it's #BlackHistoryMonth! for the month of february (and the first week of march), i'll be doing a post-a-day on #BlackWriters that influenced me, including links to a short piece you can read in one sitting, and at least one of their books.

(late on this one also, my apologies!)

for yesterday, february 8, i'm celebrating Lucille Clifton, a poet and educator born and raised in New York, who lived out the end of her life in Baltimore, having been poet laureate of Maryland for six years in the early 1980s. she was also born with a genetic mutation that ran in her family called polydactyly, giving her an extra finger on each hand that were surgically removed during her childhood. i bring this up because of how this kind of absence—or, as i think she conceived of it, the ghostly presence of what seems absent—influenced her work.

i hesitate to call her poetry humble or straightforward even though it can appear that way in comparison to the showy or dense work of others, but she is simply not a kitchen-sink poet: her lines (often two or three words) and stanzas tend towards the short-and-sweet, and her poems (of which there are bajillions) are focused and are already spiraling to a close from the first line. (i deeply admire this, as someone who tends to bloviate, lol.)

whether it's because i'm not familiar enough with her ouevre or because she comes at politics slant, what i've read of her work feels to me intimate and personal—still political, but the politics of a loving correspondence rather than of a stirring speech or manifesto. "wishes for sons" indicts patriarchal masculinities by casting a spell of pain at those who perpetuate them; "sisters" cherishes the shared Black womanhood of Clifton and her sister and ends with the killer lines, "only where you sing / i poet."; and "my dream about being white" pithily, elegantly rejects the idea of assimilation:

"and i’m wearing
white history
but there’s no future
in those clothes"

the other part of her work i'm interested in wasn't really celebrated in her time, or else remains unpublished, according to this article (https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/10/19/the-spirit-writing-of-lucille-clifton/). Clifton was a "two-headed woman"—someone with access to another plane of existence, specifically that of ghosts, spirits, and the dead (hence the reference at the start to ghostly presences/absences). she, like me, relished automatic writing, and used it to tap into her past selves, to understand her corporeality not as fixed in her body, its color, its shape, its racialization, its gendering, but rather simply as one incarnation of many, inextricably entangled across space-time. a relevant excerpt from the article:

"the once and future dead
who learn they will be white men
weep for their history. we call it
rain."

read "far memory": https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46672/far-memory

listen to "homage to my hips": https://vimeo.com/36987057

download PDF of The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, 1965 - 2010 (2012) [13.2 MB]: https://drive.proton.me/urls/GVG7JJ1WWM#gqKA8couUdx6

it's #BlackHistoryMonth! for the month of february (and the first week of march), i'll be doing a post-a-day on #BlackWriters that influenced me, including links to a short piece you can read in one sitting, and at least one of their books.

(apologies for missing yesterday! doing two entries today)

for yesterday, february 7, i'm celebrating Fred Moten, another academic and writer. born and raised in Las Vegas, Moten attended Harvard intending to study economics, but was suspended for a year after failing academically (he was apparently more focused on reading Chomsky and living his politics), during which time he worked as a janitor and read and wrote poetry, then returned to Harvard, where he met his future collaborator Stefano Harney—and the rest is history.

like so many of the writers in this series, Moten crosses genre lines with aplomb. he's as prolific a poet as he is a scholar, and like Hartman and Octavia E. Butler, he's also a recipient of the coveted MacArthur "Genius" award, though i think that, of the three, he might be most critical of the award's status and purpose.

i say this because of how i read The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013), a lyrical treatise/manifesto co-written with Harney on a variety of topics, thought the parts i remember best are about the corporatization of academia, the political structures that facilitate this, and, most importantly, the reason the state is so deeply invested in it: the lure and vortex of academia may be the state's most successful strategy for defanging radicals and rebels and reconstituting them into something of a petite bourgeoisie (i am very loosely paraphrasing lol).

beyond critique, however, Moten and Harney encourage the reader to—if they have or want to—attend anyways, but to, in the process, forge and foster an underground (the titular "undercommons") diametrically opposed to the ivory tower—what it represents and produces—and to live in this underground, use it to rob academia of what it's worth, and redistribute that hoarded wealth of knowledge freely. it should be no surprise, then, that The Undercommons was immediately released for free upon publication.

but none of this speaks to these ideas as well as Moten's poetry does, particularly this excerpt from "Fugitivity is immanent to the thing but is manifest transversally":

" 2.

and tear shit up. always a pleasure the banned
deep brown of faces in the otherwise
whack. the cruel disposed won’t stand

still. apparatus tear shit up and

always. you see they can’t get off when

they get off. some stateless folks
spurn the pleasure they are driven

to be and strive against. man, hit me again."

read "Fugitivity is immanent to the thing but is manifest transversally": https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53479/fugitivity-is-immanent-to-the-thing-but-is-manifest-transversally

download PDF of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013) [1.4 MB]: https://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/undercommons-web.pdf