Pieter Brueghel's The Wedding Dance in the Open Air

The Wedding Dance in the Open Air

William Carlos Williams

Disciplined by the artist

to go round

& round

in holiday gear

a riotously gay rabble of

peasants and their

ample-bottomed doxies

fills

the market square

featured by the women in

their starched

white headgear

they prance or go openly

toward the wood's

edges

round and around in

rough shoes and

farm breeches

mouths agape

Oya !

kicking up their heels

"The Blues is Not My Name" Reflections on the Carl Phillips Reading (and the age old question geared towards most poets of African descent)

Poet Carl Phllips

Passing

When the Famous Black poet speaks,

I understand

that his is the same unnervingly slow 

rambling method of getting from A to B 

that I hated in my father, 

my father who always told me 

don't shuffle.

The Famous Black Poet is 

speaking of the dark river in the mind 

that runs thick with the heroes of color, 

Jackie R., Bessie, Billie, Mr. Paige, anyone 

who knew how to sing or when to run. 

I think of my grandmother, said 

to have dropped dead from the evil eye, 

of my lesbian aunt who saw cancer and 

a generally difficult future headed her way 

in the still water 

of her brother's commode. 

I think of voodoo in the bottoms of soup-cans, 

and I want to tell the poet that the blues 

is not my name, that Alabama 

is something I cannot use 

in my business.

He is so like my father, 

I don't ask the Famous Black Poet, 

afterwards, 

to remove his shoes, 

knowing the inexplicable black 

and pink I will find there, a cut 

gone wrong in five places. 

I don't ask him to remove 

his pants, since that too 

is known, what has never known 

a blade, all the spaces between, 

where we differ . . .

I have spent years tugging 

between my legs, 

and proved nothing, really. 

I wake to the sheets I kicked aside, 

and examine where they've failed to mend 

their own creases, resembling some silken 

obstruction, something pulled 

from my father's chest, a bad heart, 

a lung,

the lung of the Famous Black Poet 

saying nothing I want to understand.

Earlier tonight I attended a poetry reading by Carl Phillips, poet and professor of English and African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis (one of my top choice schools to apply to for my graduate studies). Expectantly, the event went well. The poetry Phillips read seemed to have come very naturally to him. Such as water to a faucet, it seemed as if the pieces just flowed out of him because they were obligated and expected to.

Although I haven't studied much of his work, my favorite poem of his thus far is Passing. Coincidentally, one of my favorite books is Harlem Renaissance writer, Nella Larsen's novel Passing. Anyway, Phillips' piece is one that addresses the age old question to all poets of African descent or that identify themselves with the Black community: Are you a "Black Poet" and if so, how can/do you prove it in your art? That question is one that has taunted poets of African descent since the days of Phillis Wheatley, the fore-mother of African American poetry, disliked ironically by two opposing characters, Thomas Jefferson and Amiri Baraka for being "too black" for one and not "black enough" for the other. In the poem, the speaker informs readers that he "want[s] to tell the [Famous Black] poet that the blues/ is not [his] name!" Metaphorically speaking, the poet is stating that his existence is not defined by his socially constructed race. Of course he's of African descent, but why does he have to write for the sake of being Black?

During the  Q&A Discussion session of Phillips' reading, I inquired him about the concept of identity in African American poetry and whether or not he wrote intentionally from the perspective of any particular group or region he identified with or if he just wrote from the perspective of oneself.

He responded by notifying the audience that when he writes, he doesn't think of any particular audience. However, he added, that there are the obvious backgrounds that are within him consciously and subconsciously, such as being Black, gay and whatever else he could be considered. Furthermore, he answered that anything he writes is a general representation of humanity and "at the end of the day, all you can do is write what you write."

William Blake's "The Little Black Boy"

MY mother bore me in the southern wild,

    And I am black, but O, my soul is white!

White as an angel is the English child,

    But I am black, as if bereaved of light.

My mother taught me underneath a tree,

    And, sitting down before the heat of day,

She took me on her lap and kissèd me,

    And, pointing to the East, began to say:

'Look at the rising sun: there God does live,

    And gives His light, and gives His heat away,

And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive

    Comfort in morning, joy in the noonday.

'And we are put on earth a little space,

    That we may learn to bear the beams of love;

And these black bodies and this sunburnt face

    Are but a cloud, and like a shady grove.

'For when our souls have learn'd the heat to bear,

    The cloud will vanish; we shall hear His voice,

Saying, "Come out from the grove, my love and care,

    And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice."'

Thus did my mother say, and kissèd me,

    And thus I say to little English boy.

When I from black and he from white cloud free,

    And round the tent of God like lambs we joy,

I'll shade him from the heat till he can bear

    To lean in joy upon our Father's knee;

And then I'll stand and stroke his silver hair,

    And be like him, and he will then love me.

The coincidence happens to be that by chance, while studying Phillis Wheatley as the African poetess prodigy and fore-mother of African American poetry in my Contemporary African American Poetry class, I came across William Blake's "The Little Black Boy" in  Songs of Innocence. Indeed, some English majors, literary critics, poetry scholars and practicing poets may not understand the connection between Wheatley and Blake. However, I do. Many of Wheatley's critics have accused her of not being in tune with her African or Black culture. What they failed to realize and furthermore recognize is that, like in all poetry, the poet has a certain audience to attend to. Even though, primarily her poetry seems to renounce the African slave's struggle in (what were then) the British Colonies, a strict and thoughtful analysis of her work reveals that she was very in tune with what needed to be said by her for her people. 

Shortly after Wheatley's  inconspicuous death, Blake published "The Little Black Boy" in Songs of Innocence. Like most of Wheatley's poetry, this poem acknowledges its audience. That audience consisted of middle-class white citizens living in a patriarchal and pro-slavery society. Speaking to the same audience Wheatley spoke to, Blake was able to use his poetry in a  more direct way opposed to Wheatley due to their different social statuses. Socially critiquing the unjust ways of the American people, in "The Little Black Boy" Blake discusses race relations, religion, and equality for all mankind (just as Wheatley does indirectly in her poetry). The imagery of the poem is astonishing. The speaker in the poem, a Southern born black youth, explains that through folklore, his mother tells him that God is a giving God and has given them "a little space/That [they/everybody] may learn to bear the beams of love." Although there are many illusions and symbolic poetic aspects I can pull from this piece, I'll use that quote as the central thesis for Blake's poem. Within those two lines, Blake is stating that God has given everyone the ability to love and care for one another. That opinion is a counterargument against most of his peers who viewed white people as being superior to the enslaved Africans whom most thought were emotionless and unable to understand the theological virtue of love.