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Aberjhani

“The muse is a harsh mistress.

Only when she has savored

the last morsel of flesh,

tickled her tongue

with the last drop of blood,

only then will she be sated.”

--Glynn Miles, from The Wild Stallion

“What do you mean?” I dumbly asked my literature professor.

She had just informed me that I had been chosen along with two other students to recite my poetry as part of a special program celebrating the latest edition––meaning the survival––of a small press magazine.

She blinked at my response and said, “Well, I think your work is very good for a sophomore and this will give you an opportunity to meet some older poets who have been published.  I think they’ll like your work and maybe we can get some of it published in the next quarterly.”

It took a minute or two for me to understand that she had not asked if I was a football or basketball player. She had said something about poetry, about the lines of words that I had stacked in vertical rectangles and other shapes to giver her as homework. In that singular semester as an exchange student at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, 1976, poetry did not occupy the same level of priorities as partying throughout the weekend, which began officially on Thursdays anytime after 5 p.m. and was not obligated to conclude until just before class on Monday morning.

Poetry had been a means of venting the frustrations that came with struggling through poverty and racism as a teenager in the American South of the 1970s, of sometimes quietly amusing my self, and of magnetizing the attention of young women I adored. I had never intended anyone should think it particularly important because the circumstances, out of which I had dragged myself, with scholarships, loans, and part time jobs, had convinced me that I was not particularly important. How then could poetry written by me be of any consequence whatsoever?

My final answer to my professor was something pathetically lame like, “Nah, I don’t dig that kind’a stuff too much.” Then I turned away with visions of 150 proof alcohol sloshing through my head and a certain young woman’s eyes floating through my heart.

Two years later I made my way to San Francisco. A year after that, I was working as managing editor for a company specializing in publications for the insurance industry when, one day at the library, I picked up a literary magazine and unexpected read an article about my old poetry professor, Wendy Parrish. She had died of cancer.

Oh! Was that why smiling sometimes seemed like a major chore for you and why you were as thin as you were, not because you were allergic to joy as I cynically told myself but because you were…

Inside my head, a sound screeched and banged like huge rusted doors pulling open then slamming their backs against the wall. The article about her death explained that she had not been afraid or sad to know she was dying of cancer.  What she had been was angry.  She was, she said, angry that she had not yet written the poems that could topple corrupt governments or heal the world of debilitating ignorance. She was angry that she no longer had strength enough to try.  She was angry that she had not yet composed the lines that would ease the pain of other people’s loneliness, soothe the savagery of starvation, or banish war to the sophisticated pages of history books. And she was angry that she no longer had strength enough to try.       

The image of her straight light brown hair hanging flatly to her thin shoulders and her purpose-driven eyes behind round-framed glasses wedged between my brows like a thorn the size of a thumb. What did she mean by poems that could topple corrupt governments or heal the world of debilitating ignorance?  Ease the pain of other people’s loneliness?  Banish war?  Did poetry really possess such power?  Had she one day shared this titanic secret with me and I been too arrogant, apathetic, or hung over to care or comprehend? 

The years were far ahead of me when I would discover poetry’s enigmatic power.  But at the time I knew nothing of the furor stirred over Langston Hughes’ politically explosive poem, “Goodbye Christ,” the controversy brewed by Rosemary Daniell’s book, A Sexual Tour of the Deep South, the spiritually liberating works of Rumi, or Amiri Baraka’s more recent bit of literary dynamite, “Somebody Blew Up America.”  In the years to come, I would learn a great deal about muscles of poetry flexed by so many others in the name of something as grand as liberty and justice, or as simple as a flower or a river.

As it was, Parrish’s words and undiluted passion for her craft boomed relentlessly through my life like earthquakes and tsunamis chasing each other across a howling desert.  While she had decried her lack of strength, I had happily squandered mine experimenting with the many ways one could wring sensations––erotic and otherwise––out of the human body and mind.  Strength, for me, was both a legacy of my genetics and the reward from an early rites of passage when, at the age of five, I pulled a pot of boiling hot water straight off a lit stove and down onto my right arm.  I had been hungry and knew eggs were inside the pot.  What I didn’t know was that the boiling water would baptize me in fire, cooking the skin off my flesh from my shoulders to the back of my hand.  It was a first major lesson in the unforgiving nature of pain and left such an indelible tattoo––a scar shaped curiously like an elongated maple leaf––that very few events have come close to matching, and fewer still managed to surpass, the intense agony experienced that day and the years of healing that followed.

I could, however, feel an appreciable level of pain as over and over again I read about my former teacher’s death––the article said little about her life.  I had forfeited any right to cry or feel sorry for myself the day I declined her initiation to participate in a reading before an audience of distinguished litterateurs. It seemed to me the only thing I now had a right to do was honor Parrish’s passionate desire for strength to create poetry of some consequence by dedicating my own to an attempt to do exactly that. 

 
Poetry then assumed a stronger presence in my life as I began to both read more and write more.  I took up residence in volumes of poetry the way the other people took up residence in apartments or campers.  Being in San Francisco, I spent hours in Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore reading Ginsberg, Di Prima, Kerouac, Kaufman, Baraka, Bukowski, and numerous other “more obscure poets” who did not possess fame but who did wield the convictions of their unchained voices. I wrote little 10-page booklets of quatrains and gave them as gifts to co-workers and friends. No one asked what had gotten into me; they simply smiled to receive the rhymes suddenly fluttering daily through my pen.
Somewhere in the sudden incandescent storm of my reading and writing, a couple of literary magazines picked my efforts out of their editorial slush piles and for the first time I became a published poet. It didn’t occur to me to feel proud that my work was appearing in issues of what was then called Black American Literature Forum alongside those of Melvin Dixon, Claudia Tate, and Sterling D. Plumpp, Regina Williams and others far more established than I.  The depth of my dedication to my personal literary revolution could perhaps be measured by the fact that a number of my poems from that period mocked the lack of literary values and spiritual conviction that seemed to have governed my pen up until news of Parrish’s death.  This one was called GETTING STRONG NOW: 
 

Got to energize

           energize

           my machine

           for the motion

           of the notion

           of freedom in my lifetime

Got to learn again

           learn again

           the language

           of the fire

           that first retired

           the power lion’s jaw

Go to energize

          energize

          got to

          got to    
 

If, in the past, poetry had been a companion whom I sometimes entertained because it sometimes entertained me, poetry now became a distinguished friend kind enough to shower my life with fine gifts of noble purpose, passionate conviction, focused awareness, and evolution of self. Even so, it was a distinguished friend to whom I was not certain I was as loyal as I could or should be.

 
In fact, I largely forgot about the promises I had made on behalf of Wendy Parrish’s vision of poetry when I entered the U.S. Air Force in 1981.  Within the frozen interior of Alaska, ink literally froze in my pen.  It thawed to the warmth of love discovered, the establishment of a family, and a move to England.  Still, poetry remained largely a natural by-product of romance and a tool for personal entertainment.  At least, that was all it was until the loss of several children and the dissolution of my marriage.

 
Strange how one can walk the earth bleeding from the soul and not realize it.  Having grown up looking after younger nieces and nephews, I developed early on the habit of paying more attention to the needs of others than to my own.  Therefore, despite my early baptism by fire––or maybe because of it?––wounds sometimes tended to accumulate in my life without my awareness.  It was that way with the loss of my twin girls and two sons during their respective births or shortly afterwards. I thought I had handled the situation with quiet dignity and carefully measured resolve until I realized that I was, in fact, one of those bleeding profusely from the soul without realizing it.  How long had that been going on?  I didn’t know.

 
Then one morning I awoke to the sound of weeping thundering through my bones and a cloud of angelic voices ushering me from the bedroom upstairs to the dining room table below.  In front of me a pen and sheet of paper.  My hand zigging and zagging back and forth until there before me was a block of words with a title written beneath them: I MADE MY BOY OUT OF POETRY. The bleeding in my soul stopped.  I recalled a woman’s yearning for strength––and I suspect time as well––to write poems that might make large or small differences in the world. 

 

(FROM: The American Poet Who Went Home Again)

 
By Aberjhani