem with Two Stanzas of Five Lines that refer to different objects in each line, the second poem using the objects in a different manner. Make it a rhyming poem. How does it feel to read this poem?

For my second day in honor of Black History Month I am choosing another contemporary poet, Lameese Badr whose chapbook Dust to Dust is included in the New Generation African Poets Collection from Akhashic Books. Lameese Badr is a Sudanese poet based in Khartoum and one of the poems included in her chapbook is offered by Pank Magazine titled "Q/A with My Therapist". Her work uses a lot of space and features dust often, and this image below of the Nile taken near Abu Simbel Egypt offers the best image I have of what can inspire it.

 
​Lameese Badr's "Q/A with my Therapist" features questions that start with how often she thinks about death but provides a response that doesn't connect directly. This is true for the entire poem. First question, then response. The emptiness in this poem comes from the space between sentences and the disconnect in understanding death as a form of leaving as well as a disconnect between life and death and between home and community or people.

This airy feature of her poetry occurs in many of the poems, through the use of spacing, line breaks, thought or pronunciation breaks and offers the sense the writer is trying to capture something that goes beyond the concrete ability to touch someone. It's how emotions such as love are dealt with as well as disorientation between events or between time.

The preface for the chapbook by Samiya Bashir discusses sandstorms called haboob's that sweep through Central Sudan. A look at recent Sudanese news by the United Nations, offers more insight into some of Lameese's poems, particularly "Alternate" that offers both a jubilant view of a protest but also the grief that violence that occurred related to it brings. 

Two poems "Why We Couldn't Stay" and "After You Will Die at Twenty/ For Muzamil" offer clues to what life outside the home country offers, in terms of disconnection and in terms of giving up who you are. 

The style used, of open space and of slipperyness, the movement of idea to idea from stanza to stanza and line to line is very contemporary and post-modern. It requires flexibility from the writer and reader to follow along a path that changes from time, place, idea, emotion but because they are contained in the space of the poem, it holds additional meaning that is connected.  An example of this is shown in her poem "When the Man in the Uniform Knocks Three Times", "when it breaks me and i keep coming back for more when the maps you are". Here many questions arise, what can break someone, why would someone come back for more breakage, how a person can be a map, or place perhaps. The next line continues "drawing on my palm" which helps make sense of the maps questions but there the connection is formed between the two individuals and the process of making a map or being a map. This makes the poem much stronger by sharing meaning that goes beyond the words.

Throughout the chapbook, the sense of the poet offering love is a strength that goes beyond the other emotions of loss, grief, and change. It's very easy to read poetry and helps bridge the gap between Sudanese culture and other cultures. Find other Sudanese poets on Youtube, see below:

“Adore” is a chapbook of first poems by Madeline Walz, who offers the confession that she never meant to be a writer but felt called to testify her faith and what came out is sixteen poems that offer up her experience with Christian life. The chapbook is attractively designed with a green marbled cover, the simple title “Adore” and a dark green cross.

“Adore” is aptly titled because the poet clearly adores God and puts her faith into her life as shown by these poems. The poems range in topic from health issues and healing, conversations by a child, the need for friends and family especially love, storms, losses and many more. It is easy to connect how the poet feels and her experience with your own life. The collection offers her testimony of wonder and experience but ends with a call to action, which is easy to take up.

The poetry is mostly free form, allowing the words to direct the shape. The use of repetition as a device often appears from poem to poem so that they all connect by technique as well as topic. I think this chapbook is a strong beginning from a new writer that offers something for everyone. Although many wonder what Christian faith feels like, her words offer the strong sense that she is being guided by her faith and love. Those who lack faith might find answers to find faith in these words. And those who have faith will understand what the poet feels with ease.
​
I wish this poet good luck with her writing and hope to read more from her someday. She also has a book out, you can find it on her webpage. Below is a video Madeline Walz made on the costs of distracted driving.

The title “Sistas Stay Strong” by Eric Reese feels somewhat misleading when written by a male poet, but it does explain the content of the book of poems. The use of the word "Sistas" is slang for sisters and conveys the African sense of sister meaning family women and women friends. It starts by using consonance and addressing black women. The book provides homage to what black women have endured while using the reinforcement of command to continue with encouragement. Courage is needed as many of the poems show.

Most of the poems read as if the author had read the Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters at some time in the past, because they bare the same resemblance to gravestone inscriptions, that tell a brief moment about an individual or providing witness to some event. The poems are all short, tight, discussions that often start with an address to a person and then ends with a sharp note of wisdom at the end. The hooks are in the tight start, the cliffhangers beat a drum, meaning they often have a real impact on the reader.

​Topics vary throughout including the #Metoo movement, prostitution, rape, slavery, media, hair, skin, babies, equality. So as you can see, the poems offer why encouragement is needed. Examples from Sistas Stay Strong:
​
OF COURSE!
 
Was accused of murder
when she was just
avoiding rape.
 
and an example of encouragement:
 
SISTA GO GET IT
 
She didn’t know anything
other than being in the kitchen
but wasn’t intimidated
when she discovered that
she had the same power
to generate money in it
like her white counterparts

​Most of the poems brought back memories for me, the latter of working in a restaurant which has the equality of being where the unskilled first start out. The former "Sista Go Get It", reminded me of the terrible trial I had sat on during jury duty, where a woman was accused of killing her significant other with a kitchen knife. I hadn’t qualified for the jury because I had had previous experience of assault in my history. Later, after the trial finished and I was still on jury duty, I learned from a jury member the murder trial victim had previously killed other partners in self-defense, a psychologist explaining why this often happened. In the murder trial, the woman was black, my coworker’s daughter was white. Regardless of the race issue, the issue of violence, especially toward women is apparent throughout the book.
​
The situation of violence that I was aware of that disqualified me for the jury happened to a daughter of a coworker had stopped to help a man who stopped on the roadside in front of her. When the man came to my friend's daughter's window which she rolled down partially, he punched her in the face. Luckily, the daughter had pepper spray in her car and was able to get away. The police found he had pictures of her in his apartment, he’d followed her for some time.

So my long-winded set of examples is leading to a point, namely that poems don’t exist on their own. They feed from the world we live in, and feed back through the words to the community members, providing tales we can relate to and providing the music of verse to reinforce that things need to be different and can be different.

If you suffer from abuse in your relationship, please read "The Truth About Abusers" an article at Psychology Today.
 
Poems also connect to each other, forming a pattern and texture almost like cloth, that paints a picture that each instance can apply to more than one individual to create the sense that not just one person was wounded, we were all wounded.
 
My view of this collection of poems is that Eric Reese went beyond the Spoon River Collection that captured individuals in a graveyard, to capture the society of living and dead in our society. It connects and reconnects throughout, while being easy to read and understand.
 
In conclusion, this is one of the collections Eric Reese has written and has an opening dedication written by former President Obama. Eric Reese writes from his home in Philadelphia. It will be interesting to see what moves him to write in the future.

What I found especially attractive about Thomas Centolella’s poems in “Lights and Mysteries” is the strong sense of emotion leading to a more analytical, detached view of some ideal, be it love, relationship, God, or reaction to an earthquake.

I didn’t mind the wordiness of the poems in the collection because they were rich with detail, enough so to keep me reading on to the next line and next.  Some examples I particularly liked are the rich details about being at the race track in “Perfecta” since I’ve gone to the race track many times and the opening line to Mountain Town, “Sometimes hell looks beautiful.”

I have a harder time with some of the longer selections such as the poem “Lights and Mysteries” where I have to show patience to find the connections between sets, often because when I read poetry, I want to be able to take a quick read of one poem and set it down and walk away, while the longer poems require a deeper, longer immersion. I am attracted to the idea of how some of these poems work and using them in my own work. I’ve noticed that there are different ways that poem series are made, i.e. connected times as in the poem “Light and Mysteries”, or with a personal connection as in “Sister”, or associated ideas like in “On My Street” where each stanza addresses a different aspect of life on the street.

The photo above is the beautiful Seattle harbor with a view of the street from the sculpture garden. Seattle for me could be hell anytime I needed to commute but most the time the beauty paid for all the trouble to get there.

Most of Thomas Centolella’s poems do tell a story, all with a reflective moment that said, what I am doing here, and how I’m reacting are larger than the immediate sensing and why. The twists often come related to that why, by this I mean the poem changes with this understanding of how emotional state relates to an ideal state. A good example of this is The Orders which has two turns, first when two buddies are talking together in a car when God “put a gun to the head of my friend” and then a second time when their neighbor’s arrival saves them and between there, the poet realizes “Suddenly time was nothing.”

The first poems all relate to a love relationship where the narrator and a woman seem to share a sense of love and experience but they don’t quite know where it will go. As It Was in the Beginning seems to show the narrator and his lover mid love making as a form of prayer. Toward the end of the section, it is clear that the relationship ended, but the narrator is still in touch with the poetry inside himself. So this section seems to be linearly arranged in time, i.e. this happened, then that.

Two poems I found I liked to use as emulations include Addis Abada, and In the Evening We Shall Be Examined on Love; here's a link to Thomas Centolella's readings of these poems.

The next section opens with the poem that titles the collection and it is one of the longer poems series narrative tales where the poet seems to be going back in time to his childhood experiences via maybe a visit to his former school. In this poem, Lights and Mysteries, the narrator is reflecting on the question of what makes life matter, if we’re all going to die anyway, as seen through various a series of incidents that occurred, perhaps linearly in time. 

I think here, the meaning of the title becomes clearer. Where the poet is mystified about some aspect of life, he delves deeper into the question, either by sharing what he learned from an incident or discovered along the way. The first section appears to be the mystery of what makes a relationship work and how do you let go once a relationship doesn’t work or ends. The second section appears to be linear, with a gradual progression in life leading to interest in spiritual matters. A key turning point occurs with the poem, Gentleman of the Century which concludes, “… so I’ve become human again.” I think these words seem to signify the poet is able to connect his desire to connect experience to feelings to a search for more meaning found in poetry or meditation.

Kim Addonizio’s poetry in “Tell Me” reads more like prose than poetry. This is not a fault or a benefit, it serves more to establish her voice, for me. Many of the pieces seem stream of consciousness—she doesn’t seem to edit out the unpleasant from her thoughts, such as a poem titled “Garbage”, a very unique look at humanity and what we value and do not that has a political edge to it rather than ecological. She in fact seems to specialize in the nitty gritty of everyday life, those details stood out as different from say, a nature poem and they add the richness of experience and reality to the content.

Even though her poem’s format seems to imply line breaks, I feel they are superficial, not always breaking to make a point or to lend emphasis, same way for the indents, sometimes they start a sentence, sometimes they end a sentence, other times words trail off not so you’d ponder the words more, but so that maybe it fits neatly on the page.

When I mentioned this to my classmates, they disagreed, and I admit that there are many places where her use is specific and important, however, that was my initial impression.

The formats are pretty much the same throughout the collection and serve as a visual tie for the poems, without even looking at content or thought or anything else. I think this format was chosen to help prepare a prose piece into a more poetic form, allowing space into a dense passage that would keep a reader from delving into the material (many people I’ve run into say dense blocks of text are skimmed or feel unapproachable and this format works to avoid that problem).

Again, I had argument about the idea that her poems were primarily prose. I guess, that is why the exercise of looking at other poet’s work is important since it helps to identify how impressions change with different people.

I felt the collection was about her broken relationship with her husband and with addiction and what comes after it. Many of the poems feel isolated and lonely or full of pain, such as “Collapsing Poem”. The follow on poem “The Divorcee and Gin” seems to indicate there is a tie here between the two. 

My emulations tended to be from less personal issue areas. I didn’t relate personally to some of her topics although I could understand them and empathsize, I can’t say I’ve ever sat looking into my glass of whatever in a bar as in “Glass” yet it finds more content than I would imagine and I have to say, the concluding line was a situation I ran into a time or two. My curiosity is sparked by the unusual topic. I found her poem “Spider” amusing and sweet, the relationship with her daughter seems wonderful.

The title poem “Tell Me” is wonderfully revealing and inviting (like a desire to step away from loneliness and reach out), and seems like a turning point in the collection. Rather than being mid center, it sits toward the end. 

Many of the poems connect to bars and drinking and the problems they cause. The many poems on this topic change from relationships, to what happens, to a father’s problem with drinking, to social engagements, to addiction, to winding down after a class. They pop up throughout the collection so one is aware of it and you feel sad, but it doesn’t overwhelm the collection.

Why did I feel empathy for her poems, what happened in the poem to cause this feeling?

The emotion I felt via her imagery primarily, but I think the empathy came from the collective sense running through the pieces. It sort of says that even if we have emotion at some point, there's a greater humanity to a person than just the moment they cry, sort of like, its the sum of her experiences and willingness to dig into the world around her which feels gutsy given the pain she feels and her willingness to see people inside of people where many don't look such as the poor, the drunk, the woman on her doorstep, and how that same return look isn't guaranteed by others. So, "Tell Me", is just that demand, do you see more? given to her audience as a challenge to give back to her what she's given them.

In comparing Kim Addonizio’s work to Robert Hass’, I felt Robert Hass' work went beyond prose, to more complex contrasting imagery and thoughts. His works had emotion, but held at check, while the ideas came from many directions as if they added up to a bigger understanding. Kim Addonizio's is quite different, she's dealing in moments often, and what is at the surface at that time, very carefully examined. Not all of them are prosaic, some like Tell Me and What Women Want, are quite refined down to the nub, while others have the sharp details of capturing everything in a moment.  But many, seem to fall from one idea to the next.  I think I use it because much of her work seems to come in complete sentences.

More on Robert Hass' writing in another post.