Written in the wake of the home-going ceremony for the legendary African American poet Lucille Clifton (1936–2010), Elizabeth Alexander's ode “One week later in the strange” breaks with many conventions of memorial poetry. The poem does not offer the usual summing up of a life. Rather, it is a summoning. For those gathered to honor Clifton, the death is not closure but a calling:
The postmemorial scene in the poem does not feature the hushed bereaved, solemnly mourning the passing of a loved one. Instead, we bear witness to the passing down of a cultural inheritance, the “ancestral knowledge” imparted by “conversation” between the dead and the living that Alexander says she so admired in Clifton's poetry.Footnote 2 The poem's “we” and “us” are not weeping but bright-eyed, not morbid nor immobile in grief but elated and earnest to go forth into an expansive world.
I open with Alexander's poem about the heightened strangeness following someone's leave-taking because the pandemic still rampant in the United States at the time of this writing similarly plunges us into the strange: it shares with mourning the odd taffy-pulls of time, the unmooring of social conventions, the anticipation of an afterward even in the midst of a now that is not yet a past. As suggested by the title of a new poetry anthology, this strangeness is at once personal and collective—Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America's Poets Respond to the Pandemic takes its title from Pablo Neruda's “Keeping Quiet,” which includes the lines “we would all be together / in a sudden strangeness” (qtd. in Quinn xviii). The first words of Alexander's poem—“One week later”—suggest this chosen-family gathering has a timing; that is, this moment in time is not an X or Y stage of individual grief but a cultural event that is shared sign and symptom of a social rite, what Pierre Nora terms a “lieu de mémoire” (“place of memory”) that bonds and binds a people.Footnote 3
In fact, this project of ritual conjuring of a “people” deeply resonates with a traditional African American poetic speech act that calls forth (and in doing so calls into becoming) a community. Consider Margaret Walker's “For My People” (1942) or Amiri Baraka in the 1960s “calling all black people” in “S O S” or Sonia Sanchez's “blk / rhetoric” (1969), in which the speaker calls back to Baraka with her own SOS and its international distress signal in radio-code ellipses: “Calling . . . . . . . . . calling . . . . . . . . . ”. Or Gwendolyn Brooks, who writes in her autobiography that she aims to “write poems that will somehow successfully ‘call’ … all black people: black people in taverns, black people in alleys, black people in gutters, schools, offices, factories, prisons, the consulate; I wish to reach black people in pulpits, black people in mines, on farms, on thrones” (qtd. in Gates and Smith, “Gwendolyn Brooks”).
That racial formation of a collective identity is one of several reasons that I suggest we consider not simply poetry written during or about the pandemic but, rather, the pandemic in the time of poetry—especially Black poetry. I say “Black” poetryFootnote 4 because that allows us to (re)place the pandemic in the context of larger social and literary movements, including but also preceding the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, with the recognition that “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning,” as Claudia Rankine put it (“Condition”). Her own poem “Weather,” in Together in a Sudden Strangeness, stands out among the other contributions for addressing Black lives lost and for responding to that particular calling to and calling out:
When we, as Ralph Ellison put it, “change the joke and slip the yoke” of storytelling in obeyance to a dominant narrative, we can take a reality check—in this case, a check of the assumption that the pandemic (with all its undeniable exigencies, its inexorable timelines, its unimpeachable graphs) is the only narrative in town, the umbrella trope under which all else sits. I mean “reality check” as Harry J. Elam invokes it, as
a moment that traumatically ruptures the balance between the real and representational. It is a moment that, in the dissonance, generates demands that the relationship between the real and representation be renegotiated. “Reality checks” brusquely rub the real up against the representational in ways that disrupt the spectators and produce new meanings. Most significantly, “reality checks,” in the unease that they cause audiences, can excite social action. (173)
And I would add: can excite new interpretation, itself a form of action affecting the cultural imagination. That is why my focus here is not on Black poetry written necessarily during or about the pandemic, because considering creative expression—untethered from the virus's temporal beginnings with its (known, or at least announced) arrival in the United States in late 2019—“rub[s] the real up” a bit.Footnote 5
Situating the pandemic in the larger context of African American poesy, for instance, challenges traditional literary histories that mark shifts and movements by wars (rather than, for instance, by plagues—or by other large-scale events, for that matter).Footnote 6 That reframing allows us a very different understanding of contemporary pandemic rhetoric, to see beyond the public service announcements about health and wellness, the quarantine self-help guides, the “future of work” consultancy projections. Because many of this moment's jeremiads—the prophesying of a “new normal,” the calls to account, the pleas for national unity before the end-time—have instructive precedents in African American aesthetic tradition. A strand of that tradition is distinguished, if not entirely defined, by challenges to “normalcy” (to the extent that norms are so often undergirded by necessarily racialized assumptions about “Truth and Goodness,” as W. E. B. Du Bois put it in “Criteria of Negro Art” [773]); by calls for reckonings—aesthetic, historical, religious, and institutional; and by the racial and national formation of a people.
Whose Normal?
Consider that Alexander's poem honors the paceless liminality of those extraordinary days following a recent death, when mourning upends the world, when all things “normal” are suspended. Indeed, normalcy itself is rendered suspect because the ever-up-closeness of death rips away the veil of the taken-for-granted, forcing at least temporary confrontation of what James Baldwin calls the existential “chaos” of the world that people spend much of their lives trying to ignore.Footnote 7 The artist—by which he means any creative person—must be “the disturber of the peace,” of that complacency with the ways things are. Baldwin's appreciation that artists must “get in good trouble, necessary trouble,” to borrow from the late John Lewis (@repjohnlewis), is precisely why centering Black poetry is so important to these pandemic times. One could say that because there has been no peace these last few years, there is precious little to disturb. But by “peace” Baldwin means the seductive perpetuation of the norms, conventions, protocols, the willed innocence, or ignorance, he says undergirds our sense of self, how “we” know ourselves—and Baldwin's slip-sliding “we” is as complicated and implicating as Alexander's use of the pronoun.Footnote 8 That “we,” when too easily at peace, can uphold and renew systemic racism. As Rankine puts it, “peace” is not the point; reparations are:
If we widen the cultural aperture and literary horizon by which we view the pandemic, it becomes clearer that, for many, COVID-19 is not the only or primary galvanizing or defining moment of this era; it was the protests over George Floyd's murder and the too long history of Black lives taken through police and other state-sanctioned abuse. After all, the BLM movement is a response to the egregious loss of life disproportionately Black and of color due to systemic inequities, disingenuous equivocations, and outright lies that pushed the wrecking-ball swing of the pandemic in the United States. The pandemic was not just contemporaneous with the BLM movement; it was yet another symptom of the reason for the protests. By now we are overweary of the early platitudes about the virus leveling all racial, gender, and socioeconomic difference, about the virus pointing up our shared humanity that transcended all those differences (an argument usually advanced in lockstep with anti-affirmative-action legislation). All that cant was quickly dropped in the flood of undeniable data showing the glaring differential impact of COVID-19 as the pandemic both exposed and amplified inequities from disparities in every sector of public and private life. Anti-Blackness was literally a COVID-19 accelerator as the initial federal approach denied the virus's reach and cultivated indifference to the fact that the exposure and morbidity rates of frontline workers were disproportionately high among people of color and low-income people. But there's no need to “rehearse the bloody catalogue,” as Baldwin puts it (“James Baldwin”); rather, there needs to be an acknowledgment of the wholly different “systems of reality” that people are living within, segregated yet interdependent realities informed by “assumptions which are held so deeply” that human beings are “scarcely aware of them.”Footnote 9
That is why Black poetry, more generally, insists there is no return—not through Gorée Island's Door of No Return and not through the contemporary portal to nostalgia for some(one's) “normal.” That prelapsarian longing is driving anger over the removal of Confederate monuments or renaming of sites and buildings, just as it fueled the revisionist historiography of the first full-length feature film, The Birth of a Nation (1915), so infamously praised by then-sitting President Woodrow Wilson as “like … history” written “in lightning.”Footnote 10 We find instead, as poetic counterweight and historical righting, Natasha Trethewey's Native Guard (2006), which recounts the story of the Louisiana Native Guards, the all-black Union Army regiment composed primarily of enlisted former slaves who guarded Confederate prisoners of war. Tracy K. Smith's poetry, especially Wade in the Water (2018), bears witness to the voices of enlisted African Americans in the Civil War.Footnote 11 In that volume, her poem “Declaration”—an “erasure” poem attempting to render extant what is missing from the page—is a declaration of independence from and a meditation on the Declaration of Independence; it represents one of the many poetic historical expansions telling fuller truths.Footnote 12 And that fullness requires confronting the fact that anti-Blackness is not the exception but the norm. That is, the violence of disappearing people and muting voices is a constitutive aspect of this American experiment, in which, as Christina Sharpe puts it, “the ongoing state-sanctioned legal and extra-legal murders of Black people are normative, for this so-called democracy, necessary; it is the ground we walk on” (7). As the poet Amanda Gorman put it in her poem for the inauguration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris: “We've learned that quiet isn't always peace, and the norms and notions of what ‘just’ is isn't always justice” (qtd. in Liu).
In the Wake
What if we think of the time of Black poetry as part of the temporal and experiential “after-life of slavery,” as Saidiya V. Hartman puts it?Footnote 13 The powerful 1619 Project included poetry in its historical telling of the slave trade and the foundations of the United States,Footnote 14 so let us, too, consider the time of poetry as “in the wake” of the “continuous and changing present of slavery's as yet unresolved unfolding,” as Christina Sharpe defines it (14). In her talk at the 2021 MLA Annual Convention's Presidential Plenary, “Black Aesthetics as (a Poetics of) Persistence,” Evie Shockley suggested that the requirements of poetic persistence include endurance of both will and time. On the same panel, Fred Moten argued in “Some Questions regarding the Persistence of (Black) Poetry” that “[t]o be exhausted in and with ‘America’ is inseparable from what it is to persist.”Footnote 15 That acknowledgment and experience of slavery's afterlife is foundational to what Sharpe proposes is “Black being in the wake as a form of consciousness” (14). The aim is “to occupy that grammar, the infinitive, [to] provide another way of theorizing” that deploys all the literal and figural meanings implied by “wakes,” from standing vigil beside the deceased to navigating the living present of the Middle Passage—“Wake: the track left on the water's surface by a ship; the disturbance caused by a body swimming or moved; it is the air currents behind a body in flight; a region of disturbed flow” (3). The conclusion of Rankine's “Weather” suggests a reckoning with that inclement legacy:
In fact, the poem enacts the kind of wakefulness that Sharpe argues is a practice most evident in Black expressive cultures that do not posit political or aesthetic resolutions but address the impossibility of resolving the “legacies of slavery's denial of Black humanity” (14), citing in particular the works of the poets and poet-novelists M. NourbeSe Philip, Dionne Brand, and Kamau Braithwaite. I would include also Audre Lorde, whose 1977 manifesto, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” insists that poetry is an act of Black survival, “a vital necessity of our existence”:
For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. … [I]f what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core—the fountain—of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds. (645)
This “woke-work,” as Sharpe calls it, can be transformative: “Living … in the wake of slavery, in spaces where we were never meant to survive, or have been punished for surviving, and for daring to claim or make space for something like freedom, we yet transform spaces for and practices of an ethics of care (as in repair, maintenance, attention), an ethics of seeing, and of being in the wake as consciousness” (131). The last line of Alexander's “One week later in the strange” similarly points to the work of care, of seeing, of attending, of claiming freeing sites—“awakening us to the open space / now everywhere surrounding.”
Those awakenings to the “open space” that the poem suggests Clifton made possible—the invitation to take up space—extend to efforts to take over, or, maybe better, to take back, the poetry industry itself. Along with the other global institutional reckonings underway, the resignation of the white male leadership (both the president and the board chair) of the wealthy and influential Poetry Foundation, which publishes Poetry magazine, occurred following scathing criticism in an open letter signed by over 2,100 poets decrying what was widely perceived as the foundation's tepid statement in response to the BLM movement and citing many other failures to address institutional racism or support antiracist, diversity-equity-and-inclusion efforts within the organization (“Letter”; Schuessler).Footnote 16 The Academy of American Poets created the series Poem-a-Day, curated by Black poets, in direct response to the BLM movement, an act applauded by Tracy K. Smith for its effort to “make space in the everyday racket for something as meaningful as a poem” (“Poem-a-Day”).Footnote 17 These are not simply petitions to make space for a seat at the table but an upending of the table itself.
One of the primary functions of these challenges to business as usual in the world(s) of poetry is the recentering of Black contribution to the world. In “One week later in the strange,” for instance, the implicating “our,” we,” and “us” make clear that those gathered are historical actors (seers, tellers, keepers). In the poem, those gathered are not explicitly raced, but neither are they deracialized, and the poem's call to duty, as I suggested earlier, offers a particular signal to those of African descent, and especially of a certain generation.Footnote 18 The poem is not a call for racial revolution or for what was commonly termed in the twentieth century “racial uplift”—even if it is uplifting. But within African American literary history, the poem's calling on and up of—one by one with the incantation of “now”—doers who see, anchor, grace-note tell, keep, spread, open holds special significance. This “we” makes and marks history. Like those evoked in Langston Hughes's “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” the “we” in Alexander's poem are central to world making.Footnote 19 That is, they are not “outside the groove of history,” in the words of Ellison's invisible man (335), nor are they “a leftover from history” (Wilson 57), which Toledo, the August Wilson character in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, proclaims has been the fate of the “colored man.”Footnote 20
The time of poetry, then, takes up space but also literally takes up time both in history and in our present. The time of poetry challenges what Julius B. Fleming, Jr., calls the space-time imperative—the “violent structure of time at the heart of global modernity that I call black patience. By this I mean an abiding historical demand for black people to wait: whether in the hold of the slave ship, on the auction block, or for emancipation from slavery.”Footnote 21 The resistant space-time of Black poetry participates in the subtle subversiveness of “CP time”—what used to be called colored people's time. Originally a white slight by slave owners or overseers annoyed by the slowness and lateness of the labor of their chattel, CP time became a form of Black resistance by those taking their time, taking back time. And as I suggested at the outset, Black poetry clocks out from pandemic timetables that, in tracing the rise and fall of infection rates, seem at times only to portend a flatlining, a plummet back down to the status quo.
Whose People? What Nation?
“What time is it?” was a popular refrain by artists and activists of the Black Arts Movement, a question posed to a crowd who would respond, “It's nation time!”Footnote 22 The presidential inaugural poems by Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Alexander, and Amanda Gorman suggest that there is a sense now of the possibility of a new “nation time”—not the Black nationalism imagined by Baraka and others, nor the alt-right white nationalism increasingly mainstreamed. Rather, these poems and their national performance contribute to the project of creating a certain kind of “we the people,” a national family that acknowledges the humanity of people of color.
Known as the “negro national anthem,” James Weldon Johnson's “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (1900), set to music by his brother, Rosalind Johnson, in 1905, joins in many ways with Angelou's “On the Pulse of Morning” (1993), Alexander's “Praise Song for the Day” (2009), and Gorman's “The Hill We Climb” (2021) to posit a usable past in which people of color are foundational to, if not founding members of, the country. Johnson's lines “May we forever stand, / True to our God, / True to our native land” claim Black people as America's native sons, a chosen people whose trials signal their right to be and be here.Footnote 23 Similarly, Angelou's chant of belonging—“Here, root yourselves beside me”—Alexander's embrace of “Love beyond marital, filial, national” (“Praise Song”), and Gorman's alliterative insistence on “a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man” all reflect an effort to make a people into a nation. These affirmations are not the same as the usual presidential inaugural calls to come together as a nation in the face of trial and division, not so easily the “day of renewal and resolution,” as President Biden put it at his own inauguration (qtd. in Sundby).Footnote 24
After all, these are poetic feats of faith addressing (yet again) the challenge to reconcile being Black and being American—“two warring ideals,” as Du Bois put it (Excerpt 689)—poignant because their performance is given with the full understanding that this “American experiment,” as the actor and producer Sterling K. Brown said recently, “never had me in mind. It never had me in mind.” Yet these inaugural recitations do put Black people top of mind, put Black people atop the National Mall. It is a mistake to see these poetic performances as mere token gestures of inclusion, regardless of the no-doubt many motivations behind the invitation to recite at the inauguration. For the poetry readings are enormous public stagings in their own right, become part of the ceremonial transfer of great power. They are performances of consequence—most especially because the poets know they stand in the wake of the country's original sin. To close with a return to my reading of Alexander's “One week later in the strange,” these poets stand in that liminal moment of national mourning. On an always bitter-chill 20 January, they are testimonial incarnate to a Black presence so often under erasure. And their poems enact that necessary unsettling, the “strange / exhilaration” ushering in the “cold wind of generational shift / … stinging our cheeks.”
Natasha Trethewey, a former United States Poet Laureate (2012–14), is the author of five collections of poetry as well as works of nonfiction and a memoir. Her many national awards and honors include the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). Currently the Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University, she has also served as the poetry editor for The New York Times Magazine (2014–15) and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; in 2019 she was elected to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets. This interview is drawn from written correspondence from 5 March 2021 and a conversation recorded on 11 March 2021 and has been edited for clarity and length.
Michele Elam: As a cochair of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Commission on the Arts, you were involved in a project sponsored by the academy and PBS for Martin Luther King Day 2021—a crowdsourced poem curated by you and inspired by Margaret Walker's classic 1937 poem, “For My People.” The “people” in that original poem are understood to be of the African diaspora. The project, “Remix: For My People” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L_uPOaYGOE&feature=emb_logo), includes submissions written by and about people of many different backgrounds. Can you share your thinking about that choice and about the (re)vision of “my people” to, as you say, “our people,” given the cultural weight of those expressions?
Natasha Trethewey: Often we are told that poetry by African Americans is only universal inasmuch as it transcends Black experience—an idea that is as myopic as it is rooted in white supremacy. I was drawn to the idea of building on Walker's poem as the bedrock of American experience—the center of it, not the margins. Always in the back of my mind are James Baldwin's words: “the story of the negro in America is the story of America.” Building outward from there you can tell a fuller version of American history. Walker's poem suggests the openness, the democratic vistas we associate with Whitman. She writes of a people “trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people, / all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations.” In that way, the poem invites us to respond from our own individual perspectives in order to contribute to the collective, which is fundamental to our participation as citizens.
ME: You raise the issue of citizen participation. How does poetry participate in social movements like the 2019–20 peaceful protests and institutional reckonings across the country?
NT: Many of the stanzas submitted by various people around the country illustrate that participation. One woman [Andrea P., Monticello, AR] in “Remix” recorded a video about voting to accompany her stanza about “holding God and voting close.” In it she contrasts “beautiful fields with monstrous prisons.” And isn't this America, in that juxtaposition—in rural communities where the beauty of the landscape is marred by monuments of the carceral state looming large in the background? The people there, as she reminds us, “holding God and voting close,” are those for whom these two things are of the utmost importance—and are linked. Black churches have been sites where people would gather to go to the polls—“Souls to the polls”—and now, in many places (Georgia, for example), Republicans are trying to get rid of Sunday voting because they know that's how Black voters are going to mobilize.
ME: You have mentioned that you see that one of the social functions of poetry is pedagogical, an invitation for creative expression, especially for young people. Can you elaborate?
NT: I had been thinking for a long time about Walker's poem as a way to create a collaborative, participatory experience for schoolchildren in which they would be invited to respond by writing stanzas about their own diverse American communities in order to create a kind of American epic, a collective of voices. Because research suggests that people's lives—the outcomes in terms of health and happiness—are improved by participation in the arts, whether it means going to a museum, attending a concert or a play, reading a poem or writing one. I imagine a tool kit based on Walker's poem that teachers could use.
ME: Do you think there is something about this time of poetry that invites communal expression? Do you see a shift from a perhaps more singular voice (even one that might be “representing”) to a chorus or compendium like the one you brought together?
NT: Rather than the individual voice, I think “Remix” amplifies the shared human experience; it amplifies the collective American voice—which is made up of so many diverse voices—reminding us not that we are different but how we are alike in our shared human need for community, justice, mercy, sanctuary. From the very beginning, I wanted the project of “Remix” to be an invitation for everyone to contribute to its making—a way to document and make a lasting record of our contemporary American moment, one that we could continue to add to as our shared story evolves.
ME: James Baldwin said in “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare” that people are not responsible to poets; instead, poets are responsible to people. What do you see as a poet's responsibility?
NT: As Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” They bear witness and record the cultural history of people. And in a moment of national and global grieving, poems offer refuge for us, solace.
ME: You say that poems bear witness, record history, offer refuge—all in the same way during a pandemic?
NT: As you say in your essay, it's a pandemic in the time of poetry. Poetry is always doing these things, but what does it mean if we have a pandemic in the midst of what poetry is always doing? I think of a poem by Lisel Mueller, “When I am asked,” which begins like this: “When I am asked / how I began writing poetry / I talk about the indifference of nature.” The poem goes on to describe the summer days following the death of her mother, how they go on with the sun shining and flowers blooming as if nothing had happened. The poem ends “I … placed my grief / in the mouth of language / the only thing that would grieve with me.” Right now, we are witnessing that indifference of nature which feels so cruel as this pandemic rages on, killing so many people, rendering so many others isolated and alone. And yet we can find some solace in the language of a poem, in the way that poems can remind us that we are not alone, that grief is shared and that, across time and space, people have felt and endured what we are feeling and enduring. Another poem I think of is Lucille Clifton's “won't you celebrate with me”—these lines in particular: “come celebrate / with me that everyday / something has tried to kill me / and has failed”—that might as well be the anthem for the pandemic. It articulates our human struggle, and our survival.
