Assignment 1: Tyrice Deane

SUMMARY: Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin is a cover to cover experience of an epoch marked by racism and violence that continues to be perpetuated in modern society .  The art compiled by Phillip Cushway and Michael Warr holds space on the page for historical and contemporary critique of acts of terror committed towards Black’s living in America. Through visual and linguistic art Black bodies transcend traditional time as the poetry, essays, pictures, and content of this anthology illustrate the temporality of the Black existence. An existence that is made to fit within a Eurocentric calendar marked by linear time, which by means of power and control, exclude the simultaneity of slavery that straddles the free enslaved Blacks of today.  Michael Warr describes himself as “unapologetically political”. A man who believes that, “today’s terror must be in plain view of the national consciousness”. He raises national consciousness, not via digital awareness, which alerts people for as long as the live Facebook feed plays, and the news story runs, but a consciousness that will permeate  “future school kids who waving through the “pages” of this book on a holographic “screen” that floats in midair...disbelieving of the need to condemn sanctioned murders, in the same way that most of us today cannot imagine a past when Americans picnicked at public lynchings…I hope that one day this book becomes a relic” This anthology is written for the then, now, and future, and coalescence of past and present. Poetry of Protest includes a diverse group of Black  poets who through their words, condemn history, call for immediate repeal of race driven hate and crime, and contract a consciousness with the reader that puts stock in future social reform. It is a brilliant way of “breaking poets out of a social vacuum” and using the literary economy to produce a text that will document the “inhumane continuity that must be broken.”

COVER ART: The darkness and stillness imitated in the colors of the flag made me, the reader, feel like I was visiting a burial site. A grey headstone with the names of the murdered etched in silver letters, I opened the book to lay flowers on their graves, and the graves that were never marked. The cover is a visual gravestone.

VISUAL ART: The book art created content connection that gave an optical representation of what was being said and who was saying it, creating a recognizable community. Beginning with the pictures of small Black faces being ushered into detainment, to the list of racial murders written with no convictions, into the quotes, and words etched onto surfaces that appear tangible, all of the visual art aggrandized the literature in the finest way. I especially enjoyed the autonomy the author portraits gave to their work.  These photographs proved to be staple pieces of the work as the editor allowed entire pages to be  filled with the continuous flow of  influential author faces. The wide and all-encompassing author photos captured complexity, and diversity. The visual art told stories, about the stories, within the stories, producing well done “meta” work.

LITERARY CONTENT:  The content intensified the protest by expanding upon the assumed subjectivity of poetry. It reiterates the meaning of including testimony with objective data that cannot be denied, such as government statistics that prove institutionalized racism, and social movement issued documents containing slogans and ideologies that fueled change in an era of deep rooted oppression. The content opened the creative door where poetry is often exiled as the work of the dreamers into a realistic space where poetics can control the sociopolitical climate.  Even with a cast of all Black writers, the different voices are aural, the reader can clearly hear different perspectives of Blackness and how it influences the individual. Each author used their scribed voice to communicate their “creative individualism” under one collective experience of Blackness. The stratification ranges from Cornelius Eady giving voice to Emmett Till’s glass- top casket, Kwame Dawes charting the ascension of a leader and a hero juxtaposing the 45^th president to 16^th, Elizabeth Alexanders’ account of the “Rumble in the Jungle” that was Ali the great, Toi Derricotte, a woman of lighter hue contemplating the damnation of having a dark son, and questioning who is the monster, the social system or her hands that tried to “bend over his nose” to straighten it. These voices are only but a few poets who engraved their DNA into the canvass of this book empowering those to include themselves in the story of revolution.

POEM OF THE DAY:  I chose to highlight Camille T Dungy’s Conspiracy because it can be directly correlated to the subject of imagination, specifically the imagination of time, that we are discussing in my Craft of Poetry class this semester (the topic book being Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson) .  In the beginning and end of this poem Dungy contemplates imagined time, she writes, “There is so much time in the world. How many ways can it be divided?”, and then towards the close of her testimony she reveals that, “half the time I can’t tell my experiences apart from the ghost.” The simultaneity of time and the perception that time is abundant, and endless, therefore should be easily deciphered from the crossover of apparitions from the past, is consuming Dungys’ everyday life.  Her “ghost” as she calls them are blurring, yet directing and protecting her “rhythms of tread” so much so that when she “stands still, I can feel her breathing. But when I start to move, I lose her...” her, being her daughter who rests wrapped in African cloth on her back. When a woman smiles at her daughter she wonders “if she might have been the sort of girl my mother says spat on my aunt when they were children in Virginia all those acts and laws ago.” It can be considered a trigger for Dungy to see a face that timelessly fossilizes the outward hatred of generations ago and may hide the same hate behind today’s smile. Dungy explores interior time by writing about the  walk with her daughter, and the exterior time of the Black readers daily struggle. She also sufficiently exemplifies the  “homogenous empty time” that debunks the fundamental concept of “a long time ago” that doesn’t prove to be true from those descendant who’s ancestors suffered from the  inhumanity of slavery and the injustices still in place today.  This poem also provoked another concept in my head stemming from the term “generational PTSD” which is researched in a psychology book titled, “It Didn’t Start With You”, by Mark Wolynn. Dungys’ poem added texture to the understanding of generational PTSD and how many simple moments in time, such as a walk in the park, can lead to an event that triggers the pain of  injustices from “all those acts and laws ago”, like a white woman spiting on a Black woman, or last weeks Black body, son, father, husband, human, that lay cold in the street murdered by the shield. It is no wonder that a Black woman such as Dungy can be split into two separate frames, “half the time I am filled with terror. Half the time I am full of myself. I can relate as a poet, and a Black woman, the terror is often unwritten, unread, and unchallenged.