#is poetry enuf?

[manwalksintobar]

if we’ve gotta live underground and everybody’s got cancer/ will poetry be enuf?  // Eisa Davis to Ntozake Shange

         dear ntozake,

I got sacks of mercury under the skin beneath my eyes either cried too much or i’m abt to the cool war’s burnin up my retina again does poetry start where life ends? i know i’m supposed to be cool: i wear corrective lenses that feature high definition tragedy. baby in the dumpster       ethnic cleansing assassinations       multinational mergers i’m supposed to shake my head write a poem believe in ripples. but i ain’t cool. i emit inhuman noises i imagine terrorist acts as i flick my imaginary ash onto the imaginary tray i imagine going insane with a purpose and writing it down feels sorta unnecessary does poetry end where life begins? berkeley girl       black girl        red diaper baby born of the blood of the struggle but with reaganomics and prince pickin up steam in ‘81 nothing came between me and my calvins 10 yrs old       unpressed hair       playin beethoven readin madeleine l’engle       got scared in my pants when i heard this girl testifying ‘TOUSSAINT’ in the black repertory group youth ensemble i was just sittin in a rockin chair pretendin to be 82 and talkin like I knew all bout langston’s ‘rivers’

i wasn’t as good as her and i definitely wadn’t cool so i gave up drama and decided to bake soufflés zake you wda beat me up in the playground if we’da grown up together and you did eighth grade       ‘he dropped em’ at the regional oratorical competition i saw another fly honey rip it this time it’s ‘a nite with beau willie brown’ i was bleedin on the ground i became yours no more soufflés i jacked for colored girls right off my mama’s shelf my mama fania who was sweatin with you and raymond sawyer and ed mock and halifu osumare dancin on the grass       back in the day in you i found a groove never knew i had one like that did that monologue over and over alone in my room my bunk bed the proscenium arch 13 yrs old       screamin and cryin abt my kids gettin dropped out a window didn't know a damn thing about rivers but i knew abt my heart fallin        five stories you were never abbreviated or lower case to me you just pimped that irony that global badass mackadocious funkology you not only had hígado you had ben-wa balls in yr pussy

betsey brown on my godmother's couch nappy edges in mendocino at the mouth of big river spell #7 after the earthquake in silverlake the love space demands had to be in brooklyn yr poems are invitations to live in yr body love letters yr admirers dream they coulda written themselves no one cd find a category that was yr size blackety black but never blacker than thou you teased me into sassiness when i had none to speak of made profane into sacred but never formed a church sanctified women's lives whether we were reading nietzsche or a box of kotex we were magical and regular you many-tongued st louis woman of barnard and barcelona you left us the residue of yr lust left us to wander life as freely as sassafrass cypress and indigo and even the unedumacated could get yr virtuosity cuz you always fried it up in grease you built an aqueduct from lorraine hansberry's groundwater and it bubbled straight to george c wolfe you never read what the critics said and you scrunched up the flesh between yr eyebrows like everybody else in my family

but zake is poetry enuf?

i beg the question cuz you grew me up you    and adrienne kennedy     and anna deavere smith and all my mothers you blew out the candles on my 26th so when there's mercury under the skin beneath my eyes and the world ain't so cool do you write a poem or a will?

like leroi jones said     if bessie smith had killed some white people she wouldn't have needed that music so do we all write like amiri baraka does or do we all get our nat turner on?

i beg the question cuz i wanna get my life right do some real work and i really don't want to kill any white folk i mean     can we talk abt this maybe it's just my red diaper that's itchin but i still got that will to uplift the race sans bootstraps or talented tenths or paper bag tests this time we uplift the human race and i know the rainbow might be but is poetry enuf?

it's a naive question but i'm old enuf to ask them once in a while if we do finally unload the canon clean it out stock up on some more colorful balls ain't we only gettin the ones that are available at a store near you? doesn't the market end up setting the new standards anyway? is poetry enuf if it ain't sellin? if ain't nobody readin it? can poetry keep a man     who can't read from droppin his kids out a window?

and how can i call a ceasefire to this cool war in stanzas of eights when we've declared poetry a no fly zone? we have learned to protect it and its potential politics like a mother shoot down anyone who might overdetermine a poem's meaning (while we poets divebomb everyone else's politics with impunity like we're the United States or something)

if poetry is just poetry we save it from the conservatives but doesn't that mean it's of no use to the progressives?

is poetry enuf? cuz that's all i'm doin. makin up stories    on stage     on the page keepin the beat and that's all my friends are doin and that's what a lot of folks my age are doin

but if we've gone and burnt up everything in the sky if there's nothin else to eat but landfill stroganoff if we've gotta live underground and everybody's got cancer will poetry be enuf?

my aunt angela says i can do my thang and keep swinging left hooks to oppression if i stay up stay into it stay involved just one form of praxis will do. it's just my guilt that thinks i need twenty-two what's enuf?

shouldn't i (or somebody) be our secular bodhisattva become a real power player but skip the talk show can't we stabilize, rekindle collectives and cooperatives and collaborations therapeutic communities that double as creative juggernauts a publishing house     a theatre where the plays cost less than the movies get the neighborhood coven back together take dance breaks in the cubicles sing until the flourescent lights burst into snow i ask you because you changed me zake you changed thousands of women and i know poetry can't be enuf if you drunk

i ain't tryin ta walk off wid alla yr stuff and i got nuttin but love for ya so that's why i gotta know i'm sittin on my bed encircled by every book you've ever published they're open like fans marking pages with the flint of genius all i want is for this circle to grow so tell me:

is this where poetry and life are twins? i felt so crumpled up when i started writing you poetry seemed so useless and dingy next to all the bright red bad news but now that the poem is over i feel wide open like an infant of the spring just tell me how to feed this light to my responsibilities and poetry just might be enuf           love           eisa

[uwmspeccoll]

First Feminist Press!

Shameless Hussy Press

With the stress of Roe vs Wade potentially facing a repeal this summer, we want to let the women in our lives know they are not alone in their frustration. The fight women have been waging for their intellectual and bodily freedom has been a long one, so we wanted to revisit some history about the first women-owned feminist press in California, the Shameless Hussy Press! Poet and soon to be publisher Alta Gerrey founded the press in Oakland, California, in 1969, and would publish four women who later became prominent feminist writers: Pat Parker, Mitsuye Yamada, Ntozake Shange, and Susan Griffin. Alta published her own titles under her Shameless Hussy Press imprint, including three poetry collections preserved in our collection: Letters to Women, published around 1970; Song of the Wife; Song of the Mistress, published in 1971; No Visible Means of Support, published in 1971. 

Alta’s sarcastic and straightforward writing style is reflected in the Shameless Hussy Press aesthetic. In her first collection, Letters to Women, she includes the iconic feminist symbol of a fist within the symbol of Venus and her copyright statement reads:

for underground reproduction without profit, there is no copyright. for moneymakers, this is copyright, and you gotta pay.

Alta emphasizes the aid of her friends and family in producing her book, and poetry aimed at letting women know that they were not alone in whatever injustices and hardships they faced, whether gender inequality and sexism, marriage and divorce, rape, mental illness, or raising children. 

Alta’s second collection, Song of the Wife; Song of the Mistress, with drawings by Martha Kuech, reflects the intimacy the poet felt with her readers and how she used poetry as the outlet for emotions that could be a burden too heavy to carry at times. Letters to Women is dedicated “to every woman who is as isolated as i,” but Song of the Wife; Song of the Mistress "isn’t dedicated to anybody. eat yr hearts out.” Alta had a love for improper grammar, punctuation, and unconventional spelling. The first half of this second book reproduces a handwritten cursive script, presumably Alta’s handwriting, and the second half switches back to typewriter print. This title and Alta’s third collection, No Visible Means of Support, were both published after the Shameless Hussy Press had moved down the Bay to San Lorenzo, California, from its original location in Berkeley. Alta made the choice to move her independent press after the sabotage of a friend’s press in the same area, as well as to protect her daughter and herself from death threats she received for her work in the lesbian, feminist, and activist communities. 

Shameless Hussy Press was the first to publish Ntozake’s Shange’s poetic performance work, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, which was later adapted into an Obie award-winning Broadway theater production. In 1976, Shameless Hussy published Camp Notes and Other Poems by Mitsuye Yamada, revolving around her experiences in the internment camps and the pain she felt at being perceived as an outsider.

The formation of the Shameless Hussy Press by Alta and the Women’s Press Collective by Judy Grahn, with aid from Pat Parker (who I posted about earlier), was quite inspirational for second wave of feminism. The four women who brought the feminist and lesbian publishing community to the foreground in California, Alta, Susie Griffin, Judy Grahn, and Pat Parker, had all met originally as neighbors over tea, but decided it was time to take action in their communities. Alta said in an interview that the group would often argue over how political their writing should be, wondering whether they should, “stick to the personal. [but] Susie kept saying, ‘the personal is political.’” 

Griffin’s works were said to have launched ecofeminism in the United States as she rose to become one of the most influential American feminist writers of the 20th century. Alta’s Shameless Hussy Press gave these influential women the opportunity to be published outside the patriarchy of mainstream publishing, allowing them to completely claim their work as their own. Shameless Hussy ran from 1969-1989, despite being a one-woman-publishing house, publishing over fifty titles in its 20-y3qr existence. 

–Isabelle, Special Collections Undergraduate Writing Intern

[hotwheelsandhighheels]

Picked this up today!

Studying Ms. Shange’s work as she is the pioneer of the choreopoem

I’ve been reading an anthology of her work and my favorite pieces seem to be from Nappy Edges, a Daughter’s Geography, & For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf

I’ve also been watching interviews of Ms. Shange and how she describes the joy of movement and music and creation — I love joy. I want to live and love right here forever

[ablackwomansurvivingrape]

"latent rapists" – Ladies in Red, Blue, Purple

Rapist doesn’t have to be a stranger to be legitimate.

Someone you never saw, but if you’ve been public with him, dance one dance, kissed him goodbye lightly, with a closed mouth,

Pressing charges would be as hard as trying to keep your legs closed from 5 fools trying to run a train on you

these men are friends of ours,who smile nice,stay employed and take us out to dinner, lock the door behind you, & we are left wit the scares

being betrayed by men who know us & expect like the stranger we always thought waz comin that we will submit

we must have known women relinquish all personal rights in the presence of a man who apparently could be considered a rapist especially if he has been considered a friend & is no less worthy of being beat within an inch of his life being publicly ridiculed havin two fists shoved up his ass than the stranger we always thought it would be who never showed up

cuz it turns out the nature of rape has changed we can now meet them in circles we frequent for companionship we see them at the coffeehouse wit someone else we know we could even have em over for dinner & get raped in our own houses by invitation a friend

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf

Ntozake Shange

[bewby]

remember.....when jisung..... gave us this......for FREE......?

[straightplayshowdown]

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: The show examines the complexities of the marriage of a middle-aged couple, Martha and George. Late one evening, after a university faculty party, they receive an unwitting younger couple, Nick and Honey, as guests, and draw them into their bitter and frustrated relationship.

for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf: The play follows seven nameless woman through a world of racism, oppression, and sexism. These women of color are named after the colors of the rainbow: Lady in Red, Lady in Blue, Lady in Purple, Lady in Yellow, Lady in Brown, Lady in Green, and Lady in Orange. They tell their stories and the stories of other women they know through poetry, music, and dance. It is a piece that flows effortlessly from one story into the next, never really taking a moment to breathe. The women often help each other tell their stories by acting as a chorus or stepping into the shoes of another character.

Propaganda under the cut!

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?:

the only play ive read that really made me feel anything tbh. the tension all throughout it. the ending!!! the confusion and the sudden realisation.... the reality & illusion thing. Aughhhh

It's like eavesdropping on a couple fighting at a restaurant, but you're in their living room and they also invited over people they met for the first time that night 

watching this feels like you've been invited to a dinner party and the couple hosting start bickering and you're feeling kind of awkward and then they start going straight for each other's metaphorical throats and acting like it's a game. every time you try to speak up or say "oh wow it's late we should be going" they make another excuse or they turn it on you. such chaos, such fun

it's straight people in a very toxic relationship who has out their drama in front of everyone and also it was written by a gay man and it is very funny

for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf: 

A groundbreaking play/choreopoem about the lives of black women

[leonardcohenofficial]

Poetry? 👀 Favourite poets?? 👀 Favourite poems??? 👀

here are some of my favorite poems, many of which are by my favorite poets

"danse russe" by william carlos williams "feeling fucked up" by etheridge knight "for black poets who think of suicide" by etheridge knight "the idea of ancestry" by etheridge knight "october" by mary oliver "i am now able" by leonard cohen "loving" by jack veasey "donner party" by richard brautigan "the shipfitter's wife" by dorianne laux "the passionate shepherd to his love" by christopher marlowe "tanka" by sonia sanchez "first came the lion-rider" by kenneth patchen "a meeting" by wendell berry all of for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf by ntozake shange

[wecandoit]

what i read | jun-jul

note: digital versions of most books can be found on Z-library] '*' indicates a trigger warning (direct references to death, abuse, violence, obvious triggers for mental illnesses)

Books

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

The Inseparables by Simone de Beauvoir

Masterpieces of Art: Vincent Van Gogh by Stephanie Cotela Tanner

The Deep by Rivers Solomon

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara*

Articles + essays

How Britain's Opium Trade Impoverished Indians (rec from @/apricitystudies)

Bad Therapy*

Life After a Traumatic Event and the Problem with the Resilience Narrative (rec from @/apricitystudies)

Bias in Mental Health Diagnosis Gets in the Way of Treatment

Waking Up Late Doesn't Mean You're Not Successful

Brain Function of Night Owls and Larks Differ

Muslim Feminism is not a Paradox

How Do Women Really Wield Power?

Little Archer, Big Mystery

The Anxiety of Influencers (rec from @/saintbronte)

Leaked Amazon Memo Shows the Company is Running Out of People to Hire

Uber Files: Greyballing, kill switches, lobbying - Uber's dark tricks revealed

How To Help Someone Financially Without Being Rude (Or Ruining The Friendship)

Arabs believe economy is weak under democracy

Why 'Spirited Away' is Japan's Greatest Animated Film

Mountain Gorillas: The Ripple Effect of Conservatism

Short stories

The Light at the Edge of the World by Avra Margariti

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When Popeye’s Chicken Was Enuf

Seafoam & Cinders by M.K Hutchins

Emotional Morons by Becky Mandelbaum

Videos + podcasts (yes i know this isn't reading let me live okey)

How To Keep a Commonplace Book

why do the 'it girls' quit?

The most successful pirate of all time

The Gilmore Girls Diet and Food Obsession: A Deep Dive*

DKMH by Dacre Montgomery (poetry podcast)

[sittingporcelain]

Can they hear the desperation even thru the zipper? Ok we're good them lil bro hang in there. I'd give you a hand but you've had enuf applause with enuf wrong reasons to stand ovations to observe with poetry reading roars of thumbs snapping recognition. Embarrassment is not only my forte it's also in my baggage. The only skeletons in my closet are laying on the fucking tabletop, and I'd sit and peruse all to abuse in time as if that's exactly what I intend, but I'd still come up obstinate, abstinent, and magnified out of living into still life caricature without life applied I can only declare myself satanic and thus I'm need of anithhe bad claim to instigate the tenses and intemses of relatives and authorities who've looked so long at what they still see needs looked into or am I wrong to heckle the girls for this or grams, or PayPal pen palls I'll send your invoice to for that thing you and I both have no idea where this is going if it isn't fucking soon. I like the way I crave you, and disruption, and the way tinder touches the flame. Fear in the boredom is sought after for adrenaline missed so long it's like a inch long growing off the side of my bloody ear for left sided sakes. That clearly ain't right or new at this point in this narrative without. Witjout, like you never have to use axle grease if your on stilts, and you'll always be the highest aashole anybody looks up too. So fetch another snatch and grab of disastrous, and throw it and the baby the f outta here. My pockets have pants sown into the edges. And it's wearing me out.

[manwalksintobar]

Ntozake Shange to Eisa Davis

          querida antigua eisa,

you almost got it-you really did ‘born of the blood of struggle’ we all were/ even if we don’t know it/ what if poetry isn’t enuf? whatchu gonna do then? paint     ? dance     ? put your back field in motion & wait for james brown to fall on his knees like it’s too much for him/ what? too much for james? yeah/ didn’t you ever see the sweat from his brow/ a libation of passion make a semi-circle fronta his body/ a half-moon of exertion washin’ away any hope he had of/ standin’ it/ can’t stand it & he falls to his knees and three jamesian niggahs in a stroll so sharp it hurts bring him a cape that shines likes the northern star/shinin' i say like you imagined the grease in the parts of yr hair or yr legs/or yr mother's face after rehearsal after she had you/ james falls to his knees cuz he “cain't take it"/he's pleadin’ please please please don't go we look to see who brought james brown to the floor / so weak/ we think/ so overwrought with the power of love that’s why poetry is enuf/ eisa/ it brings us to our knees & when we look up from our puddles of sweat/ the world's still right there & the children still have bruises tiny white satin caskets & their mothers weep like mary shda there is nothing more sacred than a glimpse of power of the universe it brought james brown to his knees lil anthony too/ even jackie wilson arrogant pretty muthafuckah he was/ dropped no knee pads in the face of the might we have to contend with/ & sometimes yng blk boys bleed to death face down on asphalt cuz fallin' to they knees was not cool/ the way to go/it ain't fallin' to our knees is a public admission a great big ol' scarlet letter that we cain't/ don't wanna escape  any feelin'/ any sensation of bein' alive can come right down on us/ & yes my tears & sweat may decorate the ground like a veve in haiti or a sand drawing in melbourne/ but in the swooning/ in the delirium/ of a felt life lies a poem to be proud of/ does it matter? can ya stand up, chile? the point is not to fall down & get up dustin' our bottoms/ i always hated it when folks said that to me/ the point eisa/ is to fall on your knees & let the joy of survivin' bring you to yr feet/ yr bottom's not dirty/ didn't even graze the earth/ no it's the stuff of livin' fully that makes the spirit of the poem let you show yr face again & again & again i usedta hide myself in jewelry or huge dark glasses big hats long pillowin' skirts/ anythin' to protect me/ from the gazes somebody'd see i'd lived a lil bit/ felt somethin' too terrible for casual      conversation & all this was obvious from lookin' in my eyes/ that's why i usedta read      poem after poem with my eyes shut/ quite a feat/ cept the memory'd take over &      leave my tequila bodyguard in a corner somewhere out the way of the pain in my eyes that simply came through my body/ they say my hands sculpt the air with words/ my face becomes the visage of a character's voice/ i don't know i left my craft to chance & fear someone wd see i care too much take me for a chump laugh & go home this is not what happened? is poetry enuf to man a picket line/ to answer to phones at the rape crisis center/ to shield women entering abortion clinics from      demons with crosses & illiterate signs defiling the horizon at dawn/ to keep our      children from believin' that they can buy hope with a pair of sneakers or another      nasty filter for        cheap glass pipe/ no/ no/ a million times no but poetry can bring those bleeding women & children outta time up close enuf for us to see feel ourselves there/ then the separations what makes me/ me & you/ you/// drops away & the truth that we      constantly avoid/ shut our eyes to/ hold our breath hopin' we won't be found out/ surfaces/ darlin'/ & we are all everyone of those dark & hurtin' places/ those dry bloodied memories are no less ours than the mornin/ yes the mournin' we may be honorable enuf to endure with our eyes open the coroner cannot simply bring her hand gently down our eyelids/      leavin' us to the silence of not life/ the solitude of the unreachable can ya stand up, 'chile? hands stretched out to touch again not so you can get up & conquer the world/ you did that when you cdnt raise yr head & yr body trembled so/ you scared yr mama that was when the poem took over & you gave you      back what you discovered you didn't haveta give up/ all that fullness of breath/ houdini in an emotional maze/ free at last but nobody can see how you did it/ 'how'd she get out'/ nobody'll know less you tell em/ do you really wanna write/ from twenty thousand leagues under a stranger's wailin? can you move gracefully randomly thru the landmines that are yr own angola/ hey, your bosnia! are you shamed sometimes there's no feelin' you can recognize in yr left leg? does the bleeding you'll do anyway offend you or can you make a sacred drawing like ana mendieta that will heal us all? do i believe in magic? hell yeah. shd you? i don't know. don't know how yr gonna find yr way out the maze/ ancient as it is no one can tell you the secret/ not me/ not aunt angela/ not yr mama beautiful as she is/ i usedta watch her legs cut thru space like a ninja in      ballet shoes/ i wanted to be tall & clear-eyed like yr mama/ & you come tellin'      me i cd beat you up in a school yard/ no my daddy wda bought the school yard & paid kids not to hurt me/ so what you see is not what you get i am not a poem/ i am savannah's mother/ savannah sat with her bottle      thru the children's class at stanze's once we moved to texas/ but i was always lookin’ for your mother's legs to come slicing the air/ ten years later/      2000 miles away/ed mock dead/ tower of power fallen/ sly stone disappeared/      oakland like the back of my hand/ now unknown/ "get it & feel good" i usedta      say sometimes still do/ diffrence is i cherish stupid lil things now/ did yr      mama tell you raymond asked our whole class after a bout with possessed drummers and gravity/ if we ever took our dance clothes off/ he could smell us comin'       cross the Bay Bridge/ he shouted & pranced like somekinda stallion/ like his sweat      didn't stink too/workin' in the other realm is dirty work/ makes us smell bad/      did yr mama tell ya? i know she didn't let ya believe makin' art was not a messy      business/ she cdn't have/ we were trained too well is poetry enuf, eisa? that's gonna be up to you? is poetry enuf for me? why do you think i wrote 'for colored girls' i wanted yall to come out from under yr starched pinafores & pressed      heads with some notion of dream & sanctity of spirit/ looks like some of it worked but remember i'm still writin' still dancin' fell on my knees so many times now/ i wrote rev. ike for a prayer cloth it's serious like that peaceful like that i sweat when i write/ do you?           the original aboriginal dancin' girl           love,           ntozake

[iworshipsappho]

referring to your tags on the tamil poetry post

the thing about cramming taking the fun and beauty out of languages is SO fucking real and i hate it sm (thanks indian education <3).

this reminds me of sanskrit when i learnt it in school bc at one point i started to hate in it 10th standard bc ONLY the marks mattered (plus the teacher who took out tuition at home was a bhakt who said the most inane and genocidal shit about muslim folks but that's another story)

and fuck...tamil sounds difficult to learn sdkhksdf. reminds me so much of malayalam with its koot-aksharam which are so difficult to figure out lol. according to my mom, malayalam grammar is hella difficult too so...yay

anyway power to tamil poets aksjhksd with all those strict grammar rules like wtf. thinking of shakespeare on the other hand who did whatever the fuck he wanted to do

(also psst psst gimme some good tamil poem recs na...i will try and search for its translations)

asdhsfhsk yeah the indian education system is so fucked in several aspects :') and yeah shitty teachers just ruin everything (the entitlement some of them have-)

tamil used to be so easy to learn back in like 1st-3rd grade bc as a mother tongue it was just very simple as we werent expected to actually write in like very proper tamil and the lessons were simple enuf. shit went bad in 4th grade and its been downhill ever since. the lessons are fun when u learn them but even then the teachers need to be like nice and interactive or you'll just fall asleep during class (which has unfortunately happened more than once this year for me)

and like when our teacher was talking about the yaapu illakkanam (grammar for poetry) i remember the whole class just groaning bc the only thing we were thinking was "if its so difficult why do we still have so many poems to study😭😭" i truly do not understand how thiruvalluvar, bhaarathiyar, avvaiyar and so much more wrote so many works- like ?????! honestly speaking english writer's have so much creative freedom and like they do smth that "breaks" the rules of grammar? boom genius who goes beyond what is accepted and is considered one of the greatest ever ashdsjfkgh

and for the poem recs hmm- i mean we have the staple thirukkural and avvaiyaar's athichoodi. the latter was one of the first ever set of poems we were taught when our languages started, its pretty simple to understand and like the starting letter of each line is in the order of the uyirezhuthukkal. and we have like 20 thirukkurals to learn each year so- (i have to learn and memorise ten and their meanings for just tmrw's exam :'])

but the poem i was talking about in post was இளைய தோழனுக்கு by மு.மேத்தா... and honestly that is one of the very few poems, like i said, that i actually enjoy fdhfjshgk

and sorry to disappoint, but even tho i have been studying and speaking in tamil for as long as i can remember, i cant remember any of the good poems ive read/learned 😭😭 my mind is just like blank except for the stuff ive studied for tmrw :')))

(will definitely let you know if i remember or come across smth nice, maybe that will help me actually develop an interest in the language...)

[hotwheelsandhighheels]

I'm been tracking my productivity in my Slingshot organizer. I got a HOT PINK cover and I love it!

Been trying to log in at least some writing/revising/recording time when I'm actively working on my manuscript and adding to it in some way

Also trying to log in time studying poetry. I started my winter break studying forms and Langston Hughes. Sidetracked into some Bad Bunny for a minute. Kid's dope, what can I say...

Right now I am on my 2nd read through of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When The Rainbow Is Enuf by Ntozake Shange

I read it through out loud first and now I'm going through line by line and annotating, paying special attention to the visual cues in each line

I have found that I am drawn to Ms. Shange's pacing and how she navigates that with or without the use of slashes, line breaks, or capitalization (at first glance, you wonder why she chose to use a certain technique here and not there to arrive at the same effect. on second glance, there is a genius to her consistency).

Then I'll be off to find footage of different performances of this choreopoem so I can pay special attention to the blockage, the use of music and dance, as well as delivery of lines. & I'll be annotating along the way lol it'll be fun

Other things I've tracked: my period (yay no more creepy period apps) & my sobriety (no alcohol going on 5 days now, ayee. i didn't give up weed tho. i love weed)

[ablackwomansurvivingrape]

"dark phrases" – Lady in Brown with Ladies in Red, Blue, Orange, Green, Yellow and Purple

dark phrases of womenhood of never having been a girl half-notes scattered without rhythm no tune distraught laughter falling over a black girls shoulder

it’s funny it’s hysterical the melody-less-ness of her dance don’t tell nobody, don’t tell a soul she’s dancin on beer cans and shingles

this must be the spook house another song with no singers lyrics no voices & uninterrupted solos unseen performances

are we ghouls? children of horror? the joke? don’t tell nobody, don’t tell a soul are we animals? have we gone crazy?

I can’t hear anythin but maddening screams & the soft strains of death & you promised me, you promised somebody, anybody

sing a black girls song bring her out to know herself to know you but sing her rhythms Carin struggle hard times sing her song of life shes been dead so long closed in silence so long she doesn’t know the sound of her own voice her infinite beauty

she’s half-notes scattered without rhythm no tune sing her sighs sing the song of her possibilities sing a righteous gospel let her be born

let her be born and handled warmly

& this is for colored girls who have considered suicide but are moving to the ends of their own rainbows

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf

Ntozake Shange

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

crown of twigs

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“i found god in myself / & i loved her/ i loved her fiercely” — Ntozake Shange, from For colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf

[via alive on all channels]

[lifeinpoetry]

i found god in myself / & i loved her/ i loved her fiercely

Ntozake Shange, from For colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf

[straightplayshowdown]

for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf: The play follows seven nameless woman through a world of racism, oppression, and sexism. These women of color are named after the colors of the rainbow: Lady in Red, Lady in Blue, Lady in Purple, Lady in Yellow, Lady in Brown, Lady in Green, and Lady in Orange. They tell their stories and the stories of other women they know through poetry, music, and dance. It is a piece that flows effortlessly from one story into the next, never really taking a moment to breathe. The women often help each other tell their stories by acting as a chorus or stepping into the shoes of another character.

Gruesome Playground Injuries: It’s not your typical love story: Doug and Kayleen meet at the nurse’s office in their elementary school; she’s got a painful stomach ache, and he’s all banged up from a running dive off the roof of the school. Over the next thirty years, these scar-crossed lovers meet again and again, brought together by injury, heartbreak, and their own self-destructive tendencies. 

Propaganda under the cut!

for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf: 

A groundbreaking play/choreopoem about the lives of black women

Gruesome Playground Injuries:

two people but they end up only meeting/talking when they're injured and it's very dramatic and cool and they both need so much therapy and also allows for fun stage makeup