Darnell Moore Considers

I’ve decided to start posting a series of interviews with gay men of color about their relationship to writing, reading, and the American South. As you will soon see, everyone comes to the Word from a very unique place. I’m thrilled to have Darnell Moore – a good friend, scholar, and activist – to help me kick off this series.

Darnell’s work has appeared in Theology & Sexuality, Black Theology: An International Journal, Momentum, Seeing the Other; Combahee Survival E-Zine, and Arts & Understanding (forthcoming). He presently serves as Associate Director of the Newark Schools Research Collaborative and Affiliate of the Institute on Education Law and Policy at Rutgers, Newark. In addition, Mayor Cory A. Booker recently appointed Darnell as Chair of the City of Newark’s LGBTQ Advisory Commission. He holds a MA in Counseling (Eastern University) and MA in Theological Studies (Princeton Theological Seminary).

What, if any, is your relationship to the American South? (Feel free to be a little creative with this one if necessary.)

The “South” has always represented, for me, a sense of place: the geographical space where dirt carried the traces of my people’s past…home. Yet, I also think of the South as unhurried (regarding its acceptance of queer/LGBT folk) and unbothered (in terms of its conservatisms…laughs)! However, I am continually challenged to rethink my views of the American “South” (which, like the Global “South”) remains an epicenter of progressive change and opportunity. I am still reluctant to move to the South because of my love for Jersey and New York, but I am beginning to realize that those of us living “down” North have much to learn from our sisters and brothers “up” South.

What was the last book you read that you would suggest to young gay men of color?

I am currently reading In the Life: A Gay Black Anthology edited by Joseph Beam. It is a collection of inspiring writings by several well-known (and not-so-well known writers/activists/poets) that was initially published in 1986. Happily, In the Life was re-released by RedBone Press in 2008. I would encourage all young gay/bi/queer/SGL men of color to purchase and “consume” In the Life: it will encourage and strengthen young brothers. Indeed, I think that many young people will find that their struggles through have been shared by writers like Essex Hemphill, Samuel R. Delany, Melvin Dixon, James Timmey and Oye Apeji Ajanuku among others, whose essays and/or poems appear in the collection. For me, In the Life reminds me that I am part of a wider community… a lineage of warriors…and that I am not alone in the struggle for justice or my walk towards full self and communal love.

MFA Thesis Diary #7: A Constellation of Meaning

When interviewed about the experience of writing Sula, Toni Morrison explained that the book sprung out of several images, memories, and moments that came together to form a constellation of meaning. Well, today I’ve entered into the next phase of writing this manuscript: I’ve begun to order the poems into a rough sequence. Doing so is thrilling, challenging, and perplexing. (My friend Tara Betts has informed me that someone has actually published a book on how to sequence poems. I will be buying that one as soon as she emails me the title.)

The joy in this part of the process is seeing my own constellation of images, voices, and themes come into focus. A few months ago, I thought my manuscript was going to be all about fire & heat. Now, it’s actually dominated by water, twilight, and earth-toned colors. The transformation has been organic and unpredictable. At 40 pages and counting, there are still many poems to be written and A LOT of revisions that need to be made, but I’ve turned the first of many startling corners.

Currently Reading

A new goal of mine has been to buy several books of poetry every week. As an emerging writer, it is crucial that I know what’s being examined by my peers and mentors. (A note on mentors: the wonderful thing about reading is that sometimes reading a poet’s book is almost like taking their workshop. I haven’t formally studied with Patricia Smith or Kim Addonizio, but I’ve read, studied, and re-read their work so often that when I sit down to write, it feels like they are looking over my shoulder.)

I read contemporary poetry to develop a certain competence. When I meet with other literary-minded friends I want to have something to talk about. When I make a suggestion in workshop, it’s helpful if I can mention a poet who exemplifies that suggestion. Also, I read for more specific reasons: How do people come up with titles for their poems? How are the titles structured and used? Lately, I’ve been playing with white space so it’s helpful to see how poets like D.A. Powell, for example, arranges his words on the page.

After the jump are some books I’ve been reading lately. I’ll also give a short explanation as to what I’ve been learning or trying to learn from each of them.

Diary of a Mad Poet: Creativity in Rage

I.

It was 1963 and she wasn’t going to take it anymore. After hearing about the Birmingham church bombing (which resulted in the murder of four little black girls) and the assassination of Medger Evers, Nina Simone decided that she was going to kill somebody. “I suddenly realized what it was to be black in America in 1963… It came as a rush of fury, hatred, and determination. In church language, the Truth had entered in me and I came through.” Nina went into her garage looking for tools; she wanted to build a zip-gun, a hand-made pistol. Frustrated, unable to make the gun work, Nina had her second revelation: “I knew nothing about killing. I did know about music.” She put down the tools and went to her piano. An hour later, she walked out of her apartment with a new song – “Mississippi Goddam.”

Alabama’s got me so upset / Tennessee made me lose my rest / And everybody knows about Mississippi goddam

Can’t you see it / Can’t you feel it / It’s all in the air / I can’t stand the pressure much longer / Somebody say a prayer

II.

Often I write poetry out of a desperate need for beauty in an otherwise beige life. Sometimes I write to make sense of memory, unreliable as it may be. Lately though, I’ve been writing out of & in rage. I’ve been writing because, like Nina Simone, I know nothing about killing. I do know about poetry. And if I don’t find a way to translate my rage – not anger, not irritation, RAGE – into art, I don’t know what I will do with myself. Freud would call this practice sublimation, the act of channeling suppressed, uncontrollable emotions into a more manageable form. I call it being young, black, and gay in America.

III.

Because of Maine.

Because of Caster Semenya.

Because of California.

Because of Donnie McClurkin.

Because of DOMA.

Because of DADT.

Because of Ruben Diaz, Sr.

Because of Iran.

Because of Iraq.

Because of Jamaica.

IV.

In her book Killing Rage, bell hooks writes “With no outlet, my rage turned to overwhelming grief and I began to weep, covering my face with my hands. All around me everyone acted as though they could not see me, as though I were invisible..” The cost of choking down our rage is too great. I know I’m not the only one who’s angry.

Everyday I talk to young gay brothers & sisters who are at their wits end. They’ve come out of the closet only to be kicked out of their homes and abandoned by their families. One young man explained that he is practically dead to his family. He’s been asked not to call or approach them. Not one, but two people I know have been forced to endure exorcisms by their families. A teenager from Texas (the state where I grew up) was told not to come back unless he agreed to go into treatment to have his “gayness” cured. In Newark, the LGBT community still mourns the murder of Sakia Gunn on her way home from school.

I’m well aware that we’ve made progress towards changing the way our nation thinks about sexuality, race, and class, but there’s still so far to go. And for young people, it’s difficult to figure out what to do “in the meantime.” I propose that we, as a community, return to art as an act of resistance, as a way finding a unified voice for our rage. Go to poetry slams and spit it. Take the stage at the open mic and let the words come, raw and burning. Write a sestina with end words like mother, father, hate, love, me, and you. Write your way into this world again and again.

Rejected, Rejected, Rejected & Thank Goodness

When I was in a junior in college, I thought I had this poetry thing figured out. I was convinced that the first draft of everything I wrote put Paradise Lost to shame. I would wait a good 24 hours after that first draft before sending my work to publications like The New Yorker.  I think you see where this is going.

WORD RIOT, an excellent online publication, had the good sense to reject those poems. I remember pitying the editors; the poor things couldn’t see the brilliance I had given them the privilege of witnessing. Oh, well, on to THE NEW YORKER.

Rejected, rejected, rejected. And thank goodness.

Now, the mere thought of having those poems published anywhere makes me gasp with embarrassment. I read somewhere that a good editor can’t afford to publish bad poems & a poet can’t afford to have bad poems published.

All of this is to say: WORD RIOT has just published 2 of my poems. They aren’t perfect; Paradise Lost would laugh them out of the room, but I love these poems. More importantly, I’m proud of them now & I will be proud of them years from now.

To all of the editors who have rejected me because I wasn’t ready: Thank you. I’m working on it.

“What Should You Know of a Lyrical Life?”

from “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America or Something Like a Sonnet for Phillis Wheatley” by June Jordan

“It was not natural. And she was the first. Come from a country of many tongues tortured by rupture, by theft, by travel like mismatched clothing packed down into the cargo hold of evil ships sailing, irreversible, into slavery, to be turkey/horse/cow, to be cook/carpenter/plow, to be 5′6″ 140 lbs., in good condition and answering to the name of Tom or Mary: to be bed bait: to be legally spread legs for rape by the master/the master’s son/the master’s overseer/the master’s visiting nephew: to be nothing human nothing family nothing from nowhere nothing that screams nothing that weeps nothing that dreams nothing that keeps anything/anyone deep in your heart: to live forcibly illiterate, forcibly itinerant: to live eyes lowered head bowed: to be worked without rest, to be worked without pay, to be worked without thanks, to be worked day up to nightfall: to be three-fifths of a human being at best: to be this valuable/this hated thing among strangers who purchased your life and then cursed it unceasingly: to be a slave: to be a slave. Come to this country a slave and how should you sing? After the flogging the lynch rope the general terror and weariness what should you know of a lyrical life? How could you, belonging to no one, but property to those despising the smiles of your soul, how could you dare to create yourself: a poet?”

from “Education of the Poet” by Louise Glück

“The fundamental experience of the writer is helplessness. This does not mean to distinguish writing from being alive: it means to correct the fantasy that creative work is an ongoing record of the triumph of volition, that the writer is someone who has the good luck to be able to do what he or she wishes to do: to confidently and regularly imprint his being on a sheet of paper. But writing is not decanting of personality. And most writers spend much of their time in various kinds of torment: want to write, being unable to write; wanting to write differently, being unable to write differently. In a whole lifetime, years are spent waiting to be claimed by an idea. The only real exercise of will is negative: we have toward what we write the power of veto.”

from “372″ Emily Dickinson

“After great pain, a formal feeling comes –”

from Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

“Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”

The Poetics of Class & How to Write Ourselves Back to Relevancy

1. With the help of essays like “A Question of Class” by Dorothy Allison and “Gender, Class, and Terrorism” by Michael S. Kimmel, my students and I have been thinking about class quite a bit this semester. To borrow a phrase from bell hooks, if anything is true, we are desperately trying to figure out where we stand: the pink slips, the credit card bills, the student loans, the knock-off designer purses. But – I have to ask – what about the poetry?

2. In “Where We Stand: Class Matters” bell hooks argues that, unlike race and gender, we don’t have a vocabulary for class. Most Americans refer to themselves as “middle class” while statistics show that most us aren’t “middle class” by a long shot. The language of class seems to be hyperbolic at best. Sure, we can name what it means to be exorbitantly wealthy or extremely poor, but where are the words to describe the rest of us?

3. If I accept the idea that poetry emphasizes creative and innovative use of language; that poetry allows us to name what, previously, was beyond the grasp of words, how can I not think about class? How can I not think about the potential of poetry to help us feel our way through these uncertain times?

4. As we continue to search for subject matter worth putting into words, perhaps it’s well past time that we, as poets, contributed to the conversation about class in America. It’s not only a matter of writing poems that examine, depict, and voice economic struggle. It’s about mining our libraries for work that already does so. Think of Walt Whitman’s apostrophe to a prostitute. Think of Langston Hughes’s poems about landlords and tenants. Think of Carl Sandburg’s Chicago.

5. Who among us will write poems for Gary, Indiana? Who among us will write poems for Detroit, Michigan? Who among us will write poems for Newark, New Jersey?

6. As we continue to decry the lack of an audience for poetry, the lack of interest in what we do as creative writers, perhaps the poetics of class offers us a responsibility, but also an opportunity to make our work relevant again (whatever THAT means).

7. Praise to all of you already writing these poems. Praise to all of you already reading them.

On Sylvia Plath & My 11th Grade Self

1. My 11th grade English teacher wore kimonos; a hip, young white woman who wore kimonos and assigned poems by some dead woman named Sylvia Plath. I remember reading “Mushrooms”. “We shall by morning / inherit the earth.” I went to the library that day and checked out a copy of The Bell Jar.

2. I don’t remember who I was that year. I couldn’t tell you if I was happy all the time or depressed; what music I was listening to; what R-rated movies I begged my mom to let me see. I remember sitting at my desk and mouthing the lines of “Mirror” as I read them in our textbook. “I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions. / Whatever I see I swallow immediately.”

3. Before Sylvia, I didn’t know that the open mouths of ovens were fatal. I couldn’t understand why she killed herself. I read The Bell Jar for answers and found none. The woman in the book was Sylvia and wasn’t Sylvia at the same time.

4. My favorite part of The Bell Jar was when the young woman goes home and takes a bath. She sinks into the hot water and stays there until she feels better.  I had taken baths like that before. I loved how my heartbeat sounded under water; how the rush of blood filled my ears; how water felt as it pressed against my closed eyelids. I’m not coming up for air until the air changes.

5. Sylvia Plath was my imaginary friend that year. After taking a bath, I would stand in front of the mirror and think about what Sylvia would say. “Whatever I see I swallow immediately.”

Currently Reading…

What the Right Hand Knows by Tom Healy

If Birds Gather Your Hair For Nesting by Anna Journey

A Question of Light and Gravity by Blas Falconer

Horse Dance Underwater by Helena Mesa

Major Jackson on Personal Experiences & “Holding Company”

I just read a great interview with Major Jackson in which he discusses, among other things, how he came to write poetry and his current project “Holding Company.” It’s a great read. Here’s a taste.

AT: How much of your personal experience and research feeds into your poetry?

MJ: The creative process is a grinder into which you throw carrots, celery, lentils, shrimp, flowers, music, earrings, kisses–all of that. By the time a poem is done, I don’t know how much of my personal life is in. Granted, there may be some poems triggered by a memory, and trust me you, I’m one of those writers who is addicted to memory, but I am lying a lot of the time. I’m also addicted to the imagination. So what finds its way onto the page is an amalgam of everything sifted through my eyes, my nose, my fingers, and my brain. You know, cognition is a fascinating thing because I believe there are certain kinds of knowing, certain kinds of understanding, but what I find pretty amazing about the human mind is that cognition stops at some point and another kind of exploration, of knowing starts to take over. 

There’s a poem that I have called “Blunts”: did I get high in my teen years? Yes, recreationally with friends. Did that actual scene happen? No. I never had a friend named Malik, never had a friend named Johnny Cash. I played basketball with a guy named Johnny Cash, but only knew him on the basketball court and loved his name. I love the metric and the meter of that name. That hard ‘k’ sound. So the aesthetic demands are like the carrot pushing the cart. Oftentimes, I’m really just paying attention to what kind of sound I need, rhythm or cadence I need. I need to find that combination of words and syntax that will lead me to that. Then, I step back and say, “This is why poetry exists, because I never would have uttered something so weighty.” I’m not a profound person. The creative process–sitting down and writing poems–leads me unto regions of knowing that I didn’t know I possessed.