Finna

FINNA, by Nate Marshall (One World, 2020), begins with a "landless acknowledgment" containing this line: "we lost the land we were custodians over before i was a twinkle in the eye of a twinkle in the eye of a twinkle in the eye." I love how I get lost in that. I wanted Finna the first time I saw its title, its cover, and I'm so glad to be reading it now for the Sealey Challenge, Day 3. My son wrote "finna" on the window of his car. I wanted to learn from these poems what "finna" means. Thank you, Nate Marshall! The poem "FINNA," an on-beyond-definition poem, teaches me

     finna comes from the southern phrase fixing to
     like i come from my southern grandmothers & finna
     is this word that reminds me about everything next.
     even when i've been a broken boy i know i'm fixiing to
     get fixed.

I'm learning lots more, too. For instance, that there are lots of Nate Marshalls out there--one a white supremacist--and several poems about these namesakes. In one, these heartbreaking stanzas:

     1 time a dude i knew hit me up relieved & shaken
     when his timeline told him Nate Marshall had been murdered
     but it was a different me somewhere on the North Side.

     definitely peace to that Nate Marshall
     & to his people who would have been relieved
     had i been the news article instead of their sweet, beautiful boy.

I love the poem "step." It begins:

     learn this or get out my house
     is how mama started my dance lesson
     when i was a boy.

And it has this stanza of possible other names:

in Chicago we call it steppin'

but perhaps every Black

neighborhood has some version

they call swing or bop or hand dance or hustle.

The book is full of Chicago, where I used to live, where I visited this weekend and played volleyball on the beach with old friends, family, and new friends, who fed me, fed all of us, like family. This couplet resonates for me now: "but fam, understand, if you treat the fam / like strangers, then you a stranger, fam." I am shy, but no longer a stranger.

I love how some of the poems in FINNA are sideways; some of the stanzas are upside-down. Another definition poem begins

     scruples

                      is the word i tell anyone who asks

     for my favorite. what sounded

     to me like a doctor's instrument was just a

     name for the hesitation respectability births.

And the poem "slave grammar" defies definition:

                                           whole time

     i'm writing this down its obsoleting

     itself. whole time we talking we ain't got

     no dictionary we guessing the spelling

     we deciphering the phrases through

     our slurs we slurring like we ain't sure until

     we murmur a sure vow.

This book has great titles. One example: "welcome to how the hell i talk." Today I went with my mom to a neuropsychology appointment. Today I read the poem "what can be said" in FINNA, that ends:

     once Alzheimer's does what it do
     you never really have conversations

     it's more a man becomes a poem

     a lot of repetition & love with something

     indecipherable in between.

I think today is/was Tuesday, but "wednesday feels like a funeral" is the poem that says

     what i know 

     of hate

     i learned early

     & then every

     day after that.

I might have a favorite poem in this book. It tells a story and explains the world to me; it's called "let me put it to you like this fam." It gives me a new golden rule: "who you believe in is a matter / of who you mattered to." And it's referenced in the title poem, too, a poem of praise and hope

     & it's finna

     take on this wide world

     with a whole slang for possibility.

Paris Palooza

As I recall it, and this was many years ago, Richard Jones and his new wife missed their flight to Paris, and the plane crashed, killing everyone. In Paris (Tebot Bach*, 2021), on a later visit, everything is calm; it's a beautiful city, filled with history, poets, painters, composers, sculptors, ex-patriots, and flâneurs, even the Little Prince. You'll find conversational rambles here, sweet interactions with other tourists; quiet, inward moments. In "Brancusi":

     Consolation is not what I came here for,
     but it is better than anything I might have wanted
     before I came to Paris.

I might say the same about the book, Paris! I just spent the weekend--of Lollapalooza--in Chicago, seeing a play, plus family and friends, roaming my old neighborhood on a beautiful, breezy summer day. We, too, were flâneurs, stopping at a sidewalk cafe for mojitos, perfectly muddled with mint. How lovely to visit a city that, because I once lived there, still reminds me of home. How consoling, after witnessing the crowds, actually to come home! In Rodin's gardens, Richard Jones misses his own...

Playwright August Strindberg, alas, "could find no solace."

     He came searching and found nothing---
     Paris almost did him in.

In contrast, in "Strindberg and Miller," Henry Miller did, and became brave enough to face the future by accepting the present. Look at this:

     But in Paris,
     Miller came to understand
     freedom is obtained by the acceptance of suffering
     and by giving suffering meaning.
     He foresaw the future of poetry,
     the terrible day when poets
     would deliberately make themselves unintelligible
     and renounce their power to move us.
     Such poetry, he said, is worthless,
     a betrayal of trust.
     The world, Miller insisted,
     hangs on the poet's every word;
     the place of renewal is the heart, he said,
     and there the poet must anchor himself.

Richard Jones does anchor himself in the intelligible, via the heart. His Paris is full of photographers and philosophers, booksellers and bakers, children and old men, bicycles and boats. The play I saw, after the mojito, was called Riding the Bicycle. I love these lines from "'The Drunken Boat.'"

     The bicycle woke me to the fact
     I was walking Saint-Germain's winding streets
     a little bit like a drunken boat myself,
     adrift on a sea of reveries.

I'd tell you more, but it's late, I'm sleepy (I'm drinking wine to make sure I sleep), and, as Richard would tell me...

     ...in our numbered days
     we will never finish
     all the work we are put here to do.

(And this is only Day #2, of the Sealey Challenge.)

* "tebot bach" means "little teapot"!

Lily-Livered

Here I am, as predicted (based on current trends in my sleep patterns), to report on Lily-Livered, by Wren Hanks, a wonderful chapbook from Driftwood Press, first up in my pursuit of the Sealey Challenge to read a poetry book a day in August. The fabulous cover art is by Denis Sarazhin, cover design by Sally Franckowiak, and book design by James McNulty. I loved finding an interview with the author at the end, conducted by Jerrod Schwarz, co-founder of the press. I learned so much from both the poems and the interview. "I don't know how to exist as a trans person," says the poet in the interview, "even one with a good deal of privilege, without wondering whether I'm safe every time I'm out in public." I think of one of the poems in the book, the last one, as the "safe" poem. Titled "Transiversary," as are several in the book, honoring the date the poet began medical transition with testosterone, it begins, "The therapist is safe" and lists what else is safe, and I sigh with relief and awe at the poet's resilience and triumph. I love the poet's handling of form and content--how they interact--all through: repeated lines, resonating as in a sonnet crown, plus great wild rambling moments and prose poems; rich and risky. And I love what the poet says about "speaker" in the interview: "The speaker of the poem has a job to do, and it's not the same job as if you were telling this same story at a party or a friend's couch. In my opinion, the speaker exists to serve the poem's truth, not to relay every detail of a moment just as you remember them." Lots of other good advice here, too. Lily-Livered begins with an epigraph from Macbeth, from a moment where a scared boy brings a message during battle, and ends courageous, compassionate, and, I hope, at last, safe.

Almost August

It's almost August, and I'm still behind in all things poetry-related but so enjoying each day, each moment of life in summer. Today, I did post a review of What Happens is Neither, by Angela Narciso Torres, at Escape Into Life, and another review is coming soon, August 4, of Dialogues with Rising Tides, by Kelli Russell Agodon. Indeed, my fond (meaning both affectionate and foolish) hope is again to attempt the Sealey Challenge, reading a poetry book a day in August, and posting about it here. My friend Kim enjoyed that last year, as did several of the poets who found themselves here, and I love the whole idea of the challenge. But can I do it this year? 

Today, pursuant to the challenge, I did read a chapbook in advance, as I will be otherwise occupied on August 1 (volleyball, friends). Still, I may post in the middle of the night.

I'm swimming again, which is meditative, a wonderful body-mind blend. I continue to be busy with many details. I think I have a weensy bit of what they are calling "re-entry anxiety," though I feel calm most of the time, and not at all troubled by wearing a mask into all businesses, even if others aren't, but my particular county is a current hotspot and masks are being required again, not just recommended, so maybe we'll see more...masks...or rude resistance, alas. The schools will be requiring masks, a relief!

Also this weekend, I'll be seeing a new play, in a theatre, in a big city, socially distanced, in a mask when I walk in. I'll be eating in restaurants--ack!--again, masked when I walk in, unmasked when I eat and drink. So far, I've only done that outside or via takeout.

To calm myself in preparation for all this, I am reading and writing in the sun and breeze, doing small household chores, packing in stages. To stay calm in a general way, I have been attentive to each moment, and also oddly color-coordinated. That is, I stack my recently-read books on the stairs in color-coordinated stacks. These stacks can be moved to some bookshelves-in-waiting when winter comes, and the stairs get stacked with small bins of hats, scarves, mittens, and gloves. As I pick each book now, I choose a bookmark to match, mainly via color or design but sometimes also via content. A book with a woman's face on the cover may get my Edna St. Vincent Millay bookmark from the American Writers Museum in Chicago. Right now I'm reading The Writer's Library, by Nancy Pearl and Jeff Schwager, about books that various authors love, pulled from the "Yellow...Is It Me You're Looking For?" display at the library, and the bookmark I chose for this says, "I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library." --Jorge Luis Borges. I do like that idea of a heaven. And I hope to hold body & mind together...in the meantime. By swimming. A heaven in body-mind.

Off the Grid

I was off the grid for a week in early June for a family gathering in Michigan, and now it's nearly mid-July, and I've been "off the grid" in all kinds of ways before and since. My last post, in early April, was mostly about March, and time still feels suspended. I wrote a poem a day in April, as planned & hoped, and I have continued to read books of poetry but am way behind in my reviewing,* as that takes concentration, re-reading, and a clear mind. I'm also reading fiction, nonfiction, essays, comics, and letters as a kind of escape as well as a way to focus. I'm walking to work. I'm swimming laps again, as this year the pool opened! I feel good but weird.

I guess I'm surprised that coming out of Covid isolation was somehow harder than being in. But why?** I'm not scared, just wary. I worked from home till June 1, 2020, and have worked masked at the workplace ever since. I'm vaccinated and go unmasked with other vaccinated people, friends and family I trust. I still wear a mask to the grocery store, though many customers, cashiers, and other employees don't. Cases (and deaths) went way down where I live but are on the uptick again. I accompany my parents to medical appointments, where people all wear masks in healthcare settings. I was part of a masked theatre audience and will be again. But I walk to work unmasked, and it is so nice to see people's faces again.

My poetry life continues in slow motion, and sometimes I forget about it. I have publications forthcoming, but I have to look at my lists to recall them. I make notes about poems to write, and wrote one for a particular contest & deadline to spur myself on. I write poems in my head as I walk but fail to write them down. I haven't pulled my chalkboard back up from the basement to write small daily poems for social media and people at my porch in real life. Forgive me.

* I did review a chapbook by Keith Taylor, but chapbooks are short!

**Probably because I am shy and an introvert. Staying inside wasn't a problem for me.