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angele ellis, Disability, Female Poets, Gender, Race, White Gardenia Poetry Press, Woman writers
What is poetry?/Angele Ellis/Reader for Equanimity: The Peacemakers’ Poetry Series
What is poetry? To me, poetry is not merely a means of expression, but also a magical word trail to new ways of thinking, perceiving, and feeling…a slow, winding process of exploring and transforming ideas and life experiences.
In 1997, Corwin/Sage Press published Dealing With Differences: Taking Action on Class, Race, Gender, and Disability, a “diversity workbook” I co-authored with Marilyn Llewellyn (now professor and acting chairperson of Carlow University’s School of Education). In this first book, I explored in a compressed form things I’d learned in nearly 15 years of activism—as protester, organizer, student, and teacher/facilitator in the River City Nonviolent Resistance Campaign and The Pittsburgh Peace Institute. These lessons were combined with Marilyn’s knowledge and expertise, and our shared project—development and evaluation of a pilot program on prejudices and differences with a local high school.
Dealing With Differences includes “Lunch Break” by poet and disabilities activist Laura Hershey (1962-2010). Hershey, who had muscular dystrophy and used a wheelchair, was eating lunch at a women’s conference in Nairobi, Kenya, with a friend assisting her, when another American woman asked to take her photograph. The last lines of “Lunch Break” serve as an epigraph to my reading for Equanimity: The Peacemakers’ Poetry Series on 6/14/12:
…I will join the gallery
of those captured in the photographer’s
empty frame
and bare vision—
the Masai, Luo, Kikuyu,
the Navaho, Pueblo, Sioux
the Amish
the Eskimo, the Gypsy
the children
the old, the dark, the poor
the native islander, the Oriental
and “Woman”—
not born exotic, but made so
by collectors’ frozen images.
And in these frames, these photographs
of random, nameless, faces,
we all know why
so many of us are frowning.
From “Lunch Break,” 1994. © Estate of Laura Hershey.
If we are to create photographs or works in any medium that do not steal the souls from their subjects, we must be willing to go deeper and farther with our art. In “Federal Building,” from my first book of poems, Arab on Radar (Six Gallery, 2007), I was trying not only to capture moments in history and position them in the time stream, but to strike a variety of emotional tones in visual images, from euphoria to wry caution. This poem was reprinted in a wide-ranging anthology of peace poems, Come Together: Imagine Peace (Bottom Dog, 2010).
FEDERAL BUILDING
I enter through security as taxpayer,
the needle’s eye of citizenship. Bag on the table,
keys in a plastic container that could hold mail
or explosives. The only way in and out.
I remember with strained nostalgia
the protests of the eighties —
South Africa, Nicaragua, El Salvador,
the sit-ins at congressional offices,
the time we rode up and down the elevators
with our leaflets until the guards nabbed us
and threw us out. And that last time,
the sit-in during Desert Storm,
suspended between freedom and arrest,
swimming in ether like exotic fish
while our friends pressed against the aquarium glass
with hopeful signs
as if we could change history, levitate the building
like Abbie Hoffman tried with the Pentagon.
Now we are lucky to stand unmolested
on the public sidewalk,
the thin edge of the wedge of democracy.
From Arab on Radar, 2007 (Six Gallery). © Angele Ellis.
Next—also from Arab on Radar—is a poem I rarely read, because it stems from sheer outrage. In July 2006, after border skirmishes with Hezbollah, Israel began a full-scale bombing of Lebanon. Among those trapped and imperiled for a month were 25,000 American citizens—some residing in Lebanon, others making annual visits to relatives and friends. The U.S. government—unlike governments of other nations—was initially indifferent and even hostile toward rescuing these individuals, who included my uncle, a university administrator and scholar. In addition, my heart was wrenched for Lebanon and for my Lebanese cousins and friends whose newly rebuilt country was being destroyed yet again. The bombings killed over 1,300 Lebanese, and displaced close to a million. The poem’s title is borrowed from the late journalist Anthony Shadid, who died of an asthma attack while covering the revolution in Syria in February 2012.
HYPHENATED COMPLEXITIES
Are you a full American?
asked the journalists,
counting the students
fresh off the boat
from blasted Beirut.
Uncomfortable pause
raised eyebrow
slight of hand.
Next in this
gavotte of opposites:
Why would you go there?
What did you expect?
Then the story
cut to its Procrustean lead:
Arab-Americans, Muslim-Americans
crowded belated ships
for which we tried to make them pay
held up their passports
cried out loud for their cousins
while we said they were crying for themselves.
The Man Without A Country
knew he was in exile, but what of them?
Are you a full American?
or are you –
From Arab on Radar, 2007 (Six Gallery). © Angele Ellis.
Are you a full American? This question echoes today from the White House to our borders to our streets. The next poem, from my 2011 chapbook, Spared (Main Street Rag), has its genesis in the years I spent in Philadelphia after college. It was the first time I’d lived among large numbers of homeless people—many suffering from mental illness and addiction—surviving outside in all weathers.
PHILADELPHIA PSALM
In this city of love, my friend gives away gloves
all winter. She cannot bear the freezing hands
of the old woman bound in rags who twists
a scrap of mirror this way and that—worrying
her reflection, scraping consciousness sore.
I march to work down Twelfth Street, catching
my wavering self in glimpses, black-coated ghost
in every tableau of plenty. A blade of recognition,
like the ragged woman’s shard—beggar at the gates
of the palace, cardboard carpet on her concrete floor.
I read about a boy who turned from the holiday display
at Wanamaker’s, that forty-foot quilt of electric bloom.
He saw the homeless city in an invisible cage.
Dreaming of suffering windows, he begged for release.
His van of mercy opens, and gloved hands receive more.
Christmas bells ring out silver changes. I pass
the man who hoards pennies for pints of Mad Dog—
imagining his scaled overcoat shedding like snakeskin,
a neon eclipse over the Adam ‘n Eve Lounge.
Radiance in an urban garden, this field of apple cores.
From Spared, 2011 (Main Street Rag). © Angele Ellis.
In the next poem, I use a formal type of verse—the pantoum, which repeats lines in a specific pattern to create a tone of elegy. “Josseline of the Desert”—as yet uncollected, but a runner-up in the 2011 Shine Journal poetry contest—is a recreation of a true story. There are two coyotes in this poem—the mercenary coyote who brings immigrants across the U.S. border, abusing and sometimes abandoning them—and the Coyote who is a mythological hero or trickster.
JOSSELINE OF THE DESERT
in memory of Josseline Hernandez Quinteros, 1994-2008
They found her with the things she carried—
sandals stretched like tendons without meat,
faded backpack blushing at the seam,
rough feet swollen like a canyon stream.
Sandals stretched like tendons without meat,
swept from Salvador into the border dust.
Rough feet swollen like a canyon stream.
Stay here, barked the coyote, prodding the rest.
Swept from Salvador into the border dust,
she heard a trickle between sizzling waves.
Stay here, barked the coyote, prodding the rest—
she clung to that, one slender breathing thread.
She heard a trickle between sizzling waves
as frail bones took her down the rocky slide.
She clung to that, one slender breathing thread,
and knelt to scoop the desert water free.
As frail bones took her down the rocky slide,
horizon was her brother, moving on.
She knelt to scoop the desert water free.
The sun still beat, although her heart grew still.
Horizon was her brother, moving on.
Somewhere her mother’s voice was calling her.
The sun still beat, although her heart grew still,
and felt the fierce Coyote growling, come.
Somewhere her mother’s voice was calling her
when friends trekked backward to the broken stream.
She felt the fierce Coyote growling, come,
eyes shut tight to the dazzle over everything.
When friends trekked backward to the broken stream–
faded backpack blushing at the seam,
eyes shut tight to the dazzle over everything.
They found her with the things she carried.
From The Shine Journal, 2011. © Angele Ellis.
The next poem is a prose poem, also from Spared. Its impetus was to train the reader’s gaze on how practices such as torture become institutionalized. “Manual Operation” also draws on the five years I spent as a full-time business and technical writer.
MANUAL OPERATION
Remember: It is an organic machine, whatever it tries to tell you. Your goal is to prompt it to break down. Think of yourself as operating behind a screen of authority, on which you appear to it as an all-powerful shadow. Power, applied steadily, will elicit confession of any offense on the list (see Attachment A).
It left the sea too long ago to siphon oxygen from water. Submerge it for one minute, and it will panic. Another method is to deprive it of sleep: it needs the unconscious illusions of dreams for reasons not fully explained. After a number of hours—varying by object—it will project these illusions as hallucinations on its cells, it will imagine that it hears terrible voices.
Remember: It is an organic machine, whatever it tries to tell you. Tears, blood, mucus, waste—these are indicators of your success. When you have reached the terminal stage of the experiment, it will no longer respond to commands. Return it to the manufacturer in suitable packaging: pine box, urn, unmarked grave. Flag of surrender is optional.
From Spared, 2011 (Main Street Rag). © Angele Ellis.
My final poem for Equanimity: The Peacemakers’ Poetry Series is a new poem in progress. “What the Dead Do” is inspired by Marie Howe’s powerful, much anthologized poem “What the Living Do,” which in turn was inspired by the death of her brother John of AIDS in 1989. I am struck by John Howe’s words to his sister—which I use as my poem’s epigraph—as much as by the form of Howe’s elegy.
WHAT THE DEAD DO (after Marie Howe)
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is a choice—John Howe
John, you stayed everywhere but in your body, leaving your sister your runic wisdom.
And the virus that colonized you captured my old friend Louis—home in Syracuse
when he told his mother, Don’t worry Ma, it’s alright, his last words bleeding into coma.
It’s summer again: the clouds a soft, reflective white, and the sunlight rests on them
like some screening-room version of heaven, but my window’s fogged up and I can’t open it.
For weeks now, writing bills or stepping off the curb into a puddle (clouds breaking),
I’ve been thinking: this is what the dead do for us. The hot-coffee pain of my tears
is inevitable, but I’ll refuse to dress it in dark frills of suffering, a doll
clutched pathetically to my breast—not when you and Louis and the others went
into the fathomless night like that: planning, insisting that your lives were happy.
This is it. Yes. You gave up yearning, as I will learn to do when yearning goes too deep.
Of course we want the summer to last forever and ever. Of course we want every
Hershey’s kiss, scoops and scoops of sweet joy always brimming over our glasses.
Waiting. Waiting for that call, bright klaxon signaling an ice cream truck or a lover.
But there are moments, pacing, when I catch a glimpse of someone else in the spotted mirror,
say, like a window into isolation, and I’m gripped by wonder
at the young men that you were, will always be, and I’m speechless:
you are dead. But your words ride the air.
June 2012 © Angele Ellis.
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