The Power of Poetry

I've been thinking about race and politics a lot. And the ancestors. And what it means to not just survive. Surviving beyond Black power and marches and movements and how that translates into everyday life, living with purpose and dignity. It wasn't my choice for mary wants to be a superwoman to come out at this time when this country is having so many issues with history and gender and race. mary wants to be a superwoman (Third Man Books, 2017), the second book in the box set trilogy, retraces the history of the women in my mother's family, starting with the Trail of Tears. It is a personal history of race and gender in America. I knew that I would have to tour the book, so I embraced the opportunity to take my ancestor's stories across the country on a ten-city tour.

I made a very pointed decision to only visit places I've never been to before (with the exception of New York and Los Angeles). For over two months, Leo, my pup and partner in crime, and I traveled by plane, bus, and car to Los Angeles, CA; Lawrence, KS; Kansas City, MO; Norman, OK; New York, NY; Boston, MA; Denver, CO; Portland, OR; Seattle, WA; and Nashville, TN. We even made a pit stop in Kennebunkport, Maine to attend a dear friend's wedding. We took pictures on the beach and on the prairie. It was amazing. And exhausting. And hard. There was a point towards the end where I was getting physically ill during performances from re-living past traumas, over and over again, traumas that weren't even mine.

It sounds like such a cliché: the power of poetry. And really, as a poet who's been in the "po-biz" for a bit, the feelings of "power" tend to diminish and lose that shiny, eager, we-can-change-something glow. It begins to feel like that old adage if a poet falls in the middle of the woods; you start to question not why you're putting work out into the world, but if you're actually being heard. If you're really just part of the poet-as-rock-star phenomenon or if your work is actually doing something besides taking up space. Two stops on the mary trail made me realize just how much the power of poetry holds you accountable to yourself.

Oklahoma

A little history: In 1838 and 1839, as part of Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act, the Cherokee nation was forced to give up its land east of the Mississippi River and migrate to the "Indian colonization zone," an area acquired as part of the Louisiana Purchase that is present-day Oklahoma. My family history is complicated, like any family history in America. mary is all about processing that history, the day-to-day dealings with a history that has been passed down (to an extent), stories and memories that I had nothing to do with, and how to live and move on from that history and its implications. The last thing I was expecting was an invitation to read from mary in Norman, Oklahoma, the last place on earth I thought I had a following.

The gig was to do a public reading at Oklahoma University and to also visit with students at both of Norman's high schools. I read and took questions at the schools and enjoyed spending time listening to the students' hopes and dreams and the personal connections they found in my work. A boy in full cowboy regalia came up and thanked me. But it was the girls that were wide-eyed, who cried during and after the classroom readings, who came up to me, one by one, to share their own stories. Some of the girls proudly announced that they, too, were Seminole and proud of me. One girl in the front row burst into hard tears while I was reading; she said it was her story, too. They were honest and sweet and just wanted to be heard. They wanted real talk and real conversations. There was a very clear divide between the haves and have-nots at the high schools, but I found one very troubling similarity between them: no one was telling the girls that they were smart and strong and that they could do anything. That the world, not just Oklahoma, was theirs.  They startled me by saying things like, "seeing a strong woman like you makes me feel like I can be a strong woman, too." I had never in my life been told anything like that, let alone by teenagers in the middle of Trail of Tears country. I experienced many things in in Oklahoma that I had never experienced before as a performer and as a person. I feel like I got more out of connecting with these students than they did out of my ancestral literature and history lesson. Like, what do you do when you're told you're strong and all you feel is a profound sense of weakness? I'm still in touch with a few of the girls; I'll probably keep an eye on them forever.

There are aha moments in life that also serve to remind you of exactly where you are. The entire Oklahoma experience was to culminate in a public reading at the university. Prior to the reading, a group of us were to meet at a bar just off campus for a drink or two before the main event. I walked into the venue with Leo and in no uncertain terms was refused service and asked to leave not just the bar but the property itself. I'm not kidding. Being that there are no sidewalks in Norman, Leo and I literally sat on the curb, cars dangerously whizzing by us, waiting for our host to show up and take us away. While we were waiting, a literal blaze was growing across the street. There were drums, which grew louder as the ceremonial fire grew taller, and a crowd started to assemble around a teepee in the courtyard. And there was chanting and black smoke and it all convened in a glorious cacophony of everything. We were witnessing a pow wow. We were sitting with our ancestors. We were dreaming. We were exactly where we were supposed to be.

Colorado

City by city, Leo and I finished the tour. When I told my mother about what happened in Oklahoma, she told me that I closed the circle. That our family's Trail of Tears was finally over. That I was the missing connection. After living with mary wants to be a superwoman for so long, that was it. There was no real finality. It was just… over. I was extremely restless when we returned to San Francisco, a city to me that, after almost 20 years of living there, has lost its soul. After a couple of weeks, Leo and I went home to convalesce in the hinterlands of Ohio. For almost four months I buried myself in the banalities, routines, and cold weather of Midwestern life. I didn't tell anyone my whereabouts; I stopped answering emails and texts and eventually just turned off my phone. I was numb. To writing. To poetry. To expectations. To anything that had to do with sharing pieces of myself, pieces I just didn't feel I had left to give. It wasn't self-pity but more like "how do I live up to all of this?" I didn't feel like the strong, wise, superwoman I was being told I was. I felt weak and rootless and un-empowered, a hostage to an inexplicable pressure that I had (always) placed upon myself.

In his forward to mary wants to be a superwoman, poet and scholar Tyrone Williams writes, "people like me…wore the capes, were burdened with the capes (whether we wanted them or not), of super—if not great—expectations." I asked him what he meant. "What I meant by 'burdens' is that in middle school a bunch of my classmates and I were shuttled into college-prep classes, based on the various tests we occasionally took. It was only in high school that it dawned on me I wanted to 'succeed' for my father who worked like a dog. This was all self-imposed. My own sense of responsibility to my parents." I hadn’t realized just how much pressure I was carrying, the pressure of "making it" for my family, dead and alive, who very much wanted me to succeed. I needed to "succeed" (whatever that meant) for them, and that allowed me to not accept failure or stillness as an option. So when my editor sent me an unexpected message saying that someone at the University of Colorado was going to teach mary, I surprised myself by just replying, "that's nice." I was on sabbatical. I was trying to practice self-care. I no longer knew who I was and needed to take a break. I also thought that the mystery class was being taught by one of two friends at the institution and that the situation would take care of itself. Little did I know that both mary and I were about to put on our capes and catch a second wind.

I never check Facebook messenger. It is by far the worst way to reach me. A week or two after I heard that "someone" was teaching mary, I briefly went on Facebook to do a little housekeeping and found a message from Adam Bradley, who was teaching a course at UC Boulder called Contemporary Black Poets: "Just dropping you a note of appreciation…we'll be studying your work soon. Superwoman is an astounding book." In truth, I was equally flustered and flattered and entirely unsure about what to do; I had been going through life thinking that if I slowed down, if I took some time off between projects, if I wasn't constantly on the road or generating buzz or new work, then I would be forgotten. That "they" (my ancestors) would be forgotten in death, just as they had been overlooked in life. Sometimes people don't know how the little things they say or do bring you back to life. Bradley and I schemed about getting me out of the hinterlands and on a plane to the Rocky Mountains. His short note was enough to shake me out of hibernation.

I had not looked at the book for almost six months. I went to class, reconfigured the room, took my shoes off, and cold-read from mary wants to be a superwoman. It felt fresh to me, which freed me to move and interpret and perform the work in a more grounded and direct way in response to our country's latest round of political and societal upheaval. I looked every single one of the 12 graduate students in the eye and confronted every piece of critical and historical bullshit head on, something I don't believe I was able to do until then. I was truly moved by their willingness to engage and be present and go much deeper than the words. To look at history and say, "that can't happen again."

The goal of going on the road was never to "educate" anyone. It was more about educating myself and proving that I could do something like this on my own. I wasn't naive. I knew that I was opening myself up to a lot, but my thought and intention all along was to present an honest and intimate truth. It almost destroyed me. I could discuss the broad issues of injustice, humanity, of abuse and accountability, but we're all too aware of those issues by now. The truth is I met some amazing people and got to see this country, for better or worse. I understand more. About myself. About all of us. And what poetry can do. My family did not survive everything they survived for me not to. Neither did yours. History is cyclical and we have to do better, ya'll. We can't afford not to.

Back at my hotel that evening, I received another note from Bradley: "I can’t thank you enough for the remarkable experience you gave me and my students. You modeled for them the power that art can have when matched with fearlessness." The weight of my family still weighs heavily upon my shoulders, but now it's become less about telling their stories and more about using them to propel us forward. I am so grateful that there are educators out there who see something in my work worth teaching. I love that they are giving their students an opportunity to experience culture and literature and language in this way. That they are guiding them to explore in this way. This is how you get people to understand and respect other voices. The true power of poetry.