Carla Repice, "Insufficient measures", Oil on panel, 2016, 11”X14”
WEEK 1:
In Response to “Insufficient Measures” by Carla Repice
Curated by Maya Pindyck
“A Small Needful Fact”
by Ross Gay
Is that Eric Garner worked
for some time for the Parks and Rec.
Horticultural Department, which means,
perhaps, that with his very large hands,
perhaps, in all likelihood,
he put gently into the earth
some plants which, most likely,
some of them, in all likelihood,
continue to grow, continue
to do what such plants do, like house
and feed small and necessary creatures,
like being pleasant to touch and smell,
like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe
Copyright © 2015 by Ross Gay. Reprinted from Split This Rock’s The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database.
“I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies”
by June Jordan
Dedicated to the Poet Agostinho Neto,
President of The People’s Republic of Angola: 1976
1
I will no longer lightly walk behind
a one of you who fear me:
Be afraid.
I plan to give you reasons for your jumpy fits
and facial tics
I will not walk politely on the pavements anymore
and this is dedicated in particular
to those who hear my footsteps
or the insubstantial rattling of my grocery
cart
then turn around
see me
and hurry on
away from this impressive terror I must be:
I plan to blossom bloody on an afternoon
surrounded by my comrades singing
terrible revenge in merciless
accelerating
rhythms
But
I have watched a blind man studying his face.
I have set the table in the evening and sat down
to eat the news.
Regularly
I have gone to sleep.
There is no one to forgive me.
The dead do not give a damn.
I live like a lover
who drops her dime into the phone
just as the subway shakes into the station
wasting her message
canceling the question of her call:
fulminating or forgetful but late
and always after the fact that could save or
condemn me
I must become the action of my fate.
2
How many of my brothers and my sisters
will they kill
before I teach myself
retaliation?
Shall we pick a number?
South Africa for instance:
do we agree that more than ten thousand
in less than a year but that less than
five thousand slaughtered in more than six
months will
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH ME?
I must become a menace to my enemies.
3
And if I
if I ever let you slide
who should be extirpated from my universe
who should be cauterized from earth
completely
(lawandorder jerkoffs of the first the
terrorist degree)
then let my body fail my soul
in its bedeviled lecheries
And if I
if I ever let love go
because the hatred and the whisperings
become a phantom dictate I o-
bey in lieu of impulse and realities
(the blossoming flamingos of my
wild mimosa trees)
then let love freeze me
out.
I must become
I must become a menace to my enemies.
Copyright © 2017 by the June M. Jordan Literary Estate. Used with the permission of the June M. Jordan Literary Estate, www.junejordan.com.
“from The Black Maria”
By Aracelis Girmay
after Neil deGrasse Tyson, black astrophysicist & director of the Hayden
Planetarium, born in 1958, New York City. In his youth, deGrasse Tyson was
confronted by police on more than one occasion when he was on his way to
study stars.
“I’ve known that I’ve wanted to do astrophysics since I was nine years old, a first visit to the Hayden Planetarium...So I got to see how the world around me reacted to my expression of these ambitions. & all I can say is, the fact that I wanted to be a scientist, an astrophysicist, was, hands down, the path of most resistance...Anytime I expressed this interest teachers would say, Don’t you want to be an athlete? Or, Don’t you wanna...I wanted to become something that was outside of the paradigms of expectation of the people in power.
And I look behind me and say, Well, where are the others who might have been this? And they’re not there. And I wonder, What is the [thing] along the tracks that I happened to survive and others did not? Simply because of the forces that prevented it. At every turn. At every turn.”
—NdT, The Center for Inquiry, 2007
Body of space. Body of dark.
Body of light.
The Skyview apartments
circa 1973, a boy is
kneeling on the rooftop, a boy who
(it is important
to mention here his skin
is brown) prepares his telescope,
the weights & rods,
to better see the moon. His neighbor
(it is important to mention here
that she is white) calls the police
because she suspects the brown boy
of something, she does not know
what at first, then turns,
with her looking,
his telescope into a gun,
his duffel into a bag of objects
thieved from the neighbors’ houses
(maybe even hers) & the police
(it is important to mention
that statistically they
are also white) arrive to find
the boy who has been turned, by now,
into “the suspect,” on the roof
with a long, black lens, which is,
in the neighbor’s mind, a weapon &
depending on who you are, reading this,
you know that the boy is in grave danger,
& you might have known
somewhere quiet in your gut,
you might have worried for him
in the white space between lines 5 & 6,
or maybe even earlier, & you might be holding
your breath for him right now
because you know this story,
it’s a true story, though,
miraculously, in this version
of the story, anyway,
the boy on the roof of the Skyview lives
to tell the police that he is studying
the night & moon & lives
long enough to offer them (the cops) a view
through his telescope’s long, black eye, which,
if I am spelling it out anyway,
is the instrument he borrowed
& the beautiful “trouble” he went through
lugging it up to the roof
to better see the leopard body of
space speckled with stars & the moon far off,
much farther than (since I am spelling The Thing
out) the distance between
the white neighbor who cannot see the boy
who is her neighbor, who,
in fact, is much nearer
to her than to the moon, the boy who
wants to understand the large
& gloriously un-human mysteries of
the galaxy, the boy who, despite “America,”
has not been killed by the murderous jury of
his neighbor’s imagination & wound. This poem
wants only the moon in its hair & the boy on the roof.
This boy on the roof of this poem
with a moon in his heart. Inside my own body
as I write this poem my body
is making a boy even as the radio
calls out the Missouri coroner’s news,
the Ohio coroner’s news.
2015. My boy will nod
for his milk & close his mouth around
the black eye of my nipple.
We will survive. How did it happen?
The boy. The cops. My body in this poem.
My milk pulling down into droplets of light
as the baby drinks & drinks them down
into the body that is his own, see it,
splayed & sighing as a star in my arms.
Maybe he will be the boy who studies stars.
Maybe he will be (say it)
the boy on the coroner’s table
splayed & spangled
by an officer’s lead as if he, too, weren’t made
of a trillion glorious cells & sentences. Trying to last.
Leadless, remember? The body’s beginning,
splendored with breaths, turned,
by time, into, at least, this song.
This moment-made & the mackerel-“soul”
caught flashing inside the brief moment of the body’s net,
then, whoosh, back into the sea of space.
The poem dreams of bodies always leadless, bearing
only things ordinary
as water & light.
Aracelis Girmay, "from The Black Maria" from The black maria. Copyright © 2016 by Aracelis Girmay. Reprinted by permission of BOA Editions, Ltd., www.boaeditions.org.
Source: The black maria (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2016)
About the Series:
During the original run of The White Problem, Equity Gallery hosted a poetry reading curated by the poet Maya Pindyck. Inspired by the online redux of The White Problem, Pindyck has curated a new poetry series titled "3 x 3: Poems to Carry Us Now" to accompany the exhibition.
This curation of poetry, three poems a week for three weeks, amplifies & spreads the voices of Black poets whose words live in our public domain. Collectively, the poems speak both to the problem of Whiteness and to Black joy, resistance, & hope. They are poems to carry us now, into a different world.
I selected one of Carla’s paintings to go with each group of poems. The paintings I chose speak to the ways Whiteness gets reproduced and naturalized at every level of society. The poems offer distinct voices and perspectives on the same problem, and also an antidote. Together, the poems and paintings do (at least) two things: they confront the violent social structures that create and recreate a white supremacist mindset and they jolt us to respond—laying bare their rage, grief, love, and tenderness, touching us to repair this world and to find some solace in their company. The language of Carla’s paintings joined with the languages of these poems sparks a sisterhood in clear-eyed, antiracist work by way of heart and hand. — Maya Pindyck
The series will be disseminated through Equity's online channels on June 27th, July 4th and July 11th.
About the Contributors:
Ross Gay was born on August 1, 1974 in Youngstown, Ohio. He received a BA in English/Art from Lafayette College, an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, and a PhD in English from Temple University. He is the author of three collections of poetry: Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Award, Bringing the Shovel Down (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), and Against Which (Cavankerry Press, 2006). Gay is a founding editor, with Karissa Chen and Patrick Rosal, of the online sports magazine Some Call it Ballin', and an editor of the chapbook presses Q Avenue and Ledge Mule Press. His honors include fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Gay served as the guest editor for Poem-a-Day in October 2018. He currently teaches at Indiana University and in Drew University's Low-Residency MFA program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation.
Born in New York City on July 9, 1936, June Jordan attended Barnard College. Her numerous books of poetry include We’re On: A June Jordan Reader (Alice James Books, 2017), Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2007), Kissing God Goodbye: Poems, 1991-1997 (Anchor Books, 1997), Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems (Thunder's Mouth Press, 1989), Living Room: New Poems (Thunder's Mouth Press, 1985), Passion: New Poems, 1977–1980 (Beacon Press, 1980), and Things That I Do in the Dark: Selected Poetry (Random House, 1977). Jordan also authored children’s books, plays, the memoir Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood (Basic/Civitas Books, 2000), and the novel His Own Where (Crowell, 1971), which was nominated for the National Book Award. Her collections of political essays include Affirmative Acts: Political Essays (Anchor Books, 1998) and On Call: Political Essays (South End Press, 1985). Of her career, Toni Morrison writes, "I am talking about a span of forty years of tireless activism coupled with and fueled by flawless art." Jordan received a Rockefeller Foundation grant, the National Association of Black Journalists Award, and fellowships from the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She taught at the University of California, Berkeley, where she founded Poetry for the People. Jordan died of breast cancer on June 14, 2002, in Berkeley, California.
Born and raised in Santa Ana, California, poet Aracelis Girmay earned a BA at Connecticut College and an MFA from New York University. Her poems trace the connections of transformation and loss across cities and bodies. In her 2011 online chat interview with the Rumpus Poetry Book Club, Girmay discussed innovative and hybrid poetric forms, stating, “I wonder what new explorations of form might have to do with documenting the new and old ways of thinking about power. Of how we’ve been taught to think by our families, institutions, television, computer culture, etc. [….] Perhaps the so-called hybrid poems are about dislocating or splintering the central lens.” Her poetry collections include Teeth (2007), Kingdom Animalia (2011), and The Black Maria (2016), named a “Top Poetry Pick” by Publisher's Weekly, O Magazine, and Library Journal. She is also the author of the collage-based picture book changing, changing (2005). In 2011 Girmay was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and in 2015 she received a Whiting Award for Poetry. A Cave Canem Fellow and an Acentos board member, she led youth and community writing workshops. She currently teaches at Hampshire College. She lives in New York City.
Maya Pindyck examines intimate intersections of memory, place, and culture. A 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, she is the author of the poetry collections Emoticoncert (Four Way Books) and Friend Among Stones (New Rivers Press, winner of the Many Voices Project Award), and a chapbook, Locket, Master, selected by Paul Muldoon for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. She exhibits her visual work widely and publishes her academic scholarship on schooling in various journals. Pindyck received her BA from Connecticut College in studio art and philosophy; an MFA in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College; an MA in education from Brooklyn College as a New York City Teaching Fellow; and a PhD in English education from Columbia University’s Teachers College. Currently, she is an assistant professor and director of Writing at Moore College of Art & Design in Philadelphia.