June Jordan (Left) and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Right)

In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I thought I would briefly discuss June Jordan‘s unusual tribute poem, “In Memoriam: Martin Luther King, Jr.”

“In Memoriam . . .” is not a typical memorial poem.  It begins with a rush of chaotic terror:

“honey people murder mercy U.S.A.
the milkland turn to monsters teach
to kill to violate pull down destroy
the weakly freedom growing fruit
from being born

America”

“tomorrow yesterday rip rape

exacerbate despoil disfigure

crazy running threat the

deadly thrall

appall belief dispel

the wildlife burn the breast

the onward tongue

the outward hand

deform the normal rainy

riot sunshine shelter wreck

of darkness derogate

delimit blank

explode deprive

assassinate and batten up

like bullets fatten up

the raving greed . . .”

“wild reversal hearse rehearsal

bleach the blacklong lunging

ritual of fright insanity and more

deplorable abortion

more and

more”

The clipped anaphora of “more and / more” deposits us at an ominous juncture.  Jordan does not say what “more” modifies, but we can guess.  We sense that what is to come will only be an escalation of the violence previously depicted.  We can read “more and / more” in a couple of ways:  from one angle, it could be an indication that what follows the poem is so grotesque as to be unspeakable (or that the speaker herself has been silenced and forbidden to tell any more); on the other hand, if we are to think of “more and / more” as a dangling modifier rather than as one that has been clipped from the idea it is modifying, “more and / more” could imply a sense of exhaustion on the part of the speaker (i.e. that the perpetration of injustice has become so normalized as to make it mundane, and no longer worthy of further description).  And yet, one must not forget that as the poet, Jordon has a level of agency not available to the voices contained within her poem.  June Jordan is the outside agent who cuts off the poem at “more and / more” before its universe can spiral even further out of control.  In a way, then, the practice of craft allows Jordan to participate in a kind of textual or virtual activism.  Ending the poem here not only allows for a dramatic pause that gives the troubling picture she’s painted room to resonate, but also posits her (the poet) as a barrier against the onslaught of vitriol in much the same way that “STOP” operates at the end of Section I.

How, then, does Jordan’s piece serve as a “Memoriam”?  It is not, in the traditional sense, an elegy; nor does it provide a retrospective summary of King’s accomplishments.  Certainly, none of it is addressed directly to King or to his memory. But in a way, Jordan does pay tribute to King’s legacy by reenacting, in poetic form, his ultimate act: stopping a bullet with his chest.  In losing his life, King gave credence to the ideas he’d espoused.  His death became a rallying cry for many, just as in life, he’d called others to action by crying out “STOP” in the face of the injustice he saw swirling around him.  The poem’s two movements—a stop, and stop again—seem to envision a cycle, in which the first act of crying out “STOP” makes possible the subsequent termination of the “insanity” and “deplorable abortion” in Section II before “more / and more” can come to fruition.  Jordan’s speaker has no illusions about the state of the world in which we live — King’s work did not cause a complete end to racial inequality in America.  We still live in a nation riddled with injustice.  But the impact of King’s legacy is such that he did, for at least an instant, cause a hiccup, a disruption in the field that made people pause (even if uncomfortably so), and take note.  And his cry of “STOP,” which resonated in the nation’s consciousness long after his body had succumbed to a bullet, has helped to enable later voices to cry “STOP” as the struggle for social justice continues.

To read Jordan’s “In Memoriam: Martin Luther King, Jr.” in its entirety, click here.

* * *

June Jordan is not the only poet whose reflections we’d recommend to you on this day of celebrating Dr. King’s legacy. A wealth of other poems that have been written about, or which were important to, the Civil Rights Movement have also been collected on the web.  Here are a just a few sites that we thought were particularly interesting:

• The web site Civil Rights Movement Veterans has a great collection of Movement-related poems, organized by rough chronological periods (“from” and “about” the Movement, and “forerunners”).  There’s a lot on the site, including some very famous poems by Johnson, Hughes, and Cullen, but I was especially moved by the private act of escape into the imagination depicted in Gregory Orr’s Solitary Confinement.
• Still more poems of note can be found by using the “Poems About Race” category in the Poetry Foundation‘s Poetry Tool (under “poems,” select “By Category” –> “Social Commentary” –> “Race”).
• And if you are interested in checking out Dr. King’s own words, the King Institute at Stanford University has an extensive selection of his correspondence and speeches on the multimedia section of its web site.

Martin Luther King, Jr. (Lib. of Congress, via Wikipedia)

Martin Luther King, Jr. would have been 81 years old today.  I wanted to do a prompt this week which engaged thoughtfully (in some way) with his legacy—with the work that he began and which continues today—and so I was pleased to stumble upon Laura Gamache’s lesson plan, “The Right to Inquire” (on the Teachers & Writers Collaborative’s web site), in which she uses poetry as a means to link the questions about equality raised by the Civil Rights Movement with contemporary racial injustice for a group of children two generations removed from MLK’s era.  In her three-part exploration, Gamache juxtaposed the big, outspoken rhetoric of the challenges raised in Langston Hughes’ poem, “Let America Be America Again” with the much-quoted rhetoric of Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus” and asked her students to write poems that engaged in different ways with questions about the slippery relationship between what we imagine or idealize as “freedom,” and the reality of the matter.

In may ways, I think that Gamache’s title, “The Right to Inquire,” touches a vein at the heart of the struggle for social justice as it continues today.  Who has the right to raise difficult questions, or questions that nobody wants to hear?  And who will have the courage to do so?  In reading Hughes’ poem myself, I was struck not only by the questions that he raises (“Who said the free? Not me? /Surely not me? The millions on relief today? / The millions shot down when we strike? / The millions who have nothing for our pay?”), but also by the broad claims that he lays to the voices of those who (ought to) have the right to freedom, in order to argue that America has not been “itself,” or has not met its own precious standard of liberty, in which the call to equality rings foremost:

“I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek–
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean–
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today–O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.”

Inspired by this, I decided to experiment with using uncomfortable political questions to frame the shape of a poem.  I challenged myself to riff off the question of ownership (Whose is America?  Who can lay claim to being American?) and ended up using a form similar to the one called for in the “Questions Without Answers” prompt that Mia posted back in December.  Having just returned from a trip to France, where I was asked over and over again, “Where are you from?” (sometimes multiple times by the same person) I was reminded of the way in which the racial attributes of my physical appearance precede me everywhere I go, mapping me indelibly onto the geography of Asia despite my American birth and citizenship.  Whether I’m in London, Paris, New York, or even in San Francisco (I was once asked very loudly by a fellow passenger in SFO whether I spoke English), my face reads universally as “foreign,” appearing to betray the claim that I profess to hold on American culture, my status as an American citizen, the English language.   That the “perpetual foreigner” stereotype (and general xenophobia) still continues to be a subconscious factor in how we perceive the parameters of American national identity today begs the question of how far we have yet left to go in reaching the ideal that Hughes challenges Americans to meet.  The Chinese Exclusion Act may have been repealed, attempts (arguably paltry ones) may have been made at redress for Japanese American internment, but still, a Singaporean family friend of mine is stopped by the NJ Hwy Patrol and told to “go back to where you came from,” Congress speculates about putting up a wall to keep out Mexican immigrants, a Philadelphia business owner puts up a sign declaring that “This is AMERICA: WHEN ORDERING ‘SPEAK ENGLISH,’” protesters turn “tea parties” meant to express their concerns about national healthcare policy into an opportunity to express their discomfort with the President’s mixed race ancestry (questioning his American birth and citizenship because of his middle name), and Bo Deitl throws a barb at Katie Couric by announcing on national television that “She looks like a Halloween cartoon.  She’s got her eyes pulled so far, she’s starting to look Chinese . . . Ten years ago, she looked American. Today she is an Oriental.” Whose is America, then?  Who can claim this country?  Are we still a nation in which the privilege of citizenship is only “fully” claimable by a certain kind of person?

This week’s prompt is therefore as follows:

Prompt: Write a poem that frames itself in terms of a challenge to an uncomfortable political question.

And here is (at least the start of) my attempt:

Who

told you that
I was born a stranger?
Was it the fleshy plain
of my nose, bearing
its flaps of nostrils
with bridgeless
timidity, or perhaps
my eyes, their creaseless
brown, opaque, with irids
bleeding into muddy
apertures?  Tell me,
please, which one
spoke out of turn,
delivered up a map
spilled out of joint,
forgot both provenance
and ruler:  Tongue,
which never scrolled
its buds against
another grammar,
legs wound tight
in soil fine and bled out
clean as this?

As usual, we invite you to share excerpts of your own attempts at this exercise in the comments below.

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."