Jonestown and Other Madness & Movement in Black - Pat Parker

I most likely will not finish reading the book of correspondance I picked up between Audre Lorde and Pat Parker but Parker's voice in them drew me to want to read her work. She's very funny, and endearing in that exploration of a line of humor with a line of specific observation and critique. It's not the easiest thing and can sometimes break the boundary it tries to push instead of the one that leads us closer to compassion.

I think I talked about Chrystos but can't get my head into the idea of pouring through which post it was in. Chrystos' work was mentioned in the Adrienne Rich poet list in What Is Found There, and from what I then read, her work and Parker's share some similarity. Both feel highly influenced by the idea of performance in their poems, while also demanding their page be read and appreciated for its composure there. This duality is important to performance poetry and something I can feel depressed about in modern performance poets. Often, the performance of the poem overtakes the poem as itself a performance inherent to the poem's existence. All poems are to be read. All poems are to be performed. Not only when in performance mode. Parker and Chystos' work both feel like they are performing their works because there was always a need to perform them.

Parker's poetry is also extremely personal and based in historiography to me, and I appreciate that. Jonestown... is really interesting in the way it talks about Jonestown intself, as well as Priscilla Ford - who I had not heard of (these being my two favorite poems in the book). The poems in Movement in Black are not "more serious" but become a bit more varied where there are strict themes of type of poem more alongside the poem's themes itself. Where Jonestown... really hammers in a lot of portrayals of the madness/dehumanization perspective spat at black women who dare exist, Movement... is a larger exploration of its title and most poems are about her and her alone. In fact both works are very much titled in a way where it should really draw you into the complex explorations she does in the poems enclosed.

Parker died of cancer in 1989. Audre Lorde died of cancer in 1992. This is depressing.

Lorde is of course better remembered - but really only in a limited fashion. I find a lot of people haven't read her poems or are only aware of specific essays she made or accidentally make a symbol of the past out of her. Lorde is an eternal speaker, and just because she has died doesn't mean we have to think of her in the past. Her work is something we should always turn to.

In a similar way, I want to leave you with a lot of different poetry of Parker's to look at. Apparently she was on the Solange album from last year that I still haven't checked out - which is pretty cool. We all would do good to never forget dykes with radical politics.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts