February 2012

What we have in common
by James Downs

It is a fashionable thing these days to tell each what is wrong with the other, accent all the things we do not share, focus on the not-respected in the other person. Once, we tried to find what was good in our fellows, find the humanity in each of us, walk in each others shoes awhile and realize what we have in common.

In honor of February, Black History Month, I have chosen to highlight two fine black women poets who have made their marks in the world exactly because they remain real in their poetry, always trying to stay close to the truth of things. Gwendolyn Brooks and Camille T. Dungy in their writings have taken pains to get as close up to the truth as possible, and in doing so have found a way to be compassionate for themselves and each of us in the human condition, as well.

Ms. Brooks and Ms. Dungy are from two different generations of poets. Yet you can see a kind of through-line from one to the other. Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks, Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress for 1985, was born June, 1917 in Topeka, Kansas, grew up in Chicago and died there in 2000 after teaching at multiple universities. Camille T. Dungy born in 1972, lives in San Francisco and teaches at San Francisco State University. They each have award winning volumes of poetry. And the through-line of which I speak is the truth of details.

These two poets find the right details to help get at the meat of their poems. In "The Bean Eaters," Ms. Brooks gives a detailed picture of an old couple's life together: "…Dinner is a casual affair/Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,/Tin flatware" and "…Remembering, with twinklings and twinges,/As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that/ is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths,/tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes." Here, Ms. Brooks gives us detail to accent a long life with some poverty and memory and regret and sense of togetherness rolled up in one ball.

Ms. Dungy has the same ability to bring detail to bear on her subject. In "Maybe Tuesday Will Be My Good News Day," she describes a youth in the midst of music: "…I'm tuning up/on the picket fence: one moment an empty bell,/one moment a rubber mute." and "This isn't as complicated as it sounds, nor are those cats/in the alley scatting. I'm all tuned up and off the fence./ His solo is over and I've practiced so I know/what comes next: One/Then one/Then two.

With the fence and the music and also the boys and that youth being ready to start at the end of the poem, the details build to what must be the beginning of a youth going into the world with the music of her very life.

The compassion shines through a toughness in arguably the most famous poem by Gwendolyn Brooks. "We Real Cool" has the subtitle "The Pool Players. Seven at the Golden Shovel."

Here is the poem in full:

"We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon."

Gwendolyn shares the reality that these young men might not make it in their lives. Both their circumstances of no opportunity and their subsequent actions have led them here, and she wishes they had a different chance in life. I can actually envision Gwendolyn walking past a pool hall in the middle of the day and she looks in to see seven young men stuck inside the wrong place and the wrong bravado, and I see her feel for them.

Camille's poem "There are these moments of permission" feels like holding breath while a precious moment of life elapses.
Here it is in full:

"Between raindrops,

space, certainly,

but we call it all rain.

I hang in the undrenched intervals,

while Callie is sleeping,

my old self necessary

and imperceptible as air."

And so, with these few examples you can get a taste of what each of these two poets are trying to do. They want to share details of moments so that you the reader can experience through their compassion what it is to truly live in this world, too. And also, I suspect that being poets of different generations, one has had an influence on the other, and yet the elder poet kept her eyes wide open and learned from younger generations, too. This is how we touch what we have in common, as poets and as people as well.