Naming It

reflections on IS Jones, Muriel Rukeyser, curlews and more.

Mid-March now, and the curlews have returned. In the last two weeks I’ve seen daffodils, lambs; smelled wild garlic; heard oyster catchers. Spring has arrived, the dark, hard months are over. We made it.

My energy grows with the light, and I’m reading again – earlier this week, Candi Martin’s wonderful first collection “Burnt Ice Cream” with its painful but luminous poetry of single-parenthood in Rossendale; and this weekend, an advance copy of Gwyneth Lewis’ sixth collection – “First Rain in Paradise”. It’s an astonishing collection - incredibly skilful and inventive in finding a language and shape for pain - and for recovery. It deserves a whole article, and I will write it shortly.

I’m a bit ashamed to say that, though I love poetry, I can go long periods of time without reading it. One of the many things I appreciate about running January Writing Hours is that for several months, I absolutely have to read - to return to old favourites in new ways, to discover new collections, to fall into rabbit holes of language. For instance, I shared a poem by Ursula K Le Guin, whose Earthsea Trilogy rests on the concept of the Real Name – the power we acquire over a person, or a thing, when we discover the word which perfectly describes its essential nature. It’s a concept which delights me. It stretches back into folklore, and in tunnelling into that history, I encountered “Spells of My Name” by the poet IS Jones, who was entirely new to me and who blew me away.

“Spells of My Name” explores naming as an act of reclamation. Jones is constantly on the search for a better language for the body, and for their own multiple selves. They write about trauma and desire and uncertainty – and their first collection comes out this year. I love what they say in this interview:

“ I mostly write poems at night, and I remember being up at 2:00 a.m. writing a new poem and I thought to myself, "This is a part of the work that I love the most, when it’s dark and it’s quiet and nobody cares what I’m doing and I’m playing and I’m exploring and I’m reading poems and I’m dreaming about what I want them to look like.” I thought to myself, “I don’t ever want this good magic to end.

As Black artists, I don’t think we talk often enough about pleasure for the creator of the work. I definitely have been guilty of contributing to this pervasive notion that artmaking has to come from pain and trauma as opposed to coming from pleasure and joy and wanting to share a vision that you have with other people”.

As someone who often engages in trauma in my poetry and in my working life, I could not agree more. Writing does not have to hurt or harm us – and even giving words to our trauma can be an act of community, validation, and comfort.

Exercise:

- For five minutes, write from “the part of the work that you love the most” – write about where and when you write, what surrounds, as much as what you write and why.

To think about why I write, I often turn to Muriel Rukeyser, one of my favourite poets and activists. You might have encountered these lines from her long poem, Kathe Kollwitz: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?/ The world would split open.” Kathe Kollwitz was a famous German artist, whose most famous work engaged with war, poverty, hunger and death. But as Muriel points out in her poem, that’s not all that Kathe reflected in her art, and her words, and her life.

2

Woman as gates, saying:
"The process is after all like music,
like the development of a piece of music.
The fugues come back and
                                               again and again
interweave.
A theme may seem to have been put aside,
but it keeps returning—
the same thing modulated,
somewhat changed in form.
Usually richer.
And it is very good that this is so."

A woman pouring her opposites.
"After all there are happy things in life too.
Why do you show only the dark side?"
"I could not answer this. But I know—
in the beginning my impulse to know
the working life
                              had little to do with
pity or sympathy.
                               I simply felt
that the life of the workers was beautiful."

She said, "I am groping in the dark."

She said, "When the door opens, of sensuality,
then you will understand it too. The struggle begins.
Never again to be free of it,
often you will feel it to be your enemy.
Sometimes
you will almost suffocate,
such joy it brings."

Saying of her husband: "My wish
is to die after Karl.
I know no person who can love as he can,
with his whole soul.
But often too it has made me
so terribly happy."

She said: "We rowed over to Carrara at dawn,
climbed up to the marble quarries
and rowed back at night. The drops of water
fell like guttering stars
from our oars."

She said: "As a matter of fact,
I believe
                that bisexuality
is almost    a necessary factor
in artistic production; at any rate,
the tinge of masculinity within me
helped me
                  in my work."

She said: "The only technique I can still manage.
It's hardly a technique at all, lithography.
In it
        only the essentials count."

A tight-lipped man in a restaurant last night saying to me:
"Kollwitz?     She's too black-and-white."

Exercise:

Inspired by this poem, create a portrait in words of a poet or artist, across ANY genre. Muriel Rukeyser was willing to use all kinds of material and techniques in her longer poems, including interviews, articles and testimonies. Be inspired by this, and include plenty of sources and styles - perhaps contrasting facts and personal anecdotes and contradictory opinions to explore societal expectations and roles - in your poem.

And finally, from the portrait to the self-portrait, and this howl of poem by IS Jones.

SELF-PORTRAIT OF THE BLK GIRL BECOMING THE BEAST EVERYONE THOUGHT SHE WAS

by I.S. Jones

the moon is my first emotion             then beast     then happy rage
  depending on a zealous appetite

i pull bobby pins                from the kitchen of my scalp       tear out nails

one by one     pluck out the lashes              yank docile teeth             

                       fold the skin back by the mouth                          i release my human flesh & night drops

            blue wolves circle the block in acute madness
dreaming in gun smoke & new names to pick their fangs clean

                                    the moon sways blood & voices behind yellow eyes,
                                    each of the names bow inside me.

i grin       & the moon is an anxious pulse                i, a hungry one

                         in overexposure, the moon could make anything feral
            i only eat a macabre light & the night is so sweet on my tongue

                  fear makes the blue wolves multiply

the moon rummages through the light of my name like a vagrant beggar
            tills the blood in my four-legged body

                      born non-white & woman, call the thing what it is:

hostile        uppity           neck-rolls        hips without the logic       mean-mugs       vengeful at the root   


            but you’ve only known        my mercy
 
a snatched tongue: polite hands: crossed legs: a settled throat: plea and please two hands on the same body

                                    never my unhinged joy

in my first language—the cease of blood before writhing—

                                    the push back

knuckling of bone & sinew             a blue neck caught inside a maw & how each muscle negotiates

            before severing

god of the faithful night,                          teach me to lose my mouth in reverie

            to laugh in my predator’s blood                    to let it fill my belly

how it trickles                         through the floorboard of my teeth

There’s a long tradition of metamorphosis in poetry … and like any poetic device, it can be harnessed to any intention. In this fierce poem, I.S embraces and embodies racist stereotypes of black women until they joyfully and fully inhabiting the strong, fierce, hungry and sensual body. In doing so, they take ownership of those stereotypes, transforming them, filling them with power and joy.

Whoever you are, and whatever you have faced, I invite you to do the same - and as usual, to share what you write in Comments.

Exercise

Write me a self-portrait in which you become animal. Whether you write from a place of trauma and oppression, or a place of power and privilege, how might you embody and embrace the expectations you have inevitably encountered? What animal will be liberated from your inner self? Like I.S., find the form and imagery which suits that animal; like I.S., let it roam freely, let the text and the white space embody that animal and its movements.