Morgan Parker, Magical Negro

Everything Will Be Taken Away

after Adrian Piper

You can’t stop mourning

everything all the time.

The ‘90s, the black Maxima with a tail,

CD wrappers, proximity to the earth.

Glamour and sweating in your sheets.

Speaking tongues. Men, even.

You are a woman now

but you have always had skin.

Here are some ways in which

you are not free: the interiors

are all wrong, you are a drought

sprawling. When you see god

you don’t like what you see.

It is never enough to be born

again and again.

You like it at church when

strangers hold your hand.

You have a mouth men bless.

You look good enough to bury.

Furthering her responses to popular culture, as in her previous collection, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé (Portland OR/Brooklyn NY: Tin House Books, 2017) [see my review of such here], is New York poet Morgan Parker’s third full-length collection, Magical Negro (Tin House Books, 2019). The title of Magical Negro references the movie trope of the “magical negro” (think of The Legend of Bagger Vance, as well as multiple Morgan Freeman movies), a worn-out and deceptive trope akin to that of the “angry black woman” (which originated with a white writer as a way of negating the concerns of black women). The poems in Magical Negro are powerful, and in certain ways are meant to be heard aloud, presenting a real performative push. Magical Negro is made up of stunning poems composed of a harnessed and focused rage, engaged and ongoing curiosity, a whip-smart lyric and a performative confidence that pops, sizzles and hums. “I have grown up less mysterious than my myth,” she writes, as part of the poem “Magical Negro #217: Diana Ross Finishing a Rib in Alabama, 1990s.” Parker moves her way through the myths of blackness, writing out her anxieties against the frustrations and histories of black culture, and the discrepencies between blackness depicted and lived: “I was / never a gentle wish,” she writes, as part of the poem “Black Ego (Original Soundtrack)”: “so it’s fair // to say I can’t sit still.” In a recent interview online at Publisher’s Weekly, conducted by Maya C.Popa, she speaks to the origins of the current collection:

I’m interested in representations, fantasies, or media inventions of black people and understanding what those representations do on a societal level to our view of actual black people. The Magical Negro poems especially are about celebrities. I don’t know why I’m so interested in celebrities. I think there’s an element with these figures we all feel like we know, but we don’t. They’re a part of our lexicon and of informing the ways that we see ourselves. Using that is a way for me to think about the bodies of people. The word magical is complicated: uplifting, but also dehumanizing. That’s something that I was also addressing.

Poems in this collection reference and engage popular culture, as well as Diana Ross, Michael Brown, Zora Neale Hurston, Rodney King, Amira Baraka and Solange, among others. A particularly interesting exploration is the poem “‘Lilac Wine’ by Eartha Kitt vs. ‘Lilac Wine’ by Jeff Buckley,” that writes:

How many men

before I understand. I don’t want to

But I do. Invade.

Try to breathe

from their mouths.

The master’s tools—

I have them.

The house is getting too big.

My people—there’s style,

there’s misery.

The finest imports. Tender,

bittersweet. I want to

build a reef for us,

fill it with arrows.

Natalie Eilbert, Indictus

I tell a friend I want to delete this whole book so that no one will see it

and he says I should hold onto that feeling (“To Read Pomes Is to Follow Another Line to the Afterlife. / To Write Them Is to Wed Life with Afterlife.”)

Brooklyn poet and editor Natalie Eilbert’s latest poetry collection is Indictus (Las Cruces, NM: Noemi Press, 2018), winner of the 2016 Noemi Poetry Contest, and a follow-up to her Swan Feast (Bloof Books 2015) [see my review of such here]. In a book constructed via poetry, fiction and non-fiction, Eilbert writes on the brutality and messiness of trauma, the body and consent. On the back cover, Indictus is described by Morgan Parker (among others) in glowing terms, including that “One could say this is a book of poetry by a woman who has endured unspeakable trauma and lived to bear its witness. One could also say, this book is an incredible document of survival.” “Indictus,” of course, is Latin, the masculine of the feminine “indicta” and neutral “indictum,” meaning, variantly, “declared, proclaimed, published, announced, having been declared” and/or “appointed, fixed, named, having been appointed.”

Nothing happened. The alcohol shone

over the night. I cried once. A woman approached me

and said as much. A seam ripped.

many seams ripped. A hole leaked

from my hole, spilling decadent oils.

My mind is quick to spoil. I am like the rock thrown

in my uncle’s grave. I land without ceremony or miracle

with the other dirts. My diets. My flesh thins

around perception’s hegemonic mutations.

I bury data inside me, birth information.

A rock beneath my feet glows new rhetoric—

I am golem I am clay I am

the breath of my own shitty god.

To believe what was done to me is curable,

assumes a shape. This assumes

what was done to me is truly done. (“Man Hole”)

In an interview conducted by Megan Giddings and posted at SmokeLong Quarterly in 2016, Eilbert speaks to some of her approach to, and advice on, among other things, writing:

For women, it isn’t enough to have an idea about our objective space, because our objective space has always been one imposed on our bodies. We watch brown bodies shot dead and raped in the streets and some artists have the gall to say this is poetry of witness, but it is yet one more way to remove the person from the idea, to say that their pain is a concept from which to move an artistic and/or rhetorical direction. My advice is to reconsider what balance means because, likely, that balance needs to be toppled. You might need to slip on the spill to know the bucket’s been kicked on its side. And when that happens, split lipped and swearing, can you really take your pain of emotional experience to a greater vision. But then you must trouble that vision. You need to let yourself be messy and then neat and then you need to piss on those satin sheets.

Constructed as groupings/suites of individual poems as well as longer sequences, Indictus exists as a book-length long poem on the violence done to women and women’s bodies, exploring the pieces as they are collected and reassembled, and how they got there in the first place. The poems in Indictus are intimate, raw and emotionally bare, and allow nothing and no-one off the hook, naming names and demanding acknowledgment, penance and, occasionally, retribution. Eilbert writes with a barely-contained rage, one carefully and craftfully harnessed and directed before released at full force. If you think these are poems of unravelling, you are reading it wrong.

Indictus

I read yesterday that crimes are committed at a higher frequency during hotter temperature spikes. What was the language of my first crime? First, it was the house where I was born. I never dreamed. I never remember dreaming. This is not where it begins. Whenever I said I was up to nothing, my mother knew the opposite was true. She didn’t know what the opposite might mean. I smeared four sticks of butter all over my bedroom wall in secret and she knocked on my door. What are you doing / Nothing. For years I found yellow knobs on my wall and then the house was gone by way of fire. We watched the inferno from the neighbor’s driveway. This was years after that same neighbor removed my language—or it was only a year? Who is counting all the little footsteps toward error? When I sweat I am a half-species begging my body to stay alive, just a little bit longer.

Morgan Parker, There are more beautiful things than Beyoncé

Another Another Autumn

in New York

When I drink anything

out of a martini glass

I feel untouched by

professional and sexual

rejection. I am a dreamer

with empty hands and

I like the chill.

I will not be attending the party

tonight, because I am

microwaving multiple Lean Cuisines

and watching Wife Swap,

which is designed to get back

at fathers, as westernized media

is often wont to do.

I don’t know

when I got so punk rock

but when I catch

myself in the mirror I

feel stronger. So when

at five in the afternoon

something on my TV says

time is not on your side

I don’t give any

shits at all. Instead I smoke

a joint like I’m

a teenager and eat a whole

box of cupcakes.

Stepping on leaves I get

first-night thrill.

Confuse the meanings

of castle and slum, exotic

and erotic. I bless

the dark, tuck

myself into a canyon

of steel. I breathe

dried honeysuckle

and hope. I live somewhere

imaginary.

I’ve been enjoying the vulnerability and swagger of Brooklyn, New York poet Morgan Parker’s There are more beautiful things than Beyoncé (Tin House Books, 2017), a pop-culture mélange of daring, playful and fiercely smart lyrics. There are elements of Parker’s There are more beautiful things than Beyoncé that are reminiscent of some of the earlier work of Toronto poet Lynn Crosbie (best evidenced through her selected poems, Queen Rat [see my review of such here]), for their shared mix of contemporary pop culture, vulnerability, bravado and first-person flâneuse. As Parker writes to open “Poem on Beyoncé’s Birthday”: “Drinking cough syrup from a glass shaped / Like your body I wish was mine but as dark / As something in my mind telling me / I’m not woman enough for these days […]”

I find poems engaging contemporary pop culture, whether this collection or even Sarah Blake’s Kanye West-inspired Mr. West (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2015) [see my review of such here] far more compelling than poetry collections centred around historical cultural figures (The Beatles, for example). Where some of those other collections engage with a kind of nostalgia, Parker, through writing Beyoncé, Drake and Michelle Obama (among others), instead engage with more contemporary matters, such as how it is to be black and female in America, circling out into larger issues of the price of fame, negotiating love, sex, friendships and other engagements, composing a larger canvas of studies on how to simply live and be in the world. The openness and vulnerabilities displayed in Parker’s poems are quite striking, even as she plays with familiar tropes in fresh ways, such as her poem “13 Ways of Looking at a Black Girl,” riffing off Wallace Stevens’ oft-altered “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” (from his 1923 debut collection, Harmonium), that includes: “I am hungry  for myself […]” There is even a riff on Canadian writer Lawrence Hill’s 2007 novel (and subsequent miniseries), The Book of Negroes, in her own poem of the same name, that includes: “This book is uncorrected proof. You read it / on your eyelids. You sleep under it. // You give it away. You tear out whole chapters. / You say you read it but you didn’t.” The third poem in her triptych reads:

You see the commercial on BET

while you’re painting your nails.

The women are only crying.

The slave cabins are dull. You’re trying

to text this dude: Negro, please,

why sleep when the world so bad.

For him you would be pumice shined to pearl.

He makes you wanna write your name.

Everybody has an opinion.

You shiver and it is permission.

You are beautiful because you’re funny.

You are alive because you’re a question.

This is a poetry collection that holds a great deal of wisdom and lively energy (and one that is clearly improved through live performance), and was an absolute delight to read. One can only imagine (and hope) that Beyoncé herself was equally charmed.

Handsome journal, volume 5, no 1

THE WORLD IS BEAUTIFUL BUT YOU ARE

NOT IN IT

Let me refer to myself in glorious ways:

colors seem brighter, the sky is a shocking blue.

I carry my stomach in this bowl

and earth is planted in my blood.

From your last letter, I gather hills.

I’m trying to keep my tenderness in check.

Trying to see what kind of grill the neighbors have

is everything I couldn’t do before.

Now brown eggs shift heavy in my palms, this bowl.

Words make their way up my thigh.

I swear very nice boy and I refer to myself.

No. The hills are holding you and I refer to myself.

Let’s be honest: I need a real man, I say out loud.

Every weakness I have settles into a tree trunk,

stays all winter. I don’t know if I mean it.

Winter has lasted five years already.

This morning I press into the edges of my stomach.

My mother makes coffee in California.

Ladies will say we are expert with machines

but they will be two bottles under sangria.

I said you could make music out of this.

Ingesting artificial palm trees, exploding.

Your letters are getting shorter. I am getting close

enough to the sun to touch the tip of its cigar.

We carry what is shocking and heavy in blood.

Music seems brighter: the sky the sky. (Morgan Parker)

After a short wait, I finally received my contributor copy of the fifth annual HANDSOME journal, produced by Black Ocean. Launched recently at AWP in Boston, this issue contains one hundred and twenty pages of strong writing, most by writers I haven’t previously heard of. I’m slowly and still working my way through learning the names and writing of contemporary American poets, but there are still only two that haunt the pages of this new issue, being Deborah Poe [author of a recent chapbook through above/ground press] and Brian Henry. A graceful journal of new poetry, HANDSOME is edited by Paige Ackerson-Kiely and Allison Titus, and published by Janaka Stucky. Another of a series of journals who publish work sans author biography, I’m left with the work itself, immediately struck by the work of Morgan Parker, Kristina Marie Darling and Sarah Goldstein. There is something of Jenny Boully’s The Body: An Essay (Slope Editions, 2002) to Kristina Marie Darling’s poem, in that the footnote quickly overtakes the body of the poem. Sarah Goldstein’s pieces in this issue are a small handful of “untitled” prose-poems, wrapping a rather straightforward lyric story with just a hint of something more, something surreal, akin to Miranda July or Lydia Davis. She says just enough in each piece, but there is so much more beneath the surface; suggested, but still hidden.

UNTITLED (PROPERTY)

The woman in the house down the road, whose phone bill you accidentally received and ripped open, fills her doorway, out of which wafts the dark smell of potpourri. You’ve seen her in the branches of the furious thickets between your houses calling her dog, thrashing like a shark in a net. You talk about the neighborhood squirrels: the big one with deep cuts on its shoulder, and the other one that made it through the winter without any fur. Large white cat in the window, large yellow dog pushing and whining behind her. “Oh, you’re so bad, you’re so bad,” she says to him. The dog always runs to you when he sees you, snapping the leash out of her hand, shoving his desperate head into your belly.

Some other pieces that struck include Jenny Drai’s poem “DER ABFLUG,” as well as Audrey Walls’ striking poem “Aquaphobia,” which ends with the lines: “You could drown in two inches // of water, my mother once warned. All you need / is someone to hold you under.” Kerri Webster has four poems in the new issue, each with the title “DIADEM,” and I wonder if these are a stand-alone quartet, or, like Noah Eli Gordon’s The Source (New York NY: Futurepoem Books, 2011), part of something much larger? I would like to see more.

DIADEM

Jupiter is fucking with me. What I know

of cruelty: a world is made

we did not ask for. In the dark, boys

set the dog on fire, let it loose

in the field. What

do you believe? Chanting what

as you go to sleep? I

see: same trees. Same locust

blossoms. I walk and walk. Smoke

from the burning scrapwood

shuts my eyes.