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| 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."
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