No. 30 - A time to poet

As I share today’s post below, I also invite all the good wishes & genies of buoyant clarity as I develop clearer creative and long term plans. I currently work in operations, picture staffing, budgeting, office management, operational culture, but I would like to continue to push into my creative interests in arts & culture, film, poetry and nonfiction. Should I keep the two separate? Super-Zing Operator energy by day, Cuter-Zing Personal Essayist, Novelist & Filmmaker energy by night? Another part of me wonders if I should look into opportunities that will more directly exercise my creative skills and interests.  Y’all…ANY insights or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

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Back in September, on the campus of James Madison University, in a gala-sized room filled with some few hundred poets and writers, the first African American United States Poet Laureate Rita Dove led a panel of four other city and state laureates, including poets Nandi Comer, Amanda Johnston, Curtis Crisler, and Avery Young. Johnston, poet and Texas State Poet Laureate, began the panel with her 2001 poem “The Soldier’s Mother.” 

In this piece, Johnston allows us to imagine what might it mean to be continually, constantly “birthing loss.”  I think of the many variations of grief, and their emergence as loss. From the little losses of the everyday to the larger, more monumental loss of family, loved ones, of the many lost as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

I think, in part, of my mother, a midwife who, in her forty+plus years in the practice, once caught a stillborn baby. At most births, Mama welcomed the new born with her ankh, which she carried to births as keeper of the shrine of Meskhenet [khemet for the birth chamber]. Prior to the birth, she would purify the ankh and, later lower it over the crown of each baby born. This, midwifery, birthing gain, was her calling. But, ever so present, at the moment of birth lies loss, and Johnston's pairing of the opposing ideas remains apropos. 

Later in the reading, I believe it was Curtis Crisler, a laureate out of Indiana, who offered this line of tender witness: I stood there with him in the gaps and waited with him till his poems had clothes on. Avery Young, a poet out of Chicago, also on the panel, offered his hope as laureate, which was to infuse and integrate poetry into the fabric of the city. He declared to the audience:  

If you want to know what happened in 1883, you have to read the poems of 1883. 

If you want to know what happened in November 2024 you have to read the poems of November 2024. 

I remember being truly buoyed hearing this assertion. Young helped me in that moment to know that poetry be of the times, the nature, the environment of the time that it is born in. 

I see, at the  same time, that a historian might argue that to know what happened in 1883 you might dive into the archives, the historical records of 1883, similarly with November 2024. Listening recently to a lecture by historian and visual artist, Nell Painter, I think she might have stood counter to Young. I imagine that she might encourage us to veer towards the archives, towards historical records to find ourselves within them.

I hope to share more on Painter’s lecture in the near future, but for now, saying that there is a body of work that we might always return to find who we are.