Yesterday we looked at two poems: the first was the extraordinary poem ‘Trauma is Not Sacred’ by Canadian poet Kai Cheng Thom. The second was a poem which has, in some ways, become an American classic: ‘Feeling Fucked Up’ by the African American poet Etheridge Knight (1931-1991).  

I highly recommend you listen to Pádraig Ó Tuama’s ‘Poetry Unbound’ podcast which featured the Thom poem. You can listen to the poem being read by Ó Tuama. 

And you can read more poems by Kai Cheng Thom on her website. 

Trauma is Not Sacred 

violence is not special pain is not holy suffering does not make angels abuse defines no one you are more than the things that hurt you you are more than the people you have hurt do not make an altar to your woundedness do not make a fetish out of mine a body belongs to no one a memory is not made to be eaten does it titillate you to hear about assault if i told you my story, would you swallow it whole if i confessed my sins would you feed me to the beasts to purge your own i will show you mine if you show me yours we have all seen the darkness now give us the dawn tell me about the joy you keep in the hollow spaces between your bones tell me again how you laughed when you realized that you were not wholly unlovable i’ll tell you again how i cried when my best friend told me that I was not a bad person remember how we used to count the lines on our palms when we were little how we used to try to read the future for its gifts how we used to make lists of the things we would dream of when finally we were free i will make you a list of the things i’m grateful for i will sing you a litany of reasons to be alive i want to know the songs you wake up for in the morning i want to marvel at the unbelievable graciousness of your being i know that i am capable of pouring love like lavender oil into your cupped palms there is forgiveness like honey pooled in the chambers of our hearts you are the thing i am most grateful for all bodies know how to heal themselves given enough time all demons carry a map of heaven and their scars beneath the skin of every history of trauma       

there is a love poem waiting deep below

There is so much to say about this poem – its lack of punctuation and capital letters and how it looks on the page and more. We began by speaking about the bold statements in the poem, the statements which make large claims and don’t include images. As poets, we are trained to not trust statements and to favour images over abstractions in poetry. Ezra Pound warned poets: ‘Go in fear of abstractions’. Modern poets embraced Pound’s advice and the poetry he espoused. Pound’s famous Haiku-like poem ‘In a Station at the Metro’ is the perfect example of a poem which relies entirely on image:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.

Pound embraced Imagism and suggested that poets needed to move away from the effusive and often non-figurative quality of Victorian literature. But reading Thom’s poem makes me think that perhaps it’s time to let go of the image sometimes and allow statements and ideas back into poetry.  Thom successfully makes audacious declarations without hesitation. Poetry is not just about feelings and sensuality but also about ideas. 

I also want to point out that many of the statements are phrased in the negative (Trauma is not sacred, violence is not special, etc.)  These ‘nots’ create a tension in the poem as if the narrator is arguing with someone who thinks the opposite. My hunch is that the narrator is arguing with herself. All poetry is essentially an argument with the self. As William Butler Yeats wrote, ‘Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.’

I encourage you all (and myself!) to become conscious of the arguments you have with yourself and allow that inner dialogue into your poems. You might consider trying to write a poem that is made up of a dialogue between different parts of yourself, for example. Yeats did this in his poem ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul.’ And interestingly, Yeats seems to have ignored Pound’s dictum (‘Go in fear of abstractions’) and ended ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ with some of the most beautiful statements ever written. 

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I am glad we had a chance to begin writing a list poem inspired by Knight’s magnificent list in the second stanza of his poem ‘Feeling Fucked Up’. The list poem genre has a long history and has biblical origins (Let there be light, Let the earth sprout vegetation, etc. – these are rough translations of the lines that appear in the beginning of the Hebrew Bible). You can also find lists in Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’ and in ‘Howl’ by Allen Ginsberg. And in this wonderful poem by Ellen Bass, Because.  If the list poem really interests you then you might like to take a look at the book, The List Poem. 

The great Ethridge Knight poem speaks for itself. As I said in class, I attended a memorial service for Knight in New York at Teachers & Writers Collaborative where poets and friends of the poet spoke about him and read from his work. There are many wonderful Knight poems, and people read them, but almost every person at that event read ‘Feeling Fucked Up.’ Reading the poem seemed to liberate people – their faces were shining as they read it. The poem reflects a sense that we can be ‘fucked up’ but still love and be loveable. As Thom wrote, ‘we have all seen the darkness now give us the dawn tell me about the joy you keep in the hollow spaces between your bones tell me again how you laughed when you realized that you were not wholly unlovable i’ll tell you again how i cried when my best friend told me that I was not a bad person remember’. Knight’s poem gives us permission to laugh, rage and love simultaneously and to feel that we are ‘not a bad person’ despite it all.  

Feeling Fucked Up 

Lord she’s gone done left me done packed / up and split

and I with no way to make her

come back and everywhere the world is bare

bright bone white    crystal sand glistens

dope death dead dying and jiving drove

her away made her take her laughter and her smiles

and her softness and her midnight sighs—

Fuck Coltrane and music and clouds drifting in the sky

fuck the sea and trees and the sky and birds

and alligators and all the animals that roam the earth

fuck marx and mao fuck fidel and nkrumah and

democracy and communism fuck smack and pot

and red ripe tomatoes fuck joseph fuck mary fuck

god jesus and all the disciples fuck fanon nixon

and malcolm fuck the revolution fuck freedom fuck

the whole muthafucking thing

all i want now is my woman back

so my soul can sing