Don’t Walk

Nomination              Tuesday, June 3, 2008                               By Mary E. Weems   Looka here! Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m proud, no  matter hard you try you can’t stop me now. James Brown DJs in Heaven, his splits deeper, his scream love talk, all around him the party’s up there—Phyllis Wheatley Boogaloos with DuBois, King prays for the brotha, Malcolm smiles and writes, 3 of the Temps, Marvin, and Miles Davis tune up for a midnight concert.   On earth America wakes up early. In one-hour Champagne and Rose sell out in the hood, rural towns, the burbs where signs on doors mark places Obama’s the guest who’s coming to dinner. All bookies pay off, for once smiling as money leaves their pockets faster than the winners can say Barack Hussein Obama. There’s dancing in the streets, loud laughing, children dream of being old enough to vote.   Shouts hesitate for a moment in throats open with pride. We who’ve lived long enough to lose heroes, continue constant prayer. It’s not hate we’re afraid of, it’s what hate can do to a moment.   The world is in the world watching. Colors create one outfit to wear in November. In his speech, all of his words add up. He speaks of energy, transformation, and uplift as if all we have to do is wish and work and the American Dream will finally come true.

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A Poet and a Poetry to Reckon With

A Review by Rudolph Lewis

ChickenBones Best Poetry Book of 2008

Mary E. Weems. An Unmistakable Shade of Red and the Obama Chronicles. Huron: Ohio: Bottom Dog Press, 2008.

Writing poetry, Mary E. Weems pares down sociology to the social, to ancestors beginning with the stories of grandma and granny, to mama saying everything changes nothing, and daddy face down in the mud, to the self, a hole within a hole. Ideology is peeled down to the personal, to a tangerine attitude that engages the struggle to find meaning and play in the midst of absence and loss. An Unmistakable Shade of Red and the Obama Chronicles is a poetic tour de force, an act against erasure or again in the words of E. Ethelbert Miller, a “spiritual text” that outs deceptions and applauds change that moves us to higher ground.

Weems brings into focus scenes of our lives we “don’t need an expert to identify,” not only the abuse and rape of women and children, but also the ordinary and the great. There’s “a sistah” who waits tables with a “broken mouth smile.” There’s God in an unemployment line, where “patience drops on a counter/like a rock.” The problem of illiteracy within our communities is noted in which “crosswalks don’t have word signs.” There’s the shock of the beautiful and successful Phyllis Hyman (1949-1995). “In between songs she talks of life . . . several days later she ended a life I would have sworn was just beginning.”

History and the a-historical rather than erased are presented in delightful wordplay, especially in the use of Eugene Redmond’s poetic form, the Kwansaba. As in “Brother Wright . . . argues with God for forty cloud acres” and June Jordan dumps “word bombs . . . on all the ways the world needs to collect / rain change” and James Brown “writes freedom on wings” with “funk cologne.” In Weems’ poetry, the struggle for justice and hope is relentless. In “Young men with no legs,” a “black man walks time / each day another chance at chance.”

Weems’ technique in writing poetry is what most appeals. Nothing is superfluous. She strips down not just for precision but also for pleasing riffs and rhythms. When I read her poems I am encouraged to go back and take a second look at my own poems that tend to mean more with less. The starkness of her poems, the absence of watery sentimentalism in word choices, is filled with pleasing surprises and little shocks of imaginativeness. Weems’ An Unmistakable Shade of Red and the Obama Chronicles teaches as well inspires; a book of poems that will provoke many, many readings.

Weems’ approach to poetry gains its most focus in the latter third of the book, the “Obama Chronicles,” when she hones in on the earth shaking impact and possibility of a “real” black president. This section gathers up all the devices used in the preceding section of the book. For she creates these poems out of memories and experiences of family and community, out of play and that which gives black life its distinctiveness. There’s the daughter who “grew up with Black history/in the house like another family/member.” There’s Martin, Malcolm, and Moms Mabley, in heaven, listening to “debates in barber and beauty shops.”

Overall, it’s the sideways look that Professor Weems takes toward life that really intrigues. The last line of her poem “Nomination,” brings that in view. She says, “It’s not/hate we’re afraid of, its what hate can do/to a moment.”

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