Omotara James
A poem announces itself at its beginning and its end. The body of the poem is the instruction of how the poem should be read. My poem is finished when my spirit has closed the gap my intellect has yet to cross. The spirit of the poem creates a chasm or a river, to which one repeatedly returns for a different answer to the same question. The ancient proverb, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush suggests that it is more prudent to value what one already possesses than to risk it on the chance of attaining more. On revision, I find the opposite to be true. I choose to revise towards the truth beyond reach. I am most interested in the lyric comprehension that allows me to understand and feel what is true before the words bridge the gap.
Because I knew at the outset that I wished to tell a story, I began the poem in quatrains: a reliable vehicle for narrative. During edits, I decided the enjambment of the line breaks distracted from the lyric. The breaks make the poem feel too self-reflexive. The longer lines make the poetry less obvious. In the first draft, the poem reaches toward a surreal realism that could not be attained with the quatrain. The shorter lines imbue the language with a syntax that feels too spell-like. I desired the poem to invoke a conjuring, not to conjure. Therefore, I’ve extended the line so one’s breath runs short. This creates greater urgency travelling to the end of the line as the poem is spoken. Always when revising poems, I read the work aloud, a hack for regulating its music. This process grounds the poem in the oral tradition of song. Lastly, the poem flashes back from the present moment of the speaker’s life to previous moments before she was born, which requires a physically wider box on the page. There's no other way for me to explain that LOL.
The poem concerns itself with the intersection between poetry and folklore. It interrogates the liminal space between the known and the unknown. The fodder for the poem comes from Follow the Drinking Gourd, popularized by Black American singer-songwriter Richie Havens in 1991. The folklore behind this song is located within the origins of the Underground Railroad, which itself is a phrase loaded with metaphor, agency, and hope. The drinking gourd metaphor refers to the Big Dipper. The discourse between astronomy, astrology, slavery, and liberation presents a sublime canvas for poetry, laden with science, culture, and history. Furthermore, the folklore behind the lyrics of this African American folk song connects the figurative stops of the Underground Railroad to the covert, pastoral references relayed to enslaved Black people journeying toward freedom.
While scholars have debated verbiage associated with the railroad stops in the song, dissent does not challenge the magic and tenacious spirit of the real-life people who created the Underground Railroad network, through which many enslaved people journeyed to freedom.
This poem was commissioned for the folio Black Hauntology, curated by Phillip B Williams, for the Yale Review. The instructions for the prompt of the poem follow:
1. How does your work communicate with the dead?
2. What have you learned about your artistry and craft from ghosts, disembodied voices, the guiding hand that casts no reflection in the mirror but that you feel on your shoulder as you make?
3. “What does any of this talk about spirit in art have to do with loving Black people?”
4. Who do you honor on the other side? Who watches over you?
Phillip poses powerful questions. During revision, I decided there was more to offer the first question. I can trace this emphasis to the revised ending of the poem. This was the most powerful question and it felt just to answer it last, from the volta onward.
The penultimate stanza performs a lot of work, and to my ear, allows the ending to feel earned. Earned and open.
A version of this poem implementing the structure of the original draft and the language of the second draft was first published in the Yale Review. The final version of the poem appears in my debut collection, Song of My Softening, which is the revised version on the right.
< draft 1 >
Ars Diaspora under Capitalism with Drinking Gourd
(after Richie Havens)
As morning unspools new glory across the earth,
it rescinds an inch,
at least, of borrowed light. Today
those who wake heavy and heaved
beneath the lowest rung of love, press
their ears to the first quail calls of sky.
I ride the train north, underground, having hollowed
the daily enemy of its gourd-mouthed pride.
My father’s gaze across my flesh, measures the distance
between my life and the grandfather I never met on Earth.
My father’s father, disembodied by time, visited him
in Trinidad, the evening before I arrived.
The riverbank of my father’s tide, surges sweet
with sorrow, as the Caroni river runs through the sugar belt.
He recalls the dream’s wordless joy: granddad smiling
ahead of me. We are headed into New York City together,
rare luxury to dwindle time, languorously. Under my gaze,
dad dips back into memory from his vinyl subway seat,
as if on holiday, pouring out another ladle of rum punch.
In this moment I see every celebration day we spent apart,
Projected onto his dappled brown, black face. Stripes of shadow
conjure this slideshow, as we emerge from tunnel to light.
He says granddad came to tell him I was coming,
each dark twinkle of his eye, a dead tree summoning.
Dad says the words from the quarrel last night
between my mother and I, what we spoke yesterday,
has already traveled ahead of us
between two hills, where love waits.
He says, our dead return when the flesh is weak
to remind us and warn against—
each beginning and ending,
a portal too dangerous to ignore.
Tonight, midsummer sits across the unset table
of the moon, the meek yet to inherit
the earth, the suffering yet to end
in peace. Upon me, the measureless distance
between words we want to believe and what
the spirit already knows. I call and call and call
and call and call and call and call.
When speaking to the dead, I hum the melody of the body
until the little river joins the great big river, almost always
losing my way. Dark, my most loyal friend,
sings follow the drinking gourd.
< final version >
Ars Diaspora with Drinking GourD
After Richie Havens
