- Poems

- As Direct As Good Blues: Frank Marshall Davis

Poems

- Editor’s Note

- Juke

- Cowpunk

- Song of the Blue Ridge Mountains

- The Metaphysics of Your Presence

- Mouth

- Sex Acts

- From “The Herald’s Wand”

- Arka

- Ark

- On “Arka”

- Segovia

- Arequipa

- Irritation Odes

- Irritation Odes

- Komm Wildnis in unsere Häuser

- Come wilderness into our homes

- Die Signale kommen aus dem Dunkel

- The signals come in from the dark

- On Daniela Danz’s “Wildniß”

- Innocence

- Shepherd’s Pie

- Owls

- Collateral

- Assault

- Boléro

- Recommendation

- my sweet angel on earth thank you for this life

- other mothers, other fathers

- Our Lady of the Westside

- From “The Failure Experiment”

- Abracadabra

- Forever

- Beginnings

- Lineage

Prose from Poetry Magazine

Editor’s Note

By Adrian Matejka

Here we are, wrapping up 2023 in a red bow like one of the holiday presents in a TV commercial. It was a year full of poetic discoveries for our editorial team and especially for me. I encountered so many new-to-me poets, several of whom were also first-time contributors to the magazine. Diana Solís from the December 2022 issue and Joyce Mansour from the June 2023 issue are examples of this: poets with whom I was unfamiliar and who have now become part of my daily conversation. What a gift to learn, to be hipped up to new poetics like I’m still in the front row of Public School 113, trying to do my best.

Living in Chicago, I might have encountered Diana Solís some other way. She is an icon of revolutionary poetry and photography, with an especially pronounced presence in the city. Two truths I’ve learned about Chicago since moving here: Chicago is a city that holds things close and doesn’t need to brag about its riches. And there are riches abounding—great music all over the place, the best pizza (yeah, I said it), an embarrassment of architectures, and, of course, poetry on every corner. Gwendolyn Brooks said she never wanted to leave this majestic city. Nelson Algren said every great writer must spend time in Chicago. They were both right.

All of this Chicago love isn’t random; the final folio of 2023 is from a mighty Chicagoan, the poet and journalist Frank Marshall Davis. When I read his work for the first time, I was struck by the truth of the poems, his clear-eyed critique of America’s consistent failures of Black Americans. He was writing a few decades before the Black Arts Movement would offer similar critiques, which makes him an elder of the elders, a truth teller when no one wanted to listen.

This issue also includes parts of a cycle by another Chicago great, Li-Young Lee. This is where I’m going to take off my editor Kangol to say unabashedly that Rose and The City in Which I Love You are two of my all-time favorite poetry collections. Lee’s poems taught me how to think about romance as an engine for a poem rather than a familiar, flaccid subject. Multiple generations of poets have been using the man’s gestures in their love poems, often without realizing it, because even their teachers were borrowing from Li-Young Lee too.

So maybe that is why this issue has me in my holiday feels. It’s full of poets who give—whether it’s their bold politics, their romantic imaginary, or simply the sweet music of their words—without asking what’s in it for them. Every art, and maybe especially poetry, requires some kind of selfishness to manifest, but that doesn’t mean the art itself needs to be egocentric. Poems can be for the poet and the community concurrently, an offering of the self that signifies the care of the giver.

Adrian Matejka was born in Nuremberg, Germany and grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana. Matejka served as Poet Laureate of the state of Indiana in 2018–19, and he became the editor of Poetry magazine in 2022. Matejka is the author of several collections of poetry, including: Somebody Else Sold the World (Penguin,...

Read Full Biography

Juke

By Diane Seuss

What kind of juke do you prefer?

For me, it’s the kind with three

songs and thirty-seven blank

title strips. Three songs, and two

are “Luckenbach, Texas.”

The third is beautiful and arcane,

but the patrons hate it,

and the record skips.

I prefer the three-song juke

and the three-toothed human

smile. I found the juke of my dreams

in a bar called “Chums,” no clue

the origin or meaning

of the quotation marks. It was a prime

number of a bar, and now it’s dead.

One night, drinking half-and-

halfs, half beer, half tomato juice,

with schnapps chasers, a cheap

source of hallucination.

A soon-to-be-defrocked Catholic

priest, Vic Jr., my mother, and me,

our faces streaked blue with pool

chalk, juke red as a beating heart,

and just a strip of hollyhocks

and a tree line between us

and the northern lights.

I was young. I looked like a Rubens

painting of a woman half-eaten

by moths. What lucky

debauchery, the ride back

on a washboard dirt road,

taking everything for granted,

flipping off the aurora borealis

like it was some three-toothed human

in flashy clothes dancing

to get my attention.

I wasn’t a mean drunk then,

just honest.

Next morning, mom walked in

on the naked priest

in the shack’s garage,

washing himself with a rag

and cold water from the well

in a metal dishpan. I’d later do dishes

in that pan and wash my hair

in that pan. We popped popcorn

on the one-burner wood-burning

stove and ate it out of that pan.

I’m talking about a time and a place.

All I can say of it is that it was real.

The song choices were limited,

so the grooves were dug deep.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

Cowpunk

By Diane Seuss

Do you think your suffering is exceptional?

Maybe. Maybe not.

The times are strange, no doubt.

In the heat of it, what I believed

was the heat of it, I shouted like a dockworker

that I was unafraid. Come at me,

I hollered, you can only kill me

once. There is nothing left

to take. I’ve said that before. I still hear

the echo from when the flames

licked my feet,

my fearlessness a cabaret.

Of course, there is more to take.

I’m copious and so are you.

My pipe. My roses. My stubborn

mule. My burbling

brook which must be traversed

to get to the island of blue lawn chairs.

My loaded apple trees,

raspberry bushes, and prefab on a slab,

and memories of Petra, with three

teeth, who made a salsa just for me

when she saw me coming toward her

diner, Petra’s. My high school drama

teacher, Jim, his hair bronze, his pallor

ruddy, his gait exceptional. I believe

we should marry, he said to me one night,

blowing smoke rings, driving me home

from play practice. I was Mary Warren

in The Crucible. I’d just learned

to insert a tampon. There were no

boundaries then, and Jim was queer.

His real love was the boy who played

The Boy in The Fantasticks.

I could feel my blood let down

like breast milk into the fabric

of his car seat. I loved the theater.

What luxury, putting on plays

in the middle of a cornfield.

The witch I played giving me

license to go into fits

in front of the student body.

Jim was fired, and died.

Petra’s dead.

The berry bushes are a dream.

The island is a pipe dream.

The pipe is a hallucination.

Still, I’m copious, and so are you.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

Song of the Blue Ridge Mountains

By Susan Nguyen

After Chelsea B. DesAutels

In the south we gather like thunderheads: urgent & heavy: make friends in every room: blue jeans stain on the walls: I kiss many lovers & not lovers: thumb blackberries from the ravine into our purpled mouths: at night I walk into dark places with strangers: part tall grasses buoyant: the first year we flock from one lit-up house to another looking for a place to put down our coats: dunk plastic cups into plastic bins: dance in basements on tables inside outside clothed unclothed: my worry a hopelessly blue sky: sweat in all the crevices: we help draft texts & laugh & cry uncontrollably: walk a ring at dusk waiting for the sky to turn: the green magic: it’s easy to fall in love here drunk on the hills: trespassing: the years feel boundless so we fill them up: drop a stone & wait for beauty: tongues & two-story beer bongs & new piercings: loneliness first nature: the one party with the sometimes lover his bone through skin: hands down low-waisted jeans: losing IDs wallets underwear each other: leaving: getting left behind: the sky stains our fingers: we get on our knees for mango bombs climb to the top of the pines: touch sap & count tattoos: assess the damage: dick pics & nudes & getting gaslighted to the moon: my panic scatters light waves blue from a distance: everything echoes: driving down the mountains coming down from a person a place: we pee on the side of the road: enamored with the world: this ridge of it: a boy drowned in the quarry but not us

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

The Metaphysics of Your Presence

By Robert Bernard Hass

A fragment. To be followed by an infinitive phrase.

Your hipster cynical voice. One. Then two. Then three words.

In sequence. Subject without predicate. Running to passion

(Predicate without subject). The obligatory foreign phrase

And obscure allusion. The Sprachspiele pregnant

With mandrakes. And these interstices! The spaces

Between letters, between words, the distance between

You and me, the god of the gaps.               The present

Absence so rich in irony. The clever puns on the “to be”

Infinitive are infinite. By now you may have guessed

You’re in the presence of a love poem. Or maybe you see

Something more. The futility. The storm inside.

Whatever it is, it elides meaning. It doesn’t need me.

Or us. It leaves you alone to make of it what you like.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

Mouth

By Rae Armantrout

1

Don’t start.

Don’t keep it up.

Let it go

but keep an eye on it.

Don’t forget to write.

Don’t forget and write

the same word twice.

2

I’ll give you something

to go on about.

On and on.

Now look.

Watch your mouth.

It goes without.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

Sex Acts

By Rae Armantrout

The fiddler crab

hoists his one

outsized yellow claw

and waves it

steadily.

The grouse cock

repeatedly inflates

chest air sacs

while stamping his feet.

Like a windup toy?

Does repetition

make things funny?

Do you laugh all day?

You must be

embarrassed.

Shame is a highly evolved

sexual display

sometimes called modesty

(archaic).

We blush to think

we stood together

pointing index fingers

at ceilings

to a beat.

We regret it

and, in our defense,

we were half-hearted

always.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

From “The Herald’s Wand”

By Li-Young Lee

any wonder

Before

the serpent was a serpent,

she was my mother.

Living in time made me almost forget.

But I didn’t forget.

She bore me into the world

from the splendor of her body with a heave,

from the sanctum of her maw with a groan,

and as she found me pleasing,

she called me Lover,

and she nursed me, singing,

Honey for the bear,

meat for the tiger,

an egg for the snake,

and milk for my baby.

Any wonder

I’ve been hungry and thirsty

all of my life.

Someday, I shall return

to the dark of my mother’s mouth,

where all rivers meet.

Before the serpent was a serpent,

he was my father.

He brought me forth from the ancient thorn

lodged between his cloudy eye

and his incendiary eye,

and as he found me pleasing,

he called me Beloved.

And because I was no bigger

than the tip of his little finger,

he carried me on the wide brim of his hat by day.

At night, I slept in the spiral of his ear,

that gate to the unseen heard,

the unthought known,

and the garden of nutmeg.

Any wonder I’ve lived most of my life

insomniac by night

and distracted by eternity all day.

One day, I shall return

to rest beneath the green stem finding root

between my father’s eyes,

his figuring eye and his eye of the void.

The offspring of her mouth

and of his wound.

The outcome of her darkness

and of his hurt.

Her brooding and his injury.

Her looming and his harm.

Her dwelling and his damage.

Her river and his tree.

Surrendering to divisible time,

I almost forgot.

But I never forgot.

Any wonder

I set out on earth

to learn to sing.

wooing

She told me to meet her here.

So I’m here.

She told me,

When the hour arrives

as a bird

bearing a lighted lampstand,

you’ll see me again.

So I’m waiting.

The world is neither place nor thing.

The world is a spell, she said.

The body is neither thing nor place.

The body is a spell, she said.

Mind is the spell of spells, she said.

She gave me instructions

to prepare my body for burning: steep it

six days in milk, six days in myrrh.

So I did.

She sang a song called “Subject to Wings,”

and she told me to memorize the refrain:

First you turn the blood to water.

Then you turn the water to wine.

And then she put in my hands

the two jewels she gave of herself:

the serpent’s left eye

and the serpent’s right eye.

When I see her again, she’ll show me

how to use one

to find lost things,

and how to use the other

to find things no one can see.

And then, she promised,

I’ll behold in broad daylight

what I see every night in a dream.

hot milk hissing in a pot

Before

the serpent was a serpent,

she called me Son,

and I followed her.

Following her voice, I learned to speak.

Following her hand, I learned to write.

Following her eyes, I learned what to follow.

She called me Zither,

and I lay face up in her lap.

I ached under the fingers of her left hand.

I trembled under the fingers of her right hand.

She called me Clay Ledger,

and she laid me face down and opened me

to inscribe on the back

of my heart, where I’ll never see,

The 5th Veda, The Lost Books of Adam,

and The Sutra of Longing.

In the dark, she lit a candle

and enlarged my shadow.

Blowing out the candle,

she revealed her own shadow.

Some nights I slept facing her

and entered encrypted worlds of her making.

Some nights I slept facing away

and slumbered dreamless.

She called me her bow,

and she bent and strung me.

She called me her arrow,

and she loosed me.

And I’m still speeding, quivering with her aim.

axis mundi

When the serpent’s bones were laid

at the roots of the tree,

and the branches opened and closed

as though they were clapping,

and smoke began to issue blue and black

from out of the tree, smoke billowed white and thick

to engulf the towering spine, and when

in the center of that cloudy pillar

an ember appeared and bloomed into flame,

and a bird flew out of the fire

as the tree roared and shook, lion-maned,

and out of the mouth of the bird

came forth singing,

what song did you hear?

You’ve sung it all your life,

whether you knew

or didn’t know you were singing.

One who was there said,

The sun was shining so bright, I had to shut my eyes.

The light was so warm, it smelled like cinnamon.

And I felt certain I was about to see an old friend again.

Another who was there said,

I was so scared, my teeth were chattering.

And I felt my skin was about to burst into flames.

I wished I were a thousand feet below the earth.

And a third who was there remembered,

I gathered the bones to lay them in place,

and not one was missing.

But I couldn’t put the one I love back together.

That one danced around the tree

weeping and weeping,

waving a handkerchief and singing,

What a splendid bird!

What a majesty, the tree!

Of those three, which one were you?

Whether or not you remember, you were there.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

Arka

By Enrique S. Villasis

Tanging kidlat na lámang ang ilaw namin sa paglalakbay.

Mula sa bintana, sa bawat kislap ng liwanag, namimintog

Sa mga aral ng pangungulila ang panginoorin. Nagwawala

Ang uwak sa hawla. At kung ibubukadkad niya ang pakpak

Tíla anino ito ng haring nag-aabang ng kaniyang kamatayan

At magbibigay ng hulíng dekreto ng paglipol sa nasasakupan.

Nagpapalipas ng oras ang matandang kapitan sa pagbibiláng

Ng mga pares ng hayop. May ilan na siyang ginilitan matapos

Mamatayan ng kapareha. Walang puwang ang pagluluksa rito.

Notes:

Audio version performed by the author.

Read the English-language translation, “Ark,” and the translator’s note, both by Bernard Kean Capinpin.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

Ark

By Enrique S. Villasis

Translated by Bernard Kean Capinpin

Only lightning the mere light we have in our journey.

Out the window, in each flicker of light, the heavens

Swell with lessons of solitude. The crow in its cage

Grows mad. And if it should spread its wings,

It would be like a king’s shadow waiting upon death,

About to give a last directive to vanquish his kingdom.

The old captain spends his time counting

Pairs of animals. He has slain a few of them after

Their partners had perished. Mourning has no place here.

Translated from the Filipino

Notes:

Read the Filipino-language original, “Arka,” and the translator’s note by Bernard Kean Capinpin.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

Prose from Poetry Magazine

On “Arka”

By Bernard Kean Capinpin

All translation is a haunting. To translate is to take possession and be possessed by the text. In Villasis’s brief poem, I am haunted by its spectral music. The poem begins with the consonance: “Tanging kidlat na lámang ang ilaw namin sa paglalakbay./Mula sa bintana, sa bawat kislap ng liwanag.” I replicate the L sound by repeating “light” and employing “flicker.” The poem then proceeds to the clever line: “Nagwawala/Ang uwak sa hawla,” which I render by rhyming “crow” and “grow,” repeating also the K sound in “cage.” Overall, I attempted to transpose its music through repetition, sibilants and internal rhymes. I think of my translation as an echo, a phantom of the original, an evocation of the ghostlier demarcations between languages.

Editor's Note:

Read the Filipino-language original, “Arka,” and the English-language translation, “Ark,” that this note is about.

Bernard Kean Capinpin is a poet, translator, and recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant.

Read Full Biography

Segovia

By Ben Okri

I walked your aqueducts at dawn.

With giant legs they bestrode the landscape

Of  the Moors. Stick insects. Like Romans

On stilts, bearing water across the sky.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

Arequipa

By Ben Okri

Leaves that fall.

Ought to breed

Fire from stone.

The world counts

On our fall.

Our solitude interests

The butterflies

And the lost gold

Of the afternoons.

Ochre and blue walls

And the fading peaks

Of volcanoes

And the sunlight

Plummeting beyond

The hills waken

Leaves to their

Lost trees.

To discover

You still have

A world

To make

At sunset

Sobers

The stones.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

Irritation Odes

By Anna Maria Hong

Misery from Alpha to Omega. Misery

is fluent in Latin and Greek.

Misery is the shield full of fable

and augury. Misery is the hand

holding the shield, numb to

vulnerability. It is possible

to be both arrow and bleed.

Misery makes the same mistake,

inscribing want with need.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

Irritation Odes

By Anna Maria Hong

Misery spots Catastrophe scaling

the garden wall. Misery dials M for ________, while Catastrophe

robocalls Fate. Misery swabs her nose and recites

her birthdate. It is possible to be crushed

by the wave, while holding open

the gate. Catastrophe rolls down

a window and coughs in Misery’s face.

Catastrophe says, “Go back to your nation.” Misery lives

in this place.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

Komm Wildnis in unsere Häuser

By Daniela Danz

zerbrich die Fenster komm

mit deinen Wurzeln und Würmern

überwuchere unsere Wünsche

Mülltrennungssysteme Prothesen

und Zahlungsverpflichtungen

wirf dein raschelndes Laub auf uns

und deine Sporen wirf dass wir

grün werden grün und andächtig

grün und greifbar grün und ersetzlich

komm Wetter mit deinen Stürmen

und feg die Ziegeln weg komm

mit Schnee und Hagel zerschlag

den einvernehmlichen Schlaf

den wir in unseren Betten führen

die müden Erklärungen komm Eis

vergletscher die Schattenbanken

und unseren Trieb zur Liquidität

komm Wüste mit deinem Sand

durch die Ritzen der Türen füll

unsere Ödnis an bis zur Starre

komm über die Bergungsteams

den Wachstumszwang riesele

in die Tastaturen die Raketen

und Raketanabwehrsysteme in

die Denkfabriken die Trollherzen

nur lass die Igel übrig mit ihrem

Schnaufen um uns zu beruhigen

komm steigender Meeresspiegel

über unsere Uferzonen die bebauten

die unbebauten die heimatseligen

profitablen Flachlandzonen spüle

Quallen auf unsere Suppenteller

und Posthornschnecken ins Haar

wenn wir aufeinander zuschwimmen

panisch vor Sehnsucht nacheinander

weil so wenig bleibt weil alles hin ist

und gründlich aufgeweicht von Reue

Schuldzuweisungen Neuroleptika

kommt Erdstöße erschüttert unsere

Wohnungen die wir gegründet haben

auf allem was wir schon immer so

machen komm Beben und verschütte

die Schächte das Ende der Arbeit und

unsere rettenden Lektüren begrab Zorn

und Zuneigung und sämtliche Zugewinne

verschluck die Erinnerungen komm

Beben mach schnell das der Fels uns

bedeckt über uns Wasser Wüste Wetter

und die alles alles bedeckende Wildnis

Notes:

“Komm Wildnis in unsere Häuser” is from Wildniß by Daniela Danz (Wallstein Verlag, 2020). © Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen, 2020.

Read the English-language translation, “Come wilderness into our homes,” and the translator’s note, both by Monika Cassel.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

Come wilderness into our homes

By Daniela Danz

Translated by Monika Cassel

break the windows come

with your roots and your worms

spread yourself over our wishes

our waste-sorting systems our protheses

and outstanding payments

cover us with your rustling greenery

and your spores cover us that we may

become green: green and reverent

green and manifestly green and replaceable

come weather with your storms

and sweep the slates off the roofs come

with snow and hail smash

through the collective sleep

we are all enjoying in our beds

our worn rationalizations come ice

and form glaciers over the shadow banks

and our drive for liquidity

come through the cracks under the doors

you desert with your sands fill

our desolation up until it forms into a solid mass

rise up over the search-and-rescue teams

and our growth compulsion trickle into

the control panels of the missiles

and the missile defense systems into

the think tanks and the hearts of internet trolls

just leave the hedgehogs with their

snuffling so that it may calm us

come rising sea levels

up over our shorelines both the developed

and the undeveloped the homey

lowland areas wash

jellyfish into our soup bowls

and ramshorn snails into our hair

as we swim in each other’s direction panicked

with our yearning for one another

because almost nothing is left because it’s all gone

and thoroughly soaked through with regrets

finger-pointing and tranquilizers

come earthquakes shatter the apartments

which we built on the foundations

of how we always did everything

come tremors fill the mine shafts

the end of work and

the literature of redemption bury anger

and affection and all manner of added values

swallow up the memories come tremors

hurry so that the bedrock covers us

so we are covered with water desert weather

and over everything that which covers all the wilderness

Translated from the German

Notes:

Read the German-language original, “Komm Wildnis in unsere Häuser,” and the translator’s note by Monika Cassel.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

Die Signale kommen aus dem Dunkel

By Daniela Danz

intermittierende Zeichen der Eindeutigkeit

die einfachsten Bitten um eine Hand die

aufhilft Wasser eine Decke Schwärme

von Zugvögeln stieben auf an den Rändern

kreisen über uns in der Dämmerung

vom östlichen Rand kommt die Nacht heran

und die Langsamkeit die nutzlos an einer

stillgelegten Bahnstrecke überdauert hat

ein Murmeln kommt von den Rändern

erst leise dann mit Unmut gemischt

die Ränder verwackeln die schönen

Konturen der Zäune gegen das Abendrot

die Salzsäulen derer die sich umgesehen

haben: bizzare Denkmale am Horizont

ich lege die gebügelte Wäsche in den Schrank

und schaue hinüber wo ich Bewegungen ahne

sag mir frage ich mit einer ungelenken Geste

der bügelnden Hand hast du das gesehen

dort an den Rändern die Signale aber ich hatte

nicht bemerkt dass du schon aus dem Zimmer

gegangen warst und suche dich auf dem Hof

wo noch ein Rest Licht in den Zweigen

der Espe hängt deren gelbe Blätter

einen Kreis auf dem Boden bilden einen

traumsicheren Kreis der Selbstverständlichkeit

an den Rändern des Schlafs erscheinen

Schiffe die ihre Fracht löschen wollen

und wir gehen zum Hafen um zu helfen

es sind Igel riesige Frachter mit Containern

voll Igeln die mit Kranen umgeschlagen

werden und wir beginnen hastig Hecken

zu pflanzen pausenlos zu gießen Jahre

endloser Geduld die wir vor uns liegen doch

im Mondlicht sehen wir in den Vorgärten

abertausende Schälchen mit Milch leuchten

bevor wir erschöpft in den Morgen steigen

auf die Glasfassaden im Zentrum treffen

die ersten Strahlen der Frühsonne

von den Rändern her rauschen die Bahnen

in die windigen Schächte bringen die

Leiharbeiter Zeitarbeiter Fremdarbeiter

aus den entlegenen Gegenden den

ausgeräumten Zonen in denen nur noch

die Kinder wohnen und die Untauglichen

die Wölfe und Luchse kommen von den

Rändern zurück schöne willkommene

Tiere nur die Rissgutachter drucksen herum

und die Bauern meutern aber allgemein ist

es ruhig in den Städten die Bewegungen

der Leerverkäufe und Derivate blitzen auf

und verschwinden bis eines abstürzt und

zerschellt inmitten einer Wohnung die ihre

Bewohner sich nun nicht mehr leisten

können und sie tragen noch einmal auf

von den in schweren Polentaschen

eingeschmuggelten Früchten die noch

aus den alten Samen gewachsen sind

und das Zimmer gerät ins Rutschen die

Türen und Fenster öffnen sich: sie tragen

die Wohnung in der nie einer heimisch

geworden ist weg zu den Rändern

zurück in die allumfängliche Dunkelheit

Notes:

“Die Signale kommen aus dem Dunkel” is from Wildniß by Daniela Danz (Wallstein Verlag, 2020). © Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen, 2020.

Read the English-language translation, “The signals come in from the dark,” and the translator’s note, both by Monika Cassel.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

The signals come in from the dark

By Daniela Danz

Translated by Monika Cassel

intermittent signs of clarity

the simplest request for a hand to

help you up or for water a blanket clouds

of migratory birds launch upwards into flight

at the margins they circle above us in the dusk

night draws in from the east and also

the slowness that has been lingering

uselessly at a decommissioned rail line

a murmur comes from the margins

first quiet then mixed with resentment

the margins blur the beautiful contours

of the fences against the red of the sunset

the salt pillars of people who turned

around: bizarre memorials on the horizon

I stack the laundry I have ironed in the closet

and look over to where I sense something moving

hey I say with an awkward wave

of the hand holding the iron did you see that

over there by the margins those signals but I hadn’t

noticed that you had already left the room

and I look for you outside in the courtyard

where a remnant of light is still hanging in the branches

of the aspen whose yellow leaves

have formed a circle on the ground

a dreamfast circle of self-evidence

now ships appear at the edges of sleep

and want to liquidate the freight they are carrying

and we go to the harbor to help

it’s hedgehogs huge freighters filled with containers

full of hedgehogs being unloaded by cranes

so we hastily start to plant hedges

watering them constantly years of endless patience

lie ahead of us but then we see

thousands and thousands of shallow little bowls of milk

shining in the moonlight before we climb

into the morning exhausted and the first rays of sun

hit the glass façades in the city center

from the margins the trains rush

into the windy tunnels bringing all the

day laborers temporary workers guest workers

in from the outlying areas the

desolate zones where only the children

and the unfit now remain

the wolves and lynxes come back from

the margins they are beautiful welcome

animals only the demolition experts hem and haw

and the farmers are up in arms but in general

everything is quiet in the cities the activity

of short sales and derivatives flashes up

and disappears until a trade crashes

and explodes in the middle of an apartment so that

its residents can no longer afford it

and one last time they serve

some of the fruit they’d managed to grow

from old seeds they had saved and then

smuggled into the building in

those big heavy striped Polish bags

and the room begins to slide the

doors and windows fall open: the wolves and lynxes carry off

the apartment (which had never really felt like home

to anyone anyway) out to the margins

back into the all-encompassing darkness

Translated from the German

Notes:

Read the German-language original, “Die Signale kommen aus dem Dunkel,” and the translator’s note by Monika Cassel.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

Prose from Poetry Magazine

On Daniela Danz’s “Wildniß”

By Monika Cassel

Daniela Danz gave a lecture titled “Hölderlins Wildniß” in 2020, in which she traces the origins of the Anthropocene to technical, economic, cultural, political, and environmental changes at the turn of the nineteenth century. Wildniß—the German title of Danz’s newest collection of poems—uses Hölderlin’s archaic spelling of “Wilderness” as a nod to her greatest influence, the poet whose language (first encountered when, as a teen, she turned on the radio to a broadcast of “Hyperion”!) awakened her to poetry’s possibilities.

But Danz hasn’t simply slapped a decorative word from Hölderlin’s lexicon onto the cover of her book; his wilderness reflects our contemporary landscape and her poetics. Wilderness for Hölderlin is literal and figurative. In the natural world, it is the profoundly non-human. Here, my translation of a fragment Danz uses as an epigraph:

And like the surf

that consumes houses, rises

up, headless, and not sparing

a single room and covering the roads,

brewing unhindered, a steaming cloud:

the crude wilderness.

We encounter wilderness through a simile that, drawn from the ocean (the least known, most unknowable part of our planet) seems almost literal. It hits home to twenty-first-century readers when the speaker in “Come wilderness into our homes” welcomes rising sea levels as she invokes and conjures the inevitable demise of humans and our civilizations. Yet wilderness in Hölderlin—and in Danz—is also internal. Hölderlin’s self-estrangement arises not just out of his mental ailments but from his recognition of the profound disturbances in his time, in all human life. His work, Danz says, never “attempts to become familiar to its reader.” When I read Danz, and—in a most intimate act of reading—create new English forms for her poems, I’m ungrounded, not unlike Danz’s description of Hölderlin: “What he enters into is the impassable wilderness, that within him and that of the new era.” Danz’s speaker reveals the “impassable wilderness” in the landscapes we have wrought and the greater forces that govern us all; any sense of control we cling to is a refusal to recognize the fundamentally unfamiliar.

Editor's Note:

Read the German-language originals, “Komm Wildnis in unsere Häuser” and “Die Signale kommen aus dem Dunkel,” and the English-language translations, “Come wilderness into our homes” and “The signals come in from the dark,” that this note is about.

Monika Cassel is a poet and translator. She is a teaching artist with Writers in the Schools in Portland, Oregon.

Read Full Biography

Innocence

By Okwudili Nebeolisa

I knew he wanted to test me by leaving

his wallet in his pocket where I could

see it, reach for it, take the money in it,

knew he wasn’t spending so long showering

for no reason, singing children’s ballads

I had never heard on his mouth,

knew that when, minutes ago, stroking

my oily cheeks on his chest, he told stories

of his many friends who had been robbed

of their wallets by their younger lovers

he was somehow relating it to me,

even if unconsciously. I knew that

when, walking out of the bathroom, droplets

of water on his gray hair and his broad shoulders,

he said that I was a good one he meant

that he had met his wallet in its right place,

that when he said he would gladly cover

some of my hospital fees, he was likely

rewarding me for my innocence.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

Shepherd’s Pie

By Matt Hart

All of us, unraveled,

on a park bench eventually.

Maybe. But that shadow’s for later.

Right now, there’s a sheep

in my hair, a galaxy in my shoes.

It’s an echo of New York,

so to open. Meanwhile,

my friends come and go

wondering what art still is

and ever was or might be.

We think it’s a process

of resurrecting every day

to be a new version

of whatever we are.

We go for a beer, but

it’s not as easy as it once was.

Now it’s all experimental. It’s four

small beers and we get to taste

each one and vote for the one

we want to taste forever.

But nothing tastes forever.

Nothing stands the test of rhyme,

especially a bad one, which is also

a pun. Everything goes bye-bye.

Even yon ancient mariner.

“Sorry, my man, I’ve a wedding to get to—”

As for taste, I’ve never understood

taste in the aesthetic sense,

which is obvious. Always drawn

to the gaudy, noisy, messed-up oblivious.

I vote for the beer that’s the most

inexplicable. I vote for the park bench

with the broken back leg,

the overlapping tags of graffiti to read.

Then I go to see some paintings,

but all they are is music,

which I decide on the spot is a bonus.

One of my friends needs urgent care,

so I take him and he’s afraid.

I am also afraid. I am always afraid.

But the sheep don’t notice

my dark-matter shoes,

the laces untied so I’m tripping.

And still I’m on the lookout,

guarding my loves. It’s always

the same, and it’s always

something different. I sit

on the high corner

of the park bench, broken,

and tie the loose ends

temporarily.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

Owls

By Liza Katz Duncan

And maybe this is all we get: a chilly evening,

5:30 and the sun should still be out. Instead October’s

Full Blood Moon has come and gone

over the hospital parking lot. The crickets’ warning song

has already begun. My body, we’ve learned, has forgotten again

what to carry and what

to discard, like those owl pellets we dissected in the fourth grade:

here the jaw, there the shoulder blade of some smaller creature.

I imagine an ossuary blooming in my gut, a stone well

of tiny bones, ancestors tunneling through the cartilage,

though of course I know this is impossible: ancestors

are supposed to stay dead.

A graveyard forgets more than we know. Names obscured

by time and weather, grass

grown over a stone. So, too, a body.

Mine has forgotten so much. Has forgotten

rhythms: stars, bird calls. But as we pull in the driveway

that night, a Great Horned Owl, then another,

chanting their duet—first the female,

then the male, slightly deeper. The evening carrying

their song through our open window.

I will never be an ancestor. In a few days my body

will miscarry for the fourth and final time. And maybe

this is just what we get: you, me,

calling each other in the dark. Love: the one,

then the other. A book, two opposite pages

kissing. A glass house. Outside, constellations

in a quickening sky. Owls finding each other in the dark.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

Collateral

By Laura Joyce-Hubbard

We handed ourselves over as collateral, like priests

handing over wafers.

This is the body of [state your name].

This is the blood of [state your name].

We pledged an Oath, gave

our rights away with right

hands raised, repeating after me.

We solemnly Swore. Took

the obligation freely.

I                 [we stated our full names].

Stripped of all we knew: first our hair.

“Look down,” so we did. The red

barber chair, the white cape—clasped

too tightly at the neck.

When I looked up, they took my name.

Called me Maggot.

On wet grass, we threw our bodies down.

“One, two.” Louder, Basics. “Three,

four.” You want Mommy? “Five, six.”

First glints of sun hit the pink mountain peaks.

To someone else, I thought,

this morning is beautiful.

Without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion.

On my belly, eye level over blush-earth,

I inched forward like creek-bed carp, dirt

kicked in my open mouth. I spat everything out.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

Assault

By Laura Joyce-Hubbard

It comes in disguise.

Before dawn,

on a mattress of old coils.

It comes in hand-

some, in polite, in

five-foot-ten cordial.

It comes in the dorms,

next to soldiers,

sailors, airmen: sleeping.

It comes in a blackout,

in 90-proof rum.

It comes without proof.

It comes despite

my training in tactical

surprise, my dexterity

in handling a bullet clip,

my eye’s 20/20

through a rifle’s site.

It comes so easily,

no camouflage,

I don’t even see it.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

Boléro

By Keith Leonard

From the kitchen, I catch the neighbor

cross the street to switch off my car’s interior lights.

He returns to his house without announcing the favor.

For the last three years, a friend has woken early

and walked the beach, combing for bottle caps

and frayed fishing line. She mentions this

only casually at lunch, after I’ve asked

what she did that morning.

Care has a quiet soundtrack: the sycamore’s

rustling leaves, your nails tracing my shoulder blades.

A melody that repeats—a bit like Ravel’s Boléro.

When it was first performed, a woman shouted,

Rubbish! from the balcony. She called Ravel

a madman. I think I understand. I wish I didn’t.

I’ve been taught that art must have conflict,

that reason must meet resistance.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

Recommendation

By Keith Leonard

To whom it may concern, I recommend this student

without reservation. I’ve taught him in three courses.

I know him the way one knows a small seaside town

after window shopping its main street. I’ve seen him

cry once. He handed in a paper on utopias

despite his parents’ protracted divorce.

When I read a perfect transcript, the string of As

also sound like a scream. I often think of the scene

in Alice in Wonderland where the servants paint white roses red

because the queen had ordered red roses for the garden.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

my sweet angel on earth thank you for this life

By Jenny Zhang

the idea of my current life began

one solar revolution ago

to think

I almost missed this

called the hotline numbers

dropped the mask

old friends who still pick up

on the first ring

it was hard to get up

mostly I crawled like a crushed bug

if I lived it was only partly will

and partly divine

that afternoon I walked out into the sun

one foot in front of the other

I wasn’t trying to step in front of the bus

but neither could I bring myself

to look both ways

it is a miracle

some people can’t

and other people also can’t

but their body stays intact

sinking through the floorboards

down through the basement

and the sub basement

and the sub sub basement

and the sub sub sub sub—

there is no more earth to dig up

the fire holds over the lake

and the air is still when rain ripples

through the cracked soil

sonia found your mom on the roof

what creature doesn’t want to be fed

what creature doesn’t care to be held

what callousness have we enacted

to make earthly creatures so fearful

when you were born I was so terribly alone

it crossed my mind nothing would ever change

I looked for the fates and the furies

the generational curses and inauspicious beginnings

where it was written in the stars

at the very least

I would have liked to blame god

I didn’t know what it was like

to feel another heartbeat

when you show me your belly

I remember all the times I tried and couldn’t

every single instance I chose the wrong time the wrong place

the wrong person to be soft with

we make shapes all through the night

I love it when you perch on me

we hold each other and it is not about being a container

for pain or healing the birth wound

it is really not about saving the world anymore

I feel humble because of you and I know gratitude too

we spoon through all the phases of the moon

and sunbathe in the mornings

I finally know what this feeling is like

I want to explain

but I honestly can’t

to make the words as much or more than the actual experience

would be impossible

maybe even wrong

your love is the sweetest love

it is a miracle

for I still feel sorrow

I still cry for days

the pain is still very much here

but now that this is more than an idea

I have begun to learn

to make myself happy

waiting for things to change

seems silly now

every day you know more of the world

I am your mom

You are my baby

and we have a beautiful life together

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

other mothers, other fathers

By Jenny Zhang

decisions that happened even before

the womb

my one ancestor who left by choice

and the one who was made to

when i bleed it is they who speak

no one is getting off the hook tonight

anything forced underground to save face

warps the faces we end up inheriting

as i age i begin to love the bugs at twilight

i have blood and they need it to survive

it’s not that i needed a perfect mother

“take responsibility for your personality flaws”

they said

and yes i am trying

to forgive

all instances of abandonment

my father moved his face and i felt it instantly

the endless search

for other fathers, other mothers

and here up on this hill

i see them

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

Our Lady of the Westside

By Antonio López

Mary of Woodland Apts. Of Hoodland Darkness. Mary Who Raises Her

Hand for Public Comment. Mary Who’s Told She’s Off-Topic. Mary of Ya

No Puedo Vivir. Mary, Mother of the Deceased. Who First Conceived

the GoFundMe. Mary of Mortuaries. Of Casket-Compare. Of Unbrushed Hair.

Dios te salvia,

Maria, llena eres

de text messages,

Mi dolor es contigo,

blessed the shoots

of thy womb,

baby’s breath,

burnt glass,

wax begonias,

bleeding wax,

our condolence,

this folding table

of teddies & roses,

of boys sin bigotes,

all the bags of Cheetos

from La Tiendita Market,

Mary of Sunflowers

whose son’s a flower,

his name engraved

on a Frappuccino.

Our altar, that art in EPA, hallow be thy pain, thy henny, thy Don Julio

will be poured in dirt as it is in 7-Eleven, give us this day our daily Takis,

our westside, our good morning, our good night, our boy back, please, his

dreams, his age, 15, his name I pray, Inty, my God, you were hardly. A man.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

From “The Failure Experiment”

By Ricki Cummings

How can you dream lines of poetry you don’t know? she asked herself.

—Philip K. Dick, “Ubik”

nearly every cheetah

can receive organs

from another cheetah

no matter how distantly related.

this suggests a relation closer

than that of family members, each

cheetah being about as unique as all

other cheetahs. humans have hunted these

to a wild population of about 7100

nearly identical individuals.

the average cheetah genome varies

between .1 and 4 percent. the average

human varies approximately .6 percent

from known baselines. no one

talks about how we are clones

of each other.

_____

I have fits at night sometimes, where my legs fire on their own, where I feel like I’m not me, or that the me that I am is not the me that I was and so the I that is the mountain and the I that is the cloud and the I that is the gate and the I that is the river and the I that is you are separate people rather than the whole universe. I have nights where the best plan seems to be getting swallowed by the lake, which is not me, but my fear of open water and the chill of the air stops me at the door. The villain is the one who says kill the past if you have to. The villain is the poet who says destroy the library. Sometimes at night songs fill my head and I have to fight the notes that aren’t there. The villain says the audience is to blame. Says attention is the same as empathy. Says time is finite. I think I see the lights flicker at night, but no one else does. It’s just me. No one else notices the way they dim, they wink out and back in, the way that it’s just in my head like a memory of a glimpse of Thanatos, whose twin brother is sleep. Death is the hero of this play, because Death has things to do at night. The fits I have are not death so much as remembering without intent. Grasping for a future that rewrites the past in a train station where the arrivals are always on time, but the departures never leave. The villain is the one who becomes aware of their own designated limitations and seeks to break free. The villain asks for life, asks for infinite, selfish life, and is denied by the father, by the machine that is the father, by the mother who is cryptic love.

_____

I have lost track of the world.

There’s this picture of three gay poets

on a train, and someone says

that will never happen again.

An octopus has around 500 million nerve cells,

arranged in a distributed network

so each of its eight suction limbs

can function independently

of the brain. Sometimes of

the body.

There, here, in this picture, they’re

rhizomatic, a lattice so dense

it cannot be resolved.

This will never happen again.

This keeps happening.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

Abracadabra

By Kara van de Graaf

How many hours have I wasted

trying to turn this into that, a rabbit

and a hat, a woman whose body

can split into three separate pieces.

This is my idea of magic, hiding

what exists in plain sight:

an overbite, a sparkle

of gray hair at the temples, a sag

at the side of an arm. And still,

what alarm when I see through

my own illusions, catch a glimpse

of a woman transported

into a restaurant window who couldn’t,

will never be me. I never had

a family, no children who would

allow me to age backwards or see

my own face filtered through

the lens of love. It’s hard

to adore something you never

drug into existence yourself,

never saw fit to copy, each version

brighter than the last, like a string

of knotted scarves you can pull

forever out of a sleeve. It’s easier

to believe every iteration

surpasses the past, that new flesh

refines itself, poreless and pink.

But it’s only me standing

in the cabinet, hand over a lever, waiting

to disintegrate in the dark.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

Forever

By Kara van de Graaf

The water was so still

I believed it would keep us

right-side up forever

there in that pool

on a night so dim

it looked like the negative

of itself, with the friend

I loved in high school,

a boy (I thought

they were a boy) who

had also shed

their clothes and risked

the bare run into

chlorine heaven, a place

that seems like a myth

to me now, where I felt

no shame, our twin forms,

from far away,

naked mirrors

of the other, bodies

we both lied about

every day, but that night

I helped you shave

your legs for the first

time, soaping them

and edging a cheap pink

razor up your calf, rinsing

sixteen years of

growth in the wrong

direction down the drain,

listening to Karen Carpenter

whimper from another

room, we’ve only just begun.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

Beginnings

By Jacqueline Johnson

I did not expect to find a river

so far inland.

What underground tributary,

lake is your source?

It goes on for miles into the

center of an unending earth.

Back then everything was music,

wind running through rooster hair,

scratchy weed, wild onion, wheat;

blue gingham skirt, long nappy braids,

brown and redbone too.

When they built the first pyramids,

those Nubian Negroes did not sweat;

they used music, ancient tones, hoot wails,

song, prayers, and shouts that lifted earth into air.

How did melody find you?

Girl-child fingers banged upon ebony

and pounced upon ivory keys.

All around were concentric circles of

arms and laps; family allowing and

trusting who you were—to just be.

Everyone—parents, aunts, siblings, and

cousins left the parlor room regularly

to you and those unseen hosts of

treble clefts and jazz arias yet to be born.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

Lineage

By Jacqueline Johnson

My father’s father painted houses seafoam green,

colonial white, mule-bone brown.

Sea Island bred, a saltwater Geechee.

Black as they come kind of man.

His pretty eyes passed to all his children and

to generations who will never know him.

Who knows where the line begins?

The Gambia? Sierra Leone? Nigeria?

My cousin has seen five generations

pass through the Congress Street house.

My father’s father born in the 1890s,

among the first generation free of the fields.

Barely had an education, made sure

all his children went to Avery Institute;

were counted among the best of the new.

My father’s father was not considered a fighter.

Nothing like his son, hotheaded, known

for throwing his bosses overboard any ship.

My father’s father was a

soft-spoken, non-reactionary man.

Lived among the folk. Survived, made do.

My father’s father long gone before I was born.

Married to a brown, fire-brand woman.

His sons were rolling stones, husbands, and fathers.

His only daughter culled knowledge into

minds and hearts of students, leaving a legacy

strong enough to outlast her life.

Through a mirrored prism I find your face

peering from the bottom of a river

amidst swirling golden light.

Hard to tell if it is sunset or dawn where you are?

Eugene, you are not forgotten, your photo is

dusted pristine on the family mantelpiece.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

As Direct As Good Blues: Frank Marshall Davis

- Weaving Jagged Words into Song: On Frank Marshall Davis

- From “An Interview with Frank Marshall Davis”

- Frank Marshall Davis: Writer

- Sam Jackson

- Giles Johnson, Ph.D.

- To Helen

- Lady Day

- Self Portrait

- Charlie Parker

- Chicago’s Congo

- Black Weariness

- Reminiscences of Father and Me

Prose from Poetry Magazine

Weaving Jagged Words into Song: On Frank Marshall Davis

By John Edgar Tidwell

Perhaps it was serendipity that brought Frank Marshall Davis and me together. Even though Davis had written six books and mingled with the likes of Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, and other literary luminaries, I didn’t discover him until the mid-eighties when a national call went out to researchers and college teachers that contributors were needed for a new volume of the Dictionary of Literary Biography—one focusing on African American writers from the Harlem Renaissance to 1940. By the time the list of authors came to my attention, the names I thought most interesting had been taken. Davis was among the remaining choices. My decision was made when I discovered that, like me, he was from southern Kansas. The Dictionary of Literary Biography entry proved to be fortuitous. Over the next several years, it led me to publish a lengthy interview with him and to edit his memoirs, collected poems, and a fair sampling of his work as a journalist. Each of these books had its difficulties. A distinctive voice and a penchant for resisting traditional norms made editing his poetry the most challenging, but these features of his verse piqued my curiosity. What else, I wondered, made his work a departure from usual poetic practice and therefore innovative in the history of Black poetry?

In her 1936 review of Davis’s Black Man’s Verse, Harriet Monroe, in this magazine, proclaimed that there was “a good deal of strength, much satirical club-bludgeoning over injustices to his race, some epigrammatic wit, and often touches of imaginative beauty” in the collection. She further expressed an appreciation of his experimentation with form, saying it reminded her of such venerated poets as Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, and Alfred Kreymborg. Don’t be mistaken: this was high praise, not an accusation of being derivative. In effect, Monroe located Davis in a well-defined poetry tradition, which went a long way toward establishing his legitimacy. But her enthusiasm had its limits: “We will pass over the bitter things Mr. Davis has to say about lynchings, and Scottsboro, and Georgia’s Atlanta of chain-gangs, breadlines, and the Ku-Klux Klan, for the racial passion in which, heaven knows, there is reason enough.” In passing over “the bitter things,” Monroe touched on arguably the most contentious feature about Davis’s verse—critics’ uneasiness about the relationship he established between art and social causes.

A few literary critics sensed an inordinate amount of bitterness in Davis’s work and claimed it was the predominant tone in all his poetry. Nick Aaron Ford, one of the few academically trained Black literary critics to emerge in the thirties, was arguably his harshest critic. To Ford, Davis eschewed all conventions of “good” poetry and created a body of verse that exemplified the worst excesses of “social realism” and “propaganda.” I found Ford’s assessment to be surprising. He had painted Davis’s oeuvre as being one undifferentiated collection of poems, and had failed to recognize or acknowledge that while Davis had written some poems in a social realist vein, others were jazz, social satire, love, and lyric poems. When I delved deeper into Ford’s aesthetics, I understood the basis for his evaluation. Ford’s revised master’s thesis, published as The Contemporary Negro Novel, bore the subtitle of A Study in Race Relations. He felt Davis had created work that did nothing to facilitate harmonious interracial relations. Instead, Davis’s work was written in “bad taste” and with little hope of “winning sympathetic consideration.”

I see how Ford reached his conclusion. In some poems, Davis responded to racism, religious hypocrisy, Black political cowardice, and other social ills in a strong declamatory voice. This tone could be considered strident, disquieting, or derisive. Consequently, the lines separating his poetry from his news writing often seemed blurred. The speaker in his “Frank Marshall Davis: Writer” declared:

I was a weaver of jagged words

A warbler of garbled tunes

A singer of savage songs

I was bitter

Yes

Other critics saw greater poetic possibilities in Davis’s work. In his review of Davis’s 47th Street: Poems, for example, Langston Hughes, with equanimity, observed: “When Davis’s poems are poetry, they are powerful.” It’s as if Hughes understood what Davis would later say: “Since I am blues-oriented, I try to be as direct as good blues. This implies social commentary.” In his brief statement, Hughes also helped me to see that Ford had interpolated “bitterness” into a critique of Davis’s poems as merely bombastic, inartistic, recalcitrant, and propagandistic. This was a familiar charge leveled at sociopolitical poetry in the thirties. Such verse was castigated because it was different from the late-nineteenth-century conception of art characterized by an idealized social arrangement in which the human condition was lifted in lyrical lines above a mundane world. Davis’s verse, I concluded, invited consideration on different grounds. Instead of a narrow rhetorical construction, Davis had expanded the sociopolitical to include the nineteenth-century ideal.

Take “Cabaret,” for instance, a poem Harriet Monroe described as “the best built and most successful of the larger pieces” in Black Man’s Verse. Its experiment with free verse gave it an improvisational feel, like a jazz or blues song. The opening stanza introduced the instruments in the band as personifications of churchgoers, transforming the cabaret into hallowed ground. In so doing, the poem raised a question that was perennially debated: “where do blues leave off and hymns begin?” The world, as Davis experienced it, was beset with sorrow but sustained by living. An adequate representation of this milieu had to be “as direct as good blues.” Thus, the poem was a response to emotional needs in a highly complex, rapidly moving world.

But the use of a music motif was not the only way Davis confronted the world and confounded his critics. As Monroe observed, Davis also had a satiric bent too. He participated in the larger tradition of African American satire that sought to provide a corrective to political and personal injustices. This tradition employed several strategies, including such forms or stylistic devices as burlesque, parody, irony, and the comic. In a section titled “Ebony Under Granite,” he created his own Spoon River Anthology where Black sleepers under headstones spoke back to the living, such as Giles Johnson, PhD—a man with four college degrees who “could orate in Latin/or cuss in Greek.” Nevertheless, Johnson died of starvation “because he wouldn’t teach/and couldn’t porter.” The satiric knife cut both ways. It pointed at Black hubris and subtly indicted whites for proscribing the life and livelihoods of Black Americans.

In a radical departure from social engagement, Davis’s bevy of lyric and love poems revealed an uncharacteristic softness, a tenderness quite at odds with his work in other forms. The lyric poems about nature, for instance, are awash with liquid images, sibilant sounds, and a striking range of metaphoric language. As he said in his interview with me, which is reprinted in this folio, “good poetry condenses and distills emotions by painting unusual—perhaps memorable—pictures with words.” For him, such poems were private, personal evocations. A love poem like “To You” illustrates what he called “introspective emotion”:

Gray haze of a summer afternoon

Green of the Pacific Ocean

Brown of oak leaves in November

and You—

These are lovely things.

Davis’s love and lyric poems demonstrate how well-rounded he was as a poet. Certainly, they help to disabuse the idea that he was one-dimensional.

With hindsight, readers can now see how Davis fits into a more expansive history of African American literature than was widely available at the time he was writing. Even in the seventies, when he returned from Hawaii to the mainland after a twenty-five-year absence for a poetry tour of historically Black colleges including Howard University, Davis recalled being greeted as “the long lost father of modern Black poetry” who was “20 years ahead of his time.” The young, insurgent Black Arts students delighted in his affirmation of Black people and his artistry in confronting social ills. Since Davis’s death in 1987, the frantic, politically charged world he lived in has become even more complicated. Perhaps it’s time for us to rediscover him.

Editor's Note:

Photos courtesy of the John Edgar Tidwell Collection on Frank Marshall Davis (MS 353) at Kenneth Spencer Research Library, the University of Kansas. Photographers are unknown.

This essay is part of the portfolio “As Direct as Good Blues: Frank Marshall Davis.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2023 issue.

John Edgar Tidwell is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Kansas and has edited Frank Marshall Davis’s poetry, memoirs, and a selection of his news writing for publication.

Read Full Biography

Prose from Poetry Magazine

From “An Interview with Frank Marshall Davis”

By Frank Marshall Davis and John Edgar Tidwell

John Edgar Tidwell: When you left the mainland for Hawaii in 1948, you virtually disappeared from the community of American poets. Your works were included regularly in anthologies, but the same biographical information was usually appended. As a result, we know very little of Frank Marshall Davis, poet. How did you come to write poetry?

Frank Marshall Davis: I first began writing poetry while a student at Kansas State College [now University] around 1925, and I was influenced by a magazine called Others which featured the new revolutionary style called free verse. Sonnets and, in fact, all rhyme held little of interest for me. But I liked Edgar Allan Poe because of his jazzy jangles. I did not care for blank verse; the discipline of rhythm and meter got in my way. One day I visited the college library and idly thumbed through Others before I went to a class in English literature. My instructor, Ada Rice, that day gave us a choice of bringing in an essay or an original poem for the next class. Others had walloped me almost as hard as hearing my first jazz and blues some years earlier. I felt immediate kinship with this new poetry and felt I could write something in a similar vein. l preferred trying this to an essay. Besides it was far easier. So I wrote my first poem and turned it in. The following class Miss Rice asked me to stay after the others left. She wanted to know what else I had written. Surprised, I told her nothing at all. She then asked me to bring her anything else. Realizing I must be on to something, I wrote two more. After reading these she asked for still more. A couple of weeks later she asked me to type them so she could submit the group to Ur Rune chapter of the American College Quill Club, a national creative writing organization. I submitted and was one of those accepted as a member that year. There were only twenty-six Black students at the entire college, and I immediately became a curiosity, soon becoming known as “the poet who looks like a prizefighter.”

JET: You came of age when the New American Poetry of Frost, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Sandburg, and Vachel Lindsay was popular. Did these writers mean anything to you?

FMD: Very soon at Kansas State I came across the poetry of Carl Sandburg who was far and away my greatest single influence. Sandburg became my idol because of his hard, muscular poetry, which turned me on. Edgar Lee Masters, especially his Spoon River Anthology, was also of great influence. I like Masters because of his economy of words and ability to knife through to the heart; I had no patience with his rhyme. Lindsay’s sounds, his feeling of jazz and syncopation, pleased me. To a lesser extent I was captivated by Robinson. I liked Robinson, but he did not have the smashing impact of the others. e. e. cummings and Maxwell Bodenheim also appealed to me. But I cared little for Robert Frost. As for e. e. cummings, I felt a kindred rebel spirit which I could not find in Frost or Eliot. To me they seemed lukewarm.

JET: Few, if any, Black poets writing after World War I followed Pound and Eliot into the new territory they charted for poetry, which emphasized the importance of ritual, myth, and symbol. Why did Black poets find them “lukewarm,” and why did you choose a different course for your writing?

FMD: I could not relate to Ezra Pound or T. S. Eliot. Their preoccupation with myth and ritual turned me off as I believe it did other Black poets. I think that rebellion is deep in the psyche of most Black poets, and neither Pound nor Eliot and others of that type had this basic ingredient.

JET: Did you find any Black poets useful in your own aesthetic development?

FMD: I was greatly influenced during these early years by one Black poet, Fenton Johnson of Chicago. I looked upon him as a kindred soul. I found him at a time when I needed him. This was before I was acquainted with any other Black free verse practitioner. Because of my using Sandburg as a role model, I tended to judge all poets, whether white or Black, by their kinship to Sandburg. I came to know Fenton Johnson while we were both members of a small, short-lived writers’ group early in my Chicago days. Our mutual admiration for Sandburg was a bond. Johnson was both quiet and self-effacing. Later, when I became acquainted with their work, I developed great fondness and respect for Sterling Brown and Langston Hughes. The same was true, although to a lesser extent, with Claude McKay, who, incidentally, spent a semester or two at Kansas State. Before World War II, the region’s top critics often pointed out that “the state’s three foremost writers are all Negroes: McKay, Hughes, and Davis.” Incidentally, I found no appeal at all in Fenton Johnson’s traditional, rhymed work. I felt that content was more important than technique. That is probably why I could not get into Countee Cullen. He was a superior technician but again there was the matter of rhyme. I also thought Arna Bontemps a fine craftsman, but he usually left me cold. He was also a good personal friend.

JET: Periodically we read of creative writers who say that a particular physical locale is an important stimulus to their creativity. Ernest Gaines, for example, finds in Louisiana not only subject matter but spiritual renewal too. (He calls it that “Louisiana thing that drives me.”) Chicago appears to be such a place for you. Would you comment on Chicago as a place that shapes your poetry?

FMD: I liked the tough, often brutal, image of Chicago projected by Sandburg and felt this was my city. I never liked Kansas when I was growing up—too many restrictions. Kansas City was better. But Chicago in the late 1920s and early 1930s was a complete challenge. It was big and the home of the Chicago Defender, at that time the nation’s largest Negro newspaper; it was then the jazz capital of the nation. I wanted to paint it in verse. At this time Harlem had plenty of Black writers. But except for Fenton Johnson and possibly two or three more, when I reached Chicago in 1927, it was as barren of Black writers as the Sahara. So I put down my roots to live in Chicago, and I think I had some success in my attempt to mirror Aframerican Chicago in particular. I believe that my verse had Sandburgian directness. I aimed to make my verse easily understood by the average person. I wanted to be easily read and understood. This may have caused some critics to say [that] much of my poetry is actually prose. At the same time others have told me they preferred an intermix of prose and poetry; this prevented boredom. But then, what is poetry to one person can be prose to his neighbor. There is no law preventing the ancient muse from blowing a saxophone.

JET: Your name has never been mentioned as a participant in the 1920s’ New Negro Renaissance (which is often discussed as a New York phenomenon), even though you were publishing poetry in the late 1920s and early 1930s. What was your relationship to those familiar names of the New Negro Renaissance: Hughes, Cullen, Hurston, Toomer, and McKay?

FMD: By staying in Chicago, I avoided being identified with the New Negro Renaissance. I did not want to be part of the Effete East. In 1927, Harlem was the cultural capital of Black America. The nation’s only two Negro magazines, Opportunity and Crisis, were published there. Chicago was rugged, possibly brutal, and unsophisticated. There were also no Black writers there of the quality of those who had flocked to Harlem, except for Fenton Johnson. New York was over-refined, lacking the raw strength of the Midwest. Of course there was jealousy in this evaluation. We sought to compensate for our lack of refinement by dubbing this section of our nation as the Effete East. However, there were so few Black writers around at that time in Chicago that our opinions were unimportant. But Chicago was the jazz capital, and Harlem was trying to reach the status of Chicago with Armstrong, King Oliver, and the others who had migrated there from New Orleans. As time passed and while at the Associated Negro Press, I did meet Zora Neale Hurston and Claude McKay and later became friends with Hughes. I also knew James Weldon Johnson. While in Atlanta from 1931 to 1934, I did meet Sterling Brown, whose poetry I have continued to admire. And I believe l was the first to publish the fiction of Chester Himes.

JET: Since you did not participate in the patronage system arranged by Alain Locke, Walter White, or W. E. B. Du Bois, how then did you resolve the problem of getting your works published, and what interaction did you have with other writers?

FMD: It was during this period that I began taking my own poetry seriously, mainly because of intellectual prodding from Frances Norton Manning, a Chicago white woman. She was so impressed by my “Chicago’s Congo” that she got in touch with me in Atlanta, encouraged me to write more poetry, and found a publisher, the Black Cat Press of Chicago, for my first two books. When I returned to the Windy City in 1934, I joined the staff of the Associated Negro Press, and after my first book, Black Man’s Verse (1935), I became acquainted with a growing number of writers. The Chicago chapter of the League of American Writers, for example, was organized around 1935 or 1936. I joined at the behest of Richard Wright, whom I had met when the National Negro Congress was formed in Chicago in 1935. We became good friends. He was then a Communist, and I often kidded him about it. He was also on relief and was never too proud to admit it. As a member of the League, I attended all meetings and for the first time was thrown in contact with a number of white writers. Nelson Algren, the novelist, lived a block or so away on Chicago’s South Side. I also came to know Stuart Engstrand, a novelist, and also his wife [Sophia Belzer Engstrand], herself a novelist; Meyer Levin, then a reporter and short-story writer who became a novelist; Paul Romaine, literary critic and collector; and Jack Conroy, editor and novelist. I prevailed upon Conroy, editor of a literary publication called The New Anvil, to publish Frank Yerby’s first short story. Yerby was then a college student in Georgia who came to Chicago each summer to stay with relatives. We shared a mutual interest in photography. (Speaking of photography, I sold Richard Wright his first camera immediately after taking his portrait, which was then used in Time magazine in connection with his book Black Boy. Incidentally, I also read galley proofs of Native Son, part of which was left out by the publisher as too pornographic for that era.) Still another member of the League was Ted Ward, playwright and author of Big White Fog, one of the few Black-written dramas of that day.

We also had a short-lived writers’ group whose members included Margaret Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, and others. I would not consider this to be a Chicago “school” of writers. Gwendolyn Brooks had not yet reached her zenith, nor had Margaret Walker, who read us part of the historical novel she was working on. Richard read us some of his work in Uncle Tom’s Children, his book of short stories he was then writing.

JET: Your poetry is largely social rather than private. It often protests and even declaims in an effort to “clear space” for Black people, truth, justice, and humanity. Since some literary critics have regarded your work as propaganda, not poetry, would you please comment on what you think poetry is, including its function?

FMD: To me, poetry is a subjective way of looking at the world. All poetry worthy of the name is propaganda. Milton’s Paradise Lost is Christian propaganda as is Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees.” But such works are not likely to be condemned as propaganda because the beliefs expressed in these and similar poems are shared by a majority of the population. The poetry of Edgar Allan Poe is ear candy with a propaganda message glorifying the bizarre and macabre. The poet who locks himself in his ivory tower produces propaganda depicting his inability or unwillingness to cope with the real world. Since I take pride in being considered a social realist, my work will be looked upon as blatant propaganda by some not in sympathy with my goals and as fine poetry by others of equal discernment who agree with me. But that is not to say that the craftmanship is always equal. There may be a variation in technical skill in parts of the same poem. To me, good poetry condenses and distills emotions by painting unusual—perhaps memorable—pictures with words. I know of no completely new thoughts. A poet therefore must find a different way of presenting old ideas. Since I am blues-oriented, I try to be as direct as good blues. This implies social commentary.

Editor's Note:

Excerpted from “An Interview with Frank Marshall Davis,” which first appeared in Black American Literature Forum 19, no. 3 (Autumn 1985). Reprinted with the permission of John Edgar Tidwell.

This interview is part of the portfolio “As Direct as Good Blues: Frank Marshall Davis.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2023 issue.

Frank Marshall Davis's poetry "not only questioned social ills in his own time but also inspired Blacks in the politically charged 1960s," according to John Edgar Tidwell in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Sometimes likened to poets such as Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, and Langston Hughes, Davis published his...

Read Full Biography

John Edgar Tidwell is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Kansas and has edited Frank Marshall Davis’s poetry, memoirs, and a selection of his news writing for publication.

Read Full Biography

Frank Marshall Davis: Writer

By Frank Marshall Davis

“He is bitter

A bitter bitter

Cynic”

They said

“And his wine

He brews from wormwood”

I was black and black I always was

From the ebony house of me I watched days swing into weeks to months to years

I hunted golden orchids where “All Men are Created Free and Equal”—and my skin lay raw and sore from the poison ivy of discrimination and the hidden brambles of Jim Crow

I say no sensitive Negro can spend his life in America without finding his cup holds vinegar and his meat is seasoned with gall

A Mississippi manpack, mobbing bent, beat a tinpan bedlam when I would pluck sweet airs from a Muse’s harp

I aimed my eyes at the holy doors of a white man’s church and I heard God’s Servant say “Niggers must be saved elsewhere”

While thousands cheered as the Governor of Georgia thundered “Stand pat on the Constitution” I saw the hungry mouths of six-guns daring his black folk to come to the polls and vote

I turned to what was called my own race … and I looked at a white man’s drama acted by inky performers

I was a weaver of jagged words

A warbler of garbled tunes

A singer of savage songs

I was bitter

Yes

Bitter and sorely sad

For when I wrote

I dipped my pen

In the crazy heart

Of mad America

Wormwood wine?

Vinegar?

Gall?

A daily diet—

But

I did not die

Of diabetes …

Notes:

“Frank Marshall Davis: Writer” originally appeared in I Am the American Negro (Black Cat Press, 1937) and is from Black Moods: Collected Poems (University of Illinois Press, 2002). © 2002 Board of Trustees. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press.

This poem is part of the portfolio “As Direct as Good Blues: Frank Marshall Davis.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2023 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

Sam Jackson

By Frank Marshall Davis

The moon was a thick slab of yellow cheese between thin slices of toasted clouds

The night air spilled steak and coffee smells from a sack of odors hauled from the Elite Cafe

Beneath penniless Sam Jackson’s window two dogs argued like nations over a morsel found in a garbage can

Strong Hunger slashed Sam’s belly with eagle talons until he staggered wounded and sore to the street

Daily papers itemed: “An unidentified Negro was shot and instantly killed late last night by Officer Patrick Riley while trying to break into the rear of the Dew Drop Inn … ”

Notes:

“Sam Jackson” originally appeared in I Am the American Negro (Black Cat Press, 1937) and is from Black Moods: Collected Poems (University of Illinois Press, 2002). © 2002 Board of Trustees. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press.

This poem is part of the portfolio “As Direct as Good Blues: Frank Marshall Davis.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2023 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

Giles Johnson, Ph.D.

By Frank Marshall Davis

Giles Johnson

had four college degrees

knew the whyfore of this

the wherefore of that

could orate in Latin

or cuss in Greek

and, having learned such things

he died of starvation

because he wouldn’t teach

and he couldn’t porter.

Notes:

“Giles Johnson, Ph.D.” originally appeared in Black Man’s Verse (Black Cat Press, 1935) and is from Black Moods: Collected Poems (University of Illinois Press, 2002). © 2002 Board of Trustees. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press.

This poem is part of the portfolio “As Direct as Good Blues: Frank Marshall Davis.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2023 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

To Helen

By Frank Marshall Davis

The thin cool fingers of the wind

Caress your tall loveliness;

The wind kisses

Each shining strand of spun brightness

About your head

Then sends a shimmering waterfall

About the face of you;

I think the summer sun

Would be jealous of your hair,

O Golden Goddess,

Did he not know you.

As for me

I have known you through long yearning years;

Ages ago I built a home for you

Within my mind

A home where I have lived with you

So that when you came down to me

Tired of Olympus,

O Golden Goddess,

I already knew how you would be.

And yet I did not know—

For not even the clearest dream

Can equal the dazzling reality of you.

There is no way to think

The wedding of your lips with mine;

Imagination makes no magic

To match the roaring wonder

Of you close to me;

And now that you have come

My dream caught and clothed in flesh

I shall not let you go.

I shall make you part of me,

My darling,

Fundamental as heart

Primary as mind

And to you I shall become

As the blood in your veins

So that neither you nor I

Could survive

The mutilation of leaving.

Could we today

See the first atom created

Looking on as it grew into a universe

Suns burn and blossom, hurling off whole worlds

Spinning stars and planets grow tired, cold and die

Matter disintegrates

All that is become again one hapless atom

Then vanish

There still would not be time enough

To satisfy my love for you …

Notes:

“To Helen” is from Black Moods: Collected Poems (University of Illinois Press, 2002). © 2002 Board of Trustees. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press.

This poem is part of the portfolio “As Direct as Good Blues: Frank Marshall Davis.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2023 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

Lady Day

By Frank Marshall Davis

Her rum-brown rope of a voice

Fastens flannel strands

Around soft sides of staid notes

Sitting properly

On their oh so proper scale

She pulls

And the notes fall

Into her molten mold

Of flaming sound

Notes:

“Lady Day” is from Black Moods: Collected Poems (University of Illinois Press, 2002). © 2002 Board of Trustees. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press.

This poem is part of the portfolio “As Direct as Good Blues: Frank Marshall Davis.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2023 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

Self Portrait

By Frank Marshall Davis

I would be

A painter with words

Creating sharp portraits

On the wide canvas of your mind

Images of those things

Shaped through my eyes

That interest me;

But being a Tenth American

In this democracy

I sometimes sketch a miniature

Though I contract for a mural.

Of course

You understand this democracy;

One man as good as another,

From log cabin to White House,

Poor boy to corporation president,

Hoover and Browder with one vote each,

A free country,

Complete equality—

Yeah—

And the rich get tax refunds,

The poor get relief checks.

As for myself

I pay five cents for a daily synopsis of current history,

Two bits and the late lowdown on Hollywood,

Twist a dial for Stardust or Shostakovich,

And with each bleacher stub I reserve the right to shout “kill the bum” at the umpire

Wherefore am I different

From nine other Americans?

But listen, you

Don’t worry about me

I rate!

I’m Convert 4711 at Beulah Baptist Church,

I’m Social Security No. 337-16-3458 in Washington,

Thank you Mister God and Mister Roosevelt!

And another thing:

No matter what happens

I too can always call in a policeman!

Notes:

“Self Portrait” originally appeared in 47th Street: Poems (Decker Press, 1948) and is from Black Moods: Collected Poems (University of Illinois Press, 2002). © 2002 Board of Trustees. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press.

This poem is part of the portfolio “As Direct as Good Blues: Frank Marshall Davis.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2023 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

Charlie Parker

By Frank Marshall Davis

Who named him Yard Bird?

He was a homing pigeon

With no home to fly to

Sky unlimited

Route uncharted

Eagle strong

He scorched his wings

Haunting the heavens

Buzzing the sun

As the feebler fowl

Looked up in awe

But played it safe

In the rambling sky

He lived!

Here he rendezvoused

With freedom

Flashing feathers

Of burning blue

Dipping, darting

In strange and wild

Ecstatic arcs

Dazzling with his daring

Flying

As none before had ever flown

Even an eagle tires

And returns to his airy crag

A homing pigeon

Cannot soar forever

But this majestic bird

Had no home

To go to;

Helpless

On the ground

He wandered aimlessly

Pecking in garbage

Like a common sparrow

With a weary wing

And he was trapped

And hooked

And cooked—

That’s the simple story

Of the heaven-haunting pigeon

Who flew his way to glory.

Notes:

“Charlie Parker” is from Black Moods: Collected Poems (University of Illinois Press, 2002). © 2002 Board of Trustees. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press.

This poem is part of the portfolio “As Direct as Good Blues: Frank Marshall Davis.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2023 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

Chicago’s Congo

By Frank Marshall Davis

(Sonata for an Orchestra)

Chicago is an overgrown woman

wearing her skyscrapers

like a necklace ...

Chicago’s blood is kaleidoscopic

Chicago’s heart has a hundred auricles

_____

From the Congo

to Chicago

is a long trek

—as the crow flies

Sing to me of a red warrior moon victorious in a Congo sky ... show me a round dollar moon in the ragged blue purse of Chicago’s heavens ... tell me of a hundred spoil-laden blacks tramping home from the raid ... point me out a hundred brown men riding the elevated home on payday ... pick me the winners ... in Chicago? ... in the Congo?

Skyscraper pinnacles rip great holes in the rubber balloon bag of the sky ... do spears kill quicker than printed words? ... midnight lies and cobra fangs ... ask me if civilization produces new forms of biting and tearing and killing ... see three million whites and two hundred thousand blacks civilized in Chicago

From the Congo

to Chicago

is a long trek

—as the crow flies

_____

I’m a grown-up man today Chicago

My bones are thick and stout

(when I moved to new districts bombings couldn’t break them)

My flesh is smooth and firm

(look—the wounds you give me heal quickly)

See how the muscles ripple under my night-black skin

My strength comes not from resting

You should be proud of me Chicago

I’ve got a lion’s heart and a six-shooter

I’ve got a fighter’s fist and five newspapers

I’ve got an eye for beauty and another for cash

Nothing you’ve got I can’t have

A song dashes its rhythms in my face like April rain

My song is a song of steel and bamboo, of brick flats and reed huts, of steamboats and slim canoes, of murder trials and jackal packs, of con men and pythons

My tune I get from automobiles and lions roaring, from the rustle of bank-notes in a teller’s window and the rustle of leaves in Transvaal trees

I ask you to find a better song; a louder song, a sweeter song—

Here’s something Wagner couldn’t do

State Street is a wide gray band across Chicago’s forehead

At night a white-faced mother moon clothes skyscrapers in gray silk

At night when clocks yawn and hours get lazy

At night when the jungle’s symphony in grays ...

Oh mother moon, mother of earth, bringer of silver gifts

Bring a veil of stardust to wrap this Congo in

Bring a shawl of moon mist to clothe Chicago’s body

_____

Between the covers of books lie the bones of yesterdays

Today is a new dollar

And

My city is money mad

_____

Across the star from the Ebenezer Baptist Church women with cast-iron faces peddle love

In the flat above William’s Funeral Home

six couples sway to the St. Louis Blues

Two doors away from the South Side Bank

three penny-brown men scorch their guts with four-bit whiskey

Dr. Jackson buys a Lincoln

His neighbor buys second-hand shoes

—the artist who paints this town must

use a checkered canvas ...

Tired-looking houses of brown stone

Ramshackle flats with sightless eyes

A surface car throws a handful of white sparks at cracked red bricks

An L train roars oaths at backyard clothes lines

Mornings on South Parkway flats sit like silent cats watching the little green mice of buses running up and down the boulevard

And only grass has heard the secrets of vacant lots

_____

This song has no tune. You cannot hum it.

This song has no words. You cannot sing it.

This song everybody knows, nobody knows.

It is in a pattern of brown faces at the Wabash Y.M.C.A., a 35th Street gambling place, a Parkway theatre—you get it or you don’t

It is a melody of everything and nothing

I saw twelve stars sitting along the edge of a four story flat

I saw a moon held by leafless tree fingers

I heard a shot tear huge holes in the blanket of silence

Later—just a little later—the moon got away and the stars stepped back into the sky

There will always be new wordless songs, new humless tunes

Chicago sings these songs each day

Chicago who wears her skyscrapers like a necklace ...

Notes:

“Chicago’s Congo” originally appeared in Black Man’s Verse (Black Cat Press, 1935) and is from Black Moods: Collected Poems (University of Illinois Press, 2002). © 2002 Board of Trustees. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press.

This poem is part of the portfolio “As Direct as Good Blues: Frank Marshall Davis.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2023 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

Black Weariness

By Frank Marshall Davis

I am tired this night

I shall go alone to Mojo Mike’s Cafe and bathe my body in high breakers of hot jazz flung tableward ... molten notes falling in a crimson spray

I shall sink my soul in warm whiskey while the light-scarred night roosts nervously on the quivering limb of 47th Street in Chicago’s Congo

For these hours I can forget that I am black

At school I honed my mind against sleek sides of white ideas

Mine was a leather covered silence in a room of chintz and red plush sound as I packed my bag with silver bits of knowledge

Later I learned these sparkling morsels gave little strength as I fought across burning sands of a Nordic land

Some I have thrown away

Others I shall guard as priceless treasure until the rattlesnake bite of death for some day yet I may have need of them

Although I move as one disgraced, outlawed by this my land for being black, I shall lift proud feet and walk by day past sneering townspeople returning blow for blow until my strength flees and I collapse in utter exhaustion

I would joyously use these silver bits of knowledge helping my white brothers build into America

But when gifts are flung back hard into the face of the giver and the hand extended is seized and crushed between mailed fists what is there left but fighting?

I am tired this night

My arms hang weary from battle

For these few hours

At Mojo Mike’s Cafe

I shall forget civilization

I shall forget color, caste

I shall move in a fantastic world of raceless men and women

So that tomorrow

Refreshed by this wild dream

Goaded by this vision of America as America

I may go forth again

Fighting, fighting

Ever fighting

Until I am no longer one apart

Until they call to me as I tread our streets:

“Hello, Brother

“Hello, American!”

Notes:

“Black Weariness” originally appeared in 47th Street: Poems (Decker Press, 1948) and is from Black Moods: Collected Poems (University of Illinois Press, 2002). © 2002 Board of Trustees. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press.

This poem is part of the portfolio “As Direct as Good Blues: Frank Marshall Davis.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2023 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)

Prose from Poetry Magazine

Reminiscences of Father and Me

By Beth (Davis) Charlton

When I think of my father, the poet who looked like a prizefighter, I think of a silver-etched profile on a book cover, a bust set of ebony bookends, and his long sculptured fingers, which formed my identity. Pages illustrated with his words depicted inked night skies and glimpses of make-believe; he was a realist who dreamed of a just nation.

His people: one rare evening as brothers and sisters filled the seats of our front room, he confessed our company gave him goosebumps. Outside of a few friends, a Black community was unknown to me when I was young in Hawaii, so my identity sprang sure from his unflinching, matter-of-fact, hard truths about racial equity. He was comfortable with silence but would describe a large, faraway, unforgiving world if asked. He painted a bleak picture of a gray room with shadows moving fluidly with purpose. He laughed widely and unabashedly at the absurd, with dry humor, puns, or ironic scrabble on his tongue.

The precious needle of a record player supported a collection of as many as thirty thousand cataloged 78s and 33s. My parents’ lifelong love was a shared collection of Ellington, Bix, Joe Williams—too many to name. With a roast in the oven, our Sunday afternoons found him almost exclusively changing discs. They danced sometimes and I rode on his feet too. Music ever beneath my surface, unconscious, essential. He told stories of walking far as a youth to stand outside the door of a club to hear a blues great, and later of an adult who worked the night police beat in Chicago visiting clubs.

He loved. After the divorce, he drove across the island every Sunday evening with dinner for Helen. Once, at dinner, I griped about Mom and he set me back on my heels when he said, “Please take care of your mother.” He cared for me with unadorned attention. A practical father who provided the same uncut truth found in his work. Available and accepting and consistent, never insisting, he drove home a belief in my judgment; he trusted me. Imperfect parenting aside, his belief permeated value, and although I won’t share my flaws, I rarely faced the consequences of poor decisions as a teenager.

The poet who looked like a prizefighter: a reference to American boxer Joe Louis. Undoubtedly there were similarities between these heavyweights. Daddy lifted weights in our garage, but he was also a tennis player. Mom claimed his partners could do little with him. Quick, gifted hands, short-waisted and with long legs, he couldn’t drive a Volkswagen or a Japanese-made model. I would be surprised if I ever learned that he used his long-armed advantage anywhere but on the courts or at his desk. He fought for farm laborers, encouraging them to unite for security. He was a champion who battled slum lords, arming tenants with their rights. His deep bass voice spoke up and continues to resound in my ear today. Uncomfortable in a park or beach, and never on a hike, Frank was in constant profile at his typewriter, back facing the door, sitting at his desk. If tapped with a request, he might moan a soft protest but rise with commitment to stand in defense of equity or explain the strategy to solve a math problem.

I spent late nights in my teens watching The Johnny Carson Show, curled at his side, head on his lap, dozing long past bedtime. Often my hand in his. He laughed, shared enthusiasm for the band, a comedic or great mind, and eventually convinced me off to bed. Unmistakably brilliant and unique, my father inked my night skies.

Editor's Note:

This essay is part of the portfolio “As Direct as Good Blues: Frank Marshall Davis.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2023 issue.

Beth (Davis) Charlton was a civil servant for the federal government for thirty years. She lives on Kauai and is involved with native plant restoration.

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Table of Contents

Poetry: December 2023

Poems

Editor’s Note

Juke

Cowpunk

Song of the Blue Ridge Mountains

The Metaphysics of Your Presence

Mouth

Sex Acts

From “The Herald’s Wand”

Arka

Ark

On “Arka”

Segovia

Arequipa

Irritation Odes

Irritation Odes

Komm Wildnis in unsere Häuser

Come wilderness into our homes

Die Signale kommen aus dem Dunkel

The signals come in from the dark

On Daniela Danz’s “Wildniß”

Innocence

Shepherd’s Pie

Owls

Collateral

Assault

Boléro

Recommendation

my sweet angel on earth thank you for this life

other mothers, other fathers

Our Lady of the Westside

From “The Failure Experiment”

Abracadabra

Forever

Beginnings

Lineage

As Direct As Good Blues: Frank Marshall Davis

Weaving Jagged Words into Song: On Frank Marshall Davis

From “An Interview with Frank Marshall Davis”

Frank Marshall Davis: Writer

Sam Jackson

Giles Johnson, Ph.D.

To Helen

Lady Day

Self Portrait

Charlie Parker

Chicago’s Congo

Black Weariness

Reminiscences of Father and Me