Carla Repice, On the line, oil on canvas board, 2016, 14X16”
WEEK 2:
In Response to “On the Line” by Carla Repice
Curated by Maya Pindyck
“Imagine”
by Kamilah Aisha Moon
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
—W. S. Merwin
A blanket of fresh snow
makes any neighborhood idyllic.
Dearborn Heights indistinguishable from Baldwin Hills,
South Central even—
until a thawing happens and residents emerge
into the light. But it almost never snows in L.A.,
and snows often in this part of Michigan—
a declining wonderland, a place not to stand out
or be stranded like Renisha was.
Imagine a blonde daughter with a busted car
in a suburb where a brown homeowner
(not taking any chances)
blasts through a locked door first,
checks things out after—
around the clock coverage and the country beside itself
instead of the way it is now,
so quiet like a snowy night
and only the grief of a brown family (again)
around the Christmas tree, recalling
memories of Renisha playing
on the front porch, or catching flakes
as they fall and disappear
on her tongue.
They are left to imagine
what her life might have been.
We are left to imagine the day
it won't require imagination
to care about all of the others.
Copyright © 2014 by Kamilah Aisha Moon. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-a-Day on February 3, 2014. SOURCE: poets.org
“from Don't Let Me Be Lonely: ‘Cornel West makes the point...’”
by Claudia Rankine
Cornel West makes the point that hope is different from American optimism. After the initial presidential election results come in, I stop watching the news. I want to continue watching, charting, and discussing the counts, the recounts, the hand counts, but I cannot. I lose hope. However Bush came to have won, he would still be winning ten days later and we would still be in the throes of our American optimism. All the non-reporting is a distraction from Bush himself, the same Bush who can't remember if two or three people were convicted for dragging a black man to his death in his home state of Texas.
/
You don't remember because you don't care. Sometimes my mother's voice swells and fills my forehead. Mostly I resist the flooding, but in Bush's case I find myself talking to the television screen: You don't know because you don't care.
/
Then, like all things impassioned, this voice takes on a life of its own: You don't know because you don't bloody care. Do you?
/
I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the recognition that a life can not matter. Or, as there are billions of lives, my sadness is alive alongside the recognition that billions of lives never mattered. I write this without breaking my heart, without bursting into anything. Perhaps this is the real source of my sadness. Or, perhaps, Emily Dickinson, my love, hope was never a thing with feathers. I don't know, I just find when the news comes on I switch the channel. This new tendency might be indicative of a deepening personality flaw: IMH, The Inability to Maintain Hope, which translates into no innate trust in the supreme laws that govern us. Cornel West says this is what is wrong with black people today—too nihilistic. Too scarred by hope to hope, too experienced to experience, too close to dead is what I think.
Claudia Rankine, “Cornel West makes the point… (pp. 21-23)" from Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. Copyright © 2004 by Claudia Rankine. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press. SOURCE: poetryfoundation.org
“say it with your whole black mouth”
By Danez Smith
say it with your whole black mouth: i am innocent
& if you are not innocent, say this: i am worthy of forgiveness, of breath after breath
i tell you this: i let blue eyes dress me in guilt
walked around stores convinced the very skin of my palm was stolen
& what good has that brought me? days filled flinching
thinking the sirens were reaching for me
& when the sirens were for me
did i not make peace with god?
so many white people are alive because
we know how to control ourselves.
how many times have we died on a whim
wielded like gallows in their sun-shy hands?
here, standing in my own body, i say: the next time
they murder us for the crime of their imaginations
i don’t know what i’ll do.
i did not come to preach of peace
for that is not the hunted’s duty.
i came here to say what i can’t say
without my name being added to a list
what my mother fears i will say
what she wishes to say herself
i came here to say
i can’t bring myself to write it down
sometimes i dream of pulling a red apology
from a pig’s collared neck & wake up crackin up
if i dream of setting fire to cul-de-sacs
i wake chained to the bed
i don’t like thinking about doing to white folks
what white folks done to us
when i do
can’t say
i don’t dance
o my people
how long will we
reach for god
instead of something sharper?
my lovely doe
with a taste for meat
take
the hunter
by his hand
Copyright © 2018 by Danez Smith. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 25, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets. SOURCE: poets.org
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.
The series will be disseminated through Equity's online channels on June 27th, July 4th and July 11th.
About the Contributors:
Kamilah Aisha Moon received a BA from Paine College and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of Starshine & Clay (Four Way Books, 2017) and She Has a Name (Four Way Books, 2013). Her honors include a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Cave Canem, the Fine Arts Work Center, the Prague Summer Writing Institute, and the Vermont Studio Center. She teaches at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta, Georgia.
Born in Kingston, Jamaica, poet Claudia Rankine earned a BA at Williams College and an MFA at Columbia University. Rankine has published several collections of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, the PEN Center USA Poetry Award, and the Forward poetry prize; Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004); and Nothing in Nature is Private (1994), which won the Cleveland State Poetry Prize. Her work often crosses genres as it tracks wild and precise movements of mind. Noting that “hers is an art neither of epiphany nor story,” critic Calvin Bedient observed that “Rankine’s style is the sanity, but just barely, of the insanity, the grace, but just barely, of the grotesqueness.” Discussing the borrowed and fragmentary sources for her work in an interview with Paul Legault for the Academy of American Poets, Rankine stated, “I don't feel any commitment to any external idea of the truth. I feel like the making of the thing is the truth, will make its own truth.”
Rankine has coedited American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language (2002), American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics (2007), and The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind (2014). Her poems have been included in the anthologies Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (2003), Best American Poetry (2001), and The Garden Thrives: Twentieth Century African-American Poetry (1996). Her play Detour/South Bronx premiered in 2009 at New York’s Foundry Theater.
Rankine has been awarded fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lannan Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2013, she was elected as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and in 2014 she received a Lannan Literary Award. She has taught at the University of Houston, Case Western Reserve University, Barnard College, and Pomona College.
Danez Smith was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and received an MFA from the University of Michigan. Smith is the author of Homie, (Graywolf Press, 2020), Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017), which was short-listed for the National Book Award, and [insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation, they are also the winner of a Pushcart Prize and co-host the podcast VS alongside Franny Choi. Smith lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
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.