ModPo 2013 #32 Caged Birds Sing: On Countee Cullen's "Yet Do I Marvel"

Image from littleblackbirddesignstudio.

Yet Do I Marvel
BY COUNTEE CULLEN

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,  
Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare  
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.  
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune  
To catechism by a mind too strewn  
With petty cares to slightly understand  
What awful brain compels His awful hand.  
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:  
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

Countee Cullen, “Yet Do I Marvel” from Color. Copyright 1925 by Harper & Brothers, NY. Renewed 1953 by Ida M. Cullen. Copyrights held by The Amistad Research Center, Tulane University. Administrated by Thompson and Thompson, Brooklyn, NY. 

Source: My Soul’s High Song: The Collected Writings of Countee Cullen (Anchor Books, 1991)

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I liked this poem. First the speaker states he does not doubt that God is kind and good. And if God could stoop to the speaker's level or a lower level, at any rate (and did He stoop to quibble could tell why), he would explain His paradoxes and cruelties (even non-Christian ones like Sisyphus and Tantalus). He goes on to call God's brain and hand awful. This reminds me of William Blake's "The Tyger" ("What dread hand"  and "in what furnace was thy brain?").  And lastly, those two striking lines that finish his perfect Shakespearean sonnet: "Yet do I marvel at this curious thnig:/ To make a poet black, and bid him sing!"

There's a lot of pathos in it. If he were merely celebrating the black man as a poet, he would not have chosen the words "this curious thing." He talks of God's cruelty and it frames this thing that he marvels at. It is as if he were saying: what cruelty of God compelled Him to make something the wrong shape or size or color and then command it to perform or do some exalted thing like "sing."

I am particularly moved by the Harlem poets because I see in them a struggle that I see in myself: recognizing my color and ethnicity even as I have grown up with an English canon. I am of color. I'm yellow and brown (in a culture that's obsessed with turning white). And even if it were true that the world has gone color blind, there's no denying that there has been a history of politics that accompanies any talk of race and color.

I have questioned my own preference for English. In a poem that addresses my national hero, Jose Rizal, I have asked why we express ourselves in our colonizer's language.

A Filipino Writer of English Poems to a Filipino Writer of Spanish Poems

I think of the whiteness of snow
on a postcard from an immigrant aunt.
How sweet, how pure
and unreal like props
in a high-school play.
The closest I have seen of it is
crushed ice on halo-halo.
Why do I end up speaking
of white things?
I feel blond -
bleached and painted over.
But this is how I speak:
misted over with a foreign flavor
but in essence a native blend
of brown and yellow.
I think of how you must have
shivered in the European snow,
words warm in your heart.
I wonder if you dreamt
in Spanish.
Perhaps we dreamt
the same dream,
our incandescent souls
glowing beneath
the translucent veils
of tongues-to-suit-our-needs.
We were born in a land
of two seasons, not four,
unused to and awed by
words like:
autumn, winter, spring.
I think of snow and
how it melts into a
gray-tinged slush,
how these words of ours
will melt with the heat
of what we really mean.
But I think we wear
our costumes well.
If it is cold
we have to put
our coats on
but it will always be
with our skins
that we feel.

1996

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I appreciate Countee Cullen's poem and why he chose to write in a perfect Shakespearean sonnet. Why does a caged bird sing? Now that's another chapter altogether. Whether it is the form or even the language itself...there has always been a tradition of the colonizer and the colonized, of the slaver and the slave. We mustn't forget that these things have happened in history. And then we move on. 

ModPo 2013 #27 Celebrating The Penetrating Word: On the Baroness Loringhoven's "A Dozen Cocktails Please"

Image from en.wikipedia.com.

Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven, "A Dozen Cocktails--Please"

No spinsterlollypop for me-- yes-- we have
No bananasI got lusting palate-- I
Always eat them-- -- -- -- -- -- --      
They have dandy celluloid tubes-- all sizes--
Tinted diabolically as a baboon's hind-complexion.
A man's a--
Piffle!
Will-o'-th'-wisp! What's the dread
Matter with the up-to-date-American-
Home-comforts? Bum insufficient for the
Should-be wellgroomed upsy!
That's the leading question.
There's the vibrator-- -- --  
Coy flappertoy! I am adult citizen with
Vote-- I demand my unstinted share
In roofeden-- witchsabbath of our baby-
Lonian obelisk.
What's radio for--if you please?
"Eve's dart pricks snookums upon
Wirefence. "
An apple a day-- -- --  
It'll come-- -- -- --  
Ha! When? I'm no tongueswallowing yogi.
Progress is ravishlng--
It doesn't me--
Nudge it --
Kick it--
Prod it--
Push it--
Broadcast-- -- -- --
That's the lightning idea!
S.O.S. national shortage of--
What ?
How are we going to put it befitting
Lifted upsys?
Psh! Any sissy poet has sufficient freezing
Chemicals in his Freudian icechest to snuff all
Cockiness. We'll hire one.
Hell! Not that! That's the trouble-- --
Cock crow silly!
Oh fine!
They're in France-- the air on the line--
The Poles-- -- -- -- -- --    
Have them send waves-- like candy--
Valentines-- -- -- --
"Say it with-- -- --  
Bolts !
Oh thunder!
Serpentine aircurrents-- -- --  
Hhhhhphssssssss! The very word penetrates
I feel whoozy!
I like that. I don't hanker after Billyboys-- but I am entitled
To be deeply shocked.
So are we-- but you fill the hiatus.
Dear-- I ain't queer-- I need it straight -- --
A dozen cocktails-- please-- -- -- --    

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The Baroness was crazy. Or perhaps I only envy women as liberated as she was? I enjoyed listening to the poem as recited during the video discussion. This was real inebriation juxtaposed with Dickson's "I taste a liquor never brewed." Or was it? She was inebriated with life, with sex, with the end of an era. 

"I demand my unstinted share" and "I am entitled/ To be deeply shocked" point towards the need to claim something as hers. Perhaps the need to appropriate. In a world which is ready-made (with advertisements peppering the poem) she needs originality, she needs the word that penetrates. There was a mention of self-destruction in the video discussion. But perhaps that is a creative instinct: to destroy so that there is something new in its place. 

I like the backdrop of Williams' autobiographical account of the Baroness when I read the poem. She scared him but he was in awe of her, I think. She lived so large. What he could skim when he found the time she could have in the buckets. Was she irresponsible and reckless? Yes, I suppose. She was lucky to be so. She was lucky to have the friends she did and to have lived as long as she did (despite the headlong flight into oblivion). 

The most memorable line in the poem, for me, is "Say it with-- -- --   /Bolts !" That was her battle cry. Don't say with flowers. Don't say it with the conventional Valentine. Or sonnets. Only sissies do that. Say with lightning, say it with thunder. Or don't say it at all. She was a phenomenon. 

As I look at this poem in context of Stein and the other poets in this chapter, the Baroness' major difference is her unapologetic sexualization of language. She equates language with the politics of sex. While that could be a bitter thing, she celebrates it instead. 

ModPo 2013 #13 Outward Conquest and Inward Discovery: On the Gendered Politics of Whitmanians and Dickinsonians

Image from garthwilson.com,

Note: I am currently taking a course on Coursera.org called Modern and Contemporary American Poetry taught by Al Filreis of the University of Pennsylvania. I will be posting my thoughts on the course discussions here.

In the video discussion on Whitmanians and Dickinsonians, I liked the challenge of reading the poems from the false binary of a gendered perspective. I have always taken a feminist stance in most of my reading and papers, even in college. So, I'll just dive into it because this is something that I've always been passionate about. 

There is no denying that there is a power struggle between the feminine and the masculine. It might be a false binary (since one can't do without the other) but it has always been around since, well, Adam and Eve. And I see it applied to the Whitmanian and Dickinsonian poets. 

Let's start with Whitman himself. His poem is a conquest poem. It's conquering the world, at least America, in all its naked glory, from the "blab of the pave" to the earth that farmers plod upon. Whitman is concerned with embracing, taking in the "outdoors." It is a very masculine preoccupation: going out into the world and taking it by the horns. Then, we move on to WCW who is concerned about "his nose" and its indiscriminate way of nosing everything. He, too, like Whitman, celebrates the earthly, the outdoors, the rank smell of creation. He, too, goes out and points out to us that he is the "happy genius" of his entire household. Ginsberg explores as well. He surveys the supermarket, the "inside" and the "outside" of the America of 1955. It's no wonder that all the Whitmanians are men. The impulse to roam seems to be a masculine one. 

The domain of Dickinson is the mind. She celebrates discoveries within, "Vesuvius at home." For a woman of her time, that is where she is confined. By cultural dictates, a woman's place truly was at home. That just defines the restrictions of her time. But she was not content to be restricted so she went after a space that was open to her: her own mind and its expansion. In the video discussion, there was a point being made that the Whitmanians and Dickinsonians were not so much about male and female than about extrovert and introvert. But, if you think about it, the activities of women at the time of Whitman and Dickinson, were conducive for introversion. Where else could a woman express her real thoughts except in her own household, in her own head? Going to Niedecker, we see a rebellion, a rejection of a traditional woman's role as she counters her grandfather's wishes. Ironically, she chooses an occupation that keeps her indoors: the act of writing. Corman, too, is preoccupied with the intimate, with just the you and the I as captured on a page. Lastly, Armantrout, celebrates a multitude of "I's" that springs from the very intimate (and very indoor) activity of reading. 

Even today, when women have made huge leaps in terms of equality...they are not completely free of traditional roles and stereotypes. Women have had to cope with being "superwomen" to "succeed" (good mother, good provider, good wife, good lover, etc.). Even today, a woman cannot really travel alone and un-harassed the way Whitman might have (note: in Delhi, a woman can be subjected to "Eve teasing" or even rape by virtue of traveling alone....and more particularly, traveling alone at night). In the Philippines, the sons of the family are permitted to go off at all times of the day because they are just being "boys." But the girls in the family are subject to curfews simply because they are the ones who can get pregnant. 

Don't get me wrong: I'm not pitting the sexes against each other. I am simply pointing out why Whitmanians have a very "male"/ outward point of view in terms of their writing and why Dickinsonians are mostly women (thanks, Cid Corman, for joining the Dickinsonians!) and mostly "feminine"/ inward in their point of view. It's a matter of culture and politics. 

Thanks, ModPo, for the opportunity to study a range of poets and different perspectives!

Al Gore's Poem

I had to write about this. It's rare to find an environmentalist who was a former politician who now expresses himself through poetry. In his book, Our Choice, Al Gore, of An Inconvenient Truth fame, wrote a  poem which appears on page 28 of the book. It's actually quite haunting in its imagery. He takes the time to choose words carefully, like "Neptune's bones" and one of my favorite lines is constructed, thus: "Ice fathers flood for a season." And the line that follows brings to mind Ondoy: "A hard rain comes quickly."

Poetry truly is the only way to distill anything complicated in our lives.

One thin September soon
A floating continent disappears
In midnight sun

Vapors rise as
Fever settles on an acid sea
Neptune's bones dissolve

Snow glides from the mountain
Ice fathers floods for a season
A hard rain comes quickly

Then dirt is parched
Kindling is placed in the forest
For the lightning's celebration

Unknown creatures
Take their leave, unmourned
Horsemen ready their stirrups

Passion seeks heroes and friends
The bell of the city
On the hill is rung
 
The shepherd cries
The hour of choosing has arrived
Here are your tools 


Image is the cover of Al Gore's book, Our Choice

Polis

By Justine C. Tajonera

I remember my lessons
from Philosophy
about this thing
called Politics.

I had come to
the conclusion
that power
corrupts.

But what I had
failed to grasp
was that politics
did not mean
"those in
power" but
the power
of the public
space.

Before you,
the people,
I leave
my hearth
for today
to declare:
that I am
responsible
for my hope
and the choices
that I make.

(Nov. 30, 2009)
Image is of me reading Obama's The Audacity Of Hope.