A January Post in the Nick of Time

So already, when I began writing this blog in 2013, I promised myself that I would post something at least monthly. With fewer than ten hours left--actually about four right now--in what has been a strangely beautiful, conveniently ice-free, disarmingly mild January, I am determined to post something by midnight tonight. But it's possible I shouldn't be posting anything right now.

A few days ago, I began writing a post--but to no avail. In it, I included the main reason for my apparent blog neglect: the fact that I've been writing more poems than usual this month--works-in-progress not yet ready to be shared in this blog or elsewhere.

Then I explained what I'd been reading that had been claiming a lot of my time and energy: essays* by Karl Kirchwey--some including poetry--in part about the war-hero uncle for whom he is named; the novel Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly, which answered so many questions that the movie "Hidden Figures" had raised for me; and recent poem collections by Sandra Cisneros (Woman Without Shame) and Louise Glück (Winter Recipes from the Collective).

 

Initially, I  thought I'd write a post about how those two poem collections, whose authors, like me, are over the age of sixty-five, had gotten me thinking about the role of senior citizen poets in American society. When the poem "The Layers," written by Stanley Kunitz when he was a senior citizen, serendipitously fell into my lap, courtesy of one of the women in my poetry writing group, I was sure it was a sign I had a good idea.

 

But the insights didn't come, either into the topic or into myself. Yes, it was true that when I shared Kunitz's poem with some of my same-age college classmates, they felt--gratefully, they said--that something they'd been feeling and struggling to express had been put into words to which they could return later. But I wondered if Glück's last lines in "The Denial of Death" better captured the feelings of others of them:

                        . . . I felt

something true had been spoken

and though I would have preferred to have spoken it myself

I was glad at least to have heard it (7).**

Why I suspected some of them would feel that way I wasn't sure; nor was I sure what it would mean if they did.

But I also knew that I wasn't going to have much time to think about that because I was going to be spending the weekend ahead at the Bob Moses Conference. Wanting to fill in the big gaps in my understanding of the history and consequences of mass incarceration in America, particularly the incarceration of Black men, I'd signed up for it weeks earlier.

 

The conference did not disappoint; it educated and galvanized. It was especially meaningful--and poignant--to be able to listen to scholars and activists talk about racial criminalization, policing, and punishment on the same weekend that the videotape of Tyre Nichols' brutal beating was released to the public. There were many answers to the question of "How could this happen?"

 

When I left Cambridge late Sunday afternoon, I was awash in new understandings that I wanted to solidify so I could use them. So when I got home, I turned on my computer not to blog, but to buy two books: William A. Darity and A. Kirsten Mullen's From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century and Khalil Gibran Muhammad's The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America.

 

Then Monday came, along with its usual obligations, the most important one being going to visit my mother in the Skilled Nursing section of her senior living community. While my mother took a post-breakfast nap, I picked up Winter Recipes from the Collective and began rereading it. Glück's poems, sometimes allegorical, sometimes surreal, sometimes stripped down to their barest essentials, catapulted me into a narrative set at the porous membrane between life and death. While I usually don't live alongside Glück in that existential border town, I have to admit that sometimes Skilled Nursing feels like such a place.

 

What was even stranger, though, was suddenly to be exploring death as an existential inevitability, and an unavoidable source of individual grief and loss, when all weekend long, my fellow conference attendees and I had been exploring it as a social reality, a means of strengthening and perpetuating a society ordered around a white supremacist racial hierarchy, and an unavoidable source of collective grief and loss. 

I wrap up this blog feeling split between--or maybe caught between--these two very different perspectives on and explorations of death. I also end it very much hoping to have something much more "figured out" to say about something next month, now only four hours away. May February be a good month for all of us, a month that offers us clarity and hope.

* These essays appear in recent issues of Agni, Arion, and The American Scholar.

** Glück, L. (2021). Winter recipes from the collective. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.