Ntozake Shange - what a good poem should be

I was talking to a friend recently about poetry, because I have those sorts of friends, and I remembered somewhere that the poet, playwright and novelist (maybe cultural agitator would be a good description) Ntozake Shange once wrote down what she thinks a poem should be. So I seached the internet thinking that someone somewhere must have transcribed it but found it nowhere. She wrote the following:

"[poems should] fill you up with something/cd make you swoon, stop in yr tracks, change yr mind, or make it up, a poem shd happen to you like cold water or a kiss"

I think this is a fitting description for a great song as well but that's by-the-by.

Here's one of her poems I like best:

Bocas: A Daughter's Geography

i have a daughter/ mozambique
i have a son/ angola
our twins
salvador & johannesburg/ cannot speak
the same language
but we fight the same old men/ in the new world

we are so hungry for the morning
we're trying to feed our children the sun
but a long time ago/ we boarded ships/ locked in
depths of seas our spirits/ kisst the earth
on the atlantic side of nicaragua costa rica
our lips traced the edges of cuba puerto rico
charleston & savannah/ in haiti
we embraced &
made children of the new world
but old men spit on us/ shackled our limbs
but for a minute
our cries are the panama canal/ the yucatan
we poured thru more sea/ more ships/ to manila
ah ha we're back again
everybody in manila awready speaks spanish

the old men sent for the archbishop of canterbury
"can whole continents be excommunicated?"
"what wd happen to the children?"
"wd their allegiance slip over the edge?"
"don't worry bout lumumba/ don't even think bout
ho chi minh/ the dead cant procreate"
so say the old men
but I have a daughter/ la habana
I have a son/ guyana
our twins
santiago & brixton/ cannot speak
the same language
yet we fight the same old men

the ones who think helicopters rhyme with hunger
who think patrol boats can confiscate a people
the ones whose dreams are full of none of our
children
the see mae west & harlow in whittled white cafes
near managua/ listening to primitive rhythms in
jungles near pétionville
with bejeweled benign nativess
ice skating in abidjan
unaware of the rest of us in chicago
all the dark urchins
rounding out the globe/ primitively whispering
the earth is not flat old men

there is no edge
no end to the new world
cuz I have a daughter/ trinidad
I have a son/ san juan
our twins
capetown & palestine/ cannot speak the same
language/ but we fight the same old men
the same men who thought the earth waz flat
go on over the edge/ go on over the edge old men
you'll see us in luanda, or the rest of us
in chicago
rounding out the morning/
we are feeding our children the sun

It's from her collection A Daughter's Geography which is available here - she's one of my favourite poets and someone I'm sure I'll return to in a future post.

whitebuildings

Reasons for writing if there are any

So, I've joined the billions of people who feel like they might have something to add to the world of blogging. Why? Presumably the ideal of blogging is to move away from the traditional media outlets. They have agendas, are funded by revenue from advertising and by people who choose to buy particular publications because they know that they won't be too challenged by them, that the editorials will broadly reflect and represent their own views. This is fair enough. I've only occasionally picked up The Daily Mail (or as it's sometimes known 'The Daily Heil') but have usually ended up throwing it down after a matter of minutes, seething with rage and feeling impotent because so many people read it and believe its content to be true. Daily Mail readers would presumably experience the same feelings of anger were they to read The Guardian, labelling it leftist, liberal, wishy-washy tripe.

The function of blogging is said to be to break these boundaries and give anyone who wants a voice a fair chance. This has to be a fallacy though. Most people of a certain generation do not write or read blogs and find cultural succour in newspapers such as those mentioned above. I'm sure that in so-called 'developing' countries workers earning less than a dollar a day probably don't have the time, or indeed the education in many instances, to sit down with their Apple imac (or whatever they're calling them nowadays) and fire off a string of cutting barbs about how their employer whips them or threatens to fire them if they're not working fast enough.

So, in the main, blogs are written by the middle-classes (please disagree with me vehemently if this generalisation isn't true, although please note the caveat that I am only positing that it's true in most cases), some of whom try to represent the voices of a sub-culture or underclass that has no voice of its own. This is entirely laudable, but I am often made quite nervous by liberal interventionism, but can acknowledge it is a useful way of trying to bring unpleasant realities about a particular way life into the light of day.

Of course most blogs are read by precisely no one. Unless you break a news story, or write about some obscure band or writer who then becomes famous, or you have a lot of friends on Facebook who in turn each have lots of friends, you're speaking into a void. Even this system of friends of friends reading your work is predicated by the assumption that you're actually any good. If you're terrible, no one will give a toss.

I've gone on long enough now. I get carried away, especially when I'm bored. Sitting here in a messy living room in Glasgow, knowing that I should be using my time more productively than talking to no one.

I'll try to put up something more interesting in my next post. Apologies, I'm a blog virgin, treat me gently.

whitebuildings