19 March 2021
Victoria, BC
Dear Poemgranates,
The Grammys! I don’t pretend to understand the rhyme and rhythm of the Grammys. However, I do know that Brecht motto about singing about the dark times I repeat over and over like a refrain in these letters. All this to say, sometimes I forget how much I love Beyoncé. Which is another way of saying how does one write something that exudes light.
I want to confront how doubtful I have been of such light. The first time I read Derek Walcott’s “Love after Love,” the promise was mere craft. It was a theatrical belonging of someone else. Yet that promise has lingered with me. Its kindness has waited with me for brighter days when I can read it differently. How does one achieve kindness in poetry?
Consider the poems that have been kind to you. Consider your own kindness. How do you write gently with language? How do you inspire without the imperative? How do you speak of solidarity without assuming the second person plural? How do you describe without defining? How does the chorus of BLACK PARADE translate an immensity of confidence from its singular speaker to an action, into a sense of pride, into strength?
This is a letter of questions. Perhaps also a letter of reassurances. Like Mary Oliver I want to create a world, if only a small poem of a world, that “offers itself to your imagination, / calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting.” I think of the explicit reassurance of Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese.” Its hope for you outweighs instruction. And then I think of Kahlil Gibran’s “On Beauty”: “People of Orphalese, beauty is life when life unveils her holy face. / But you are life and you are the veil. / Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror. But you are eternity and you are the mirror.” Gibran’s descriptions do not invite definition. If anything, they infuse the listener with infinity. Perhaps the kindest poems overwhelm language.
Beyoncé’s BLACK PARADE is written with such kindness that it alters the horizon of hope, draws sunrises very very close. If, as Derek Walcott writes, “The time will come / when, with elation / you will greet yourself arriving / at your own door,” Beyoncé has achieved that homecoming with tremendous delight and has enough elation to go around. Is that what it comes down to, a poem brimming with the joy of itself that in turn it is gentle to all that it meets?
Write to me.
Ever yours,
ALHS
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