POET

Toi Derricotte (1941 - )

BIOGRAPHY

Toi Derricotte once told Contemporary Authors: "My fears of death were prominent in my early poems. In my first book, The Empress of the Death House, that theme persists and is embodied in 'The Grandmother Poems,' a group of poems about my early experiences at my grandparents' funeral home in Detroit. In my second book, Natural Birth, I am concerned again with the same themes—death, birth, and transcendence. In new manuscripts I write about our family's experiences as one of the first black families in upper Montclair, of my problems at being unrecognized because of my light complexion, and my love and rage toward my neighbors." It is true that "truthtelling as a way to self-integrity operates as a strong impulse" in her works, the author stated.

Derricotte added: "In Catholic school we learned that by confessing our sins and admitting faults and weaknesses we were forgiven, made 'whole' and acceptable, put back into a state of grace." Derricotte confided that: "As a black woman, I have been consistently confused about my 'sins,' unsure of which faults were in me and which faults were the results of others' projections." The statement casts doubt on whether or not a sin has been committed and questions the need for a confession. She added that "truthtelling in my art is also a way to separate my 'self' from what I have been taught to believe about my 'self,' the degrading stereotypes about black women."

Derricotte is characterized by a reviewer in Publishers Weekly as a writer who "blends personal history, invention and reportage" in works that begin with a focus on the experiences of black women and ultimately discuss various themes concerning identity. In her first book, The Empress of the Death House, the narrating persona seems to be at war with a world that treats her gender frivolously, if not contemptuously. Derricotte writes about female victims/survivors, develops themes of both male and female sterility or unorthodox sexual practices, and attacks white males in the portraits she paints of her grandmother and mother. Joe Weixlmann's statement in The American Book Review, about The Empress of the Death House—that it presents a world which constantly treats African American female victims with either "indifference or contempt"—may be an assessment that applies to Derricotte's subsequent works as well.

Derricotte commented on The Empress of the Death House, outlining several purposes for writing the book: The Empress was to confess her "sexual experience . . . to confront my ambivalence as a mother, and, therefore, to examine the nature of love." Derricotte's investigations ultimately led her to the exploration of childbearing in her second book, Natural Birth. Taking an otherwise socially unsanctioned topic as her inspiration, Derricotte "offers a pioneering treatment of the . . . experience," according to Joyce Nower in Library Journal. Sally H. Lodge writes in Publishers Weekly that Natural Birth weaves memories of Derricotte's childhood into a frank treatment of the birth process as a painful, humiliating experience. According to critics, Derricotte distinguishes herself from male poets by conveying emotions exclusive to females early in the volume and then broadening her focus. The frame ultimately depicts, as Nower asserts, the commonality of male and female experiences of "fear, pain, struggle and ecstasy." Writing in Contemporary Women Poets, Jon Woodson announced: " Natural Birth is a tour de force, at once a book-length experimental poem, an exploration of the extremes of human experience, and an examination of the social construction of identity."

Derricotte's third collection, Captivity, focuses on the vestiges of slavery in the lives of contemporary African-Americans, including the prevalent violence in the family, and the continued abuses of racism within the society. Robyn Selman in The Village Voice notes that in this volume the poet's lines "alternate between long Whitmanian exhalations and short Dickinsonian gaps." Although Selman acknowledges that the poems sometimes culminate in hyperbole, the reviewer calls the work an example of "personal exploration yielding truths that apply to all of us." Her style in this text moves, as a reviewer states in Publishers Weekly, from the more relaxed autobiography of the first sections where she presents images of impoverished neighborhoods to a more sophisticated diction in her portraits of students "in ghetto schools."

Derricotte's fourth book of poetry, Tender, takes its title from a short, stark poem within the volume that calls into question the meaning of the word "tender," associating it both with meat and with a certain quality of family life. In a preface to the volume, the author notes that the seven sections of Tender emanate like the spokes of a wheel from the hub of this poem. As in her earlier poetry collections, Derricotte treats difficult and painful topics such as violence, sexuality, and racism. "Her work reaches out into the black and white and comes up with meaning that is often complex and rich—in short, grey," remarks a reviewer for Publishers Weekly. Ellen Kaufman, reviewing the collection for Library Journal, highlights Derricotte's dedication to the use of "plain language that does not settle for simplicity or cliche," and "despite its raw and upsetting subject matter" is extremely readable. Monica Dyer Rowe, writing in American Visions, similarly focuses on the intimacy of Derricotte's poetic voice: "Reading Tender is like coming across another's journal and, despite feeling somewhat guilty . . . , being too mesmerized to put the book down."

In fact, Derricotte's prose publication, The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey, is just that, selections from the poet's journals kept over the course of twenty years. At the focal point of these journals is the author's identity as a light-skinned black woman who is often mistaken for white, a problem Derricotte treats throughout her poetic oeuvre as a jumping off point for an inquiry into identity. Here, the author gathers moments from both her personal and her professional lives "that have caused her to examine her blackness and its impact on her understanding of herself and the world," comments Lillian Lewis in Booklist. Derricotte's occasional choice to "pass" for white, as when she was attempting to buy a house in a predominantly white suburban neighborhood in New York, has engendered episodes of profound discomfort with herself, resulting in a type of spiritual malaise Thomas J. Davis likens in Library Journal to Soren Kierkegaard's sickness unto death. "Derricotte might have done more to analyze how much of her anguish is personal rather than racial, but her candor is brave," concludes a reviewer for Publishers Weekly.

Derricotte is an award-winning poet whose writings, though frequently autobiographical in source, treat the universal subjects of racism and identity in ways that are moving, painful, and illuminating, according to her critics. Her style is credited with the type of evocative simplicity reminiscent of Emily Dickinson, though it also has the joy in expansive colloquial expression attributed to Walt Whitman, both poets whose works Derricotte's has been likened to. The poet is also known for treating sexual topics with a candor that sometimes shocks, and also for sketching in the grey shadows that surround difficult and painful realities. "Her poems begin in ordinary experiences but she dissects the routine definitions supplied by society as a way towards making discoveries about what unsuspected resources the self actually contains," writes Woodson in Contemporary Women Poets.

CAREER

Manpower Program, Detroit, MI, teacher, 1964-66; Farand School, Detroit, teacher of the mentally and emotionally retarded, 1966-68; Jefferson School, Teaneck, NJ, remedial reading teacher, 1969-70; New Jersey State Council on the Arts, poet in residence for Poet-in-the-Schools program, 1974-88, master teacher, 1984-88; Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, associate professor of creative writing and minority literature, 1988-90; George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, Commonwealth Professor, 1990-91; University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, associate professor, 1991—. New York University, visiting professor, 1992; has served on the faculty of Squaw Valley Community of Writers, 1992, Suncoast Florida Writers' Conference, University of South Florida, 1993, and the Charleston Writers' Conference, College of Charleston, 1993. Guest poet and lecturer at numerous colleges and universities; featured poet in readings at more than one hundred theaters, museums, bookstores, and libraries. Educational consultant, Columbia University, 1979-82; founder of African American poet retreat, 1996—; implementer of workshop, "Freeing the Voice in a Racist Society," Goddard College, summer, 1997. Member of editorial staff, New York Quarterly, 1973-77.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

POETRY

The Empress of the Death House, Lotus Press (Detroit), 1978.
Natural Birth, Crossing Press (New York City), 1983.
Captivity, University of Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, PA), 1989.
Tender, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997.
The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress, (sound recording, interview and reading by the author), 1998.

OTHER

(With Madeline Bass) Creative Writing: A Manual for Teachers (nonfiction), New Jersey State Council on the Arts, 1985.
The Black Notebooks (prose autobiography), Norton (New York City), 1997.
Natural Birth, Firebrand Books, 2000.

Contributor to anthologies, including Ariadne's Thread: A Collection of Contemporary Women's Journals, edited by Lyn Lifshin, Harper, 1982; Extended Outlooks: The Iowa Review Collection of Contemporary Women Writers, edited by Jane Cooper and others, Macmillan, 1982; Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, edited by Barbara Smith, Persephone, 1982. Also contributor to An Introduction to Poetry, edited by Louise Simpson, 1986; Waltzing on the Water, Dell, and Early Ripening, edited by Marge Piercy. Contributor of poems to numerous periodicals, including Pequod, Iowa Review, Ironwood, Northwest Review; Poetry Northwest, American Poetry Review, Bread Loaf Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, and Feminist Studies.