Gwendolyn Brooks at her typewriter.

Often, when I look back at the poems that have found their sudden ways to me—the ones that have chosen me in particular, to move through me and onto the page—it is hard to imagine they are related to one another. It is hard to believe the poems that sprawl wide, the poems that play their tricks, the poems that exhume and resurrect, that breathe strange and speak with different tongues, all share a common denominator. It is hard to believe all the differently hued poems I’ve written have come from my own throat, born of the same place but perhaps of a different season, fruit of the same tree perched on a different branch. 

How is one of my poems that sounds like “How Great,” by Chance the Rapper—a song that I love—related to another poem that I would not have written without reading Eve Ewing’s Electric Arches? How is a poem I wrote about my late father’s gold chain related to a poem I only fairly recently discovered?

This is the natural order of being descended from one common lineage, so much of the work I love the poetic offshoot of one common ancestor. Those that have taught me my best lessons have all learned from Gwendolyn Brooks, or have learned from someone who had learned from Brooks. Today, if I squint hard enough, if I ask the right questions, it seems everything—the poems, the music, the seasons—points me back to her. 

*

My poetic lineage is constructed, as I see it, via the long list of all the poems, visions, music, stories, and every syllable of any bit of good language that I’ve encountered in my life. What becomes cardinal in that lineage is the bits that manage to sear my inner skull with their light and bring me new ways of seeing. 

One entry point into my lineage can be found in the poetry of Ross Gay, and more specifically, his poem, “Sorrow Is Not My Name,” and, even more specific still, his line, “My color’s green. I’m Spring.”

I was first assigned Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude while in an undergrad workshop, and I consumed it so quickly I made small gusts of wind as I turned the pages. Gay’s ability to wield the hues of joy made me hunger. His poems taught me how I myself might enter language through the wide threshold of rapture. 

Gay is known to enter delight through many different doors, but in “Sorrow Is Not My Name,” Gay decided the door would be death itself. Death and the many tools it has sharpened and dipped into fire. Death and its claws tapping through the frost on our bedroom windows. I have been in close proximity to the reaper and his wide blade, and so it feels familiar to watch Gay’s speaker name death as it appears throughout the landscape:

just this morning a vulture
nodded his red, grizzled head at me

He names it again as he finds death even closer:

the skeleton in the mirror, the man behind me
on the bus taking notes

And yet, there is delight. There is a sense that Gay’s speaker will surely perish eventually, maybe even soon, but certainly not today, not in this particular poem. Today, Gay’s speaker feels only delight rupturing through his body. 

…yeah, yeah.
But look; my niece is running through a field
calling my name.

The speaker remembers, almost like a prayer, that their name is not endued with sorrow. And thus, the poem ends with a line that has clogged the cogs of my thinking; clogged them with glee:

I remember. My color’s green. I’m spring.  

Read More

Ottilie Mulzet on how her adoptive heritage lead her to a life of and in translation.

Learning a language is a kind of practice, as anyone who’s ever learned one will tell you. It has its own drills, milestones, peaks, and valleys. Its own rituals, such as repeating phrases aloud three times so they will register in your ears, the choreography embedded into the interface of tongue and palate. The reverberations echo in your skull—even if forgotten five minutes later, a residue remains. One ploughs through printed dictionaries and delights in their idiosyncrasies, which are missing from the online versions. There are “found poems” in certain dictionary entries. There’s pleasure in the way the language lives on your tongue, in your throat, each language residing there differently.

As someone who, as an adoptee, had to perform identity, I am continually fascinated by the ways identity shifts within, and in between, languages.

*

Growing up, I felt bereft of narrative. English was the language I spoke; Canada’s bilingual policy meant I had cursory French lessons in school, and I heard smatterings of Yiddish from older adoptive relatives (I always wanted to hear more). The notions of “motherland” and “mother tongue” are not anything I relate to. If anything, it was the English words I read that suckled me—but these words weren’t my mother. There were two mothers, one flesh-and-blood and present, the other absent, a vague image. One was Catholic, the other Jewish; one pregnant out of wedlock, the other married. The enforced secrecy of my birth mother’s identity enshrouded her in a taboo from which I recoiled, as from some amorphous void. That void had made me, but it could also swallow me up. I had been “rescued” from it, and what could be more ungrateful or unwise than to go rushing back to the disaster from which you’d just been rescued?

When adoptees choose to search, it is so that their shadowy parents might be granted real-life outlines. If this never happens, the parents remain amorphous, taking up undue space in one’s mind, eternal shape-shifters.

Read More

“Don’t you think it’s funny how now the people making these ads get it?” I say to my best friend, my voice cradling the words “get it” with invisible quotation marks. We’re watching television, something we do together often now, grateful to be in each other’s bubble. “What?” she replies, looking up from her phone. “The models,” I say. “Oh, I know,” she says. We’ve been friends for twenty-eight years. She knows what I mean without my having to explain.

After yet another murder, one salve seemed to be representation. Between announcements of our crumbling democracy and more and more people dying, there were now ads with smiling Black faces. Black girls with crowns of 4c curls. Black women running businesses. Black men walking hand in hand down a suburban street with their Black and biracial daughters. It makes you wonder why Black people had to die in order to see ourselves reflected.

The Thanksgiving issue of The New Yorker features a little Black girl with a blue iris flower in her Afro holding an American flag with her sleeves rolled up. I’m caught off guard by the emotion it elicits. It makes me want to frame it. Keep it and one day show my daughter, if I have one. I stand in my mother’s house looking at the cover and wonder: Why does such a quotidian image make me want to cry? It isn’t just that it’s beautiful in the midst of the year’s chaos and pain. It’s because I can’t help wondering what it might have been like for me and my friend to grow up with images such as this one on a magazine like this one. Perhaps then I wouldn’t have been so caught off guard. The image could just have been beautiful, not uncommon.

Isn’t this what you wanted? That’s what I imagine the executives who made these decisions asking. Yes, but not at this price. I smile at the images, I’m glad for them, but they needn’t have come like this. They should have come before this. Without this. The taste in my mouth is bittersweet. I hate that guilt and corporate desire fuels change, rather than genuine understanding. Because if you understood, it wouldn’t have taken a murder of eight minutes and forty-six seconds to get us here. Read More

Photo: Mairead Small Staid

In the torpor of the past ten months, I’ve found myself missing most those things I rarely did before. I miss the grand galleries of art museums, though the nearest is more than an hour away and trips have always been sporadic. I daydream about travel, about the tenuous camaraderie of the airport screening line, the stratus-brushed horizon beyond the window, the world narrowed to a seat, a tray, a book, a bubble of time removed from the world and set ever so gently aside. What I miss, I think, is less action itself than the likelihood of action—or of accident. Even as the pandemic spans four seasons, some underlying transformation (or its potential) is absent; some kinetic possibility is missing in each changeless change. I miss, I want to say, the cusp of things, even as I know this to be a meager complaint amid the litany of real loss. That needling lack remains. And so, seeking some approximation of museum or airport, I’ve turned to the closest thing I have—my shelves—and there found a book on the work of the Italian artist Max Coppeta.

Piogge sintetiche is the book’s title, Synthetic Rain, and the unit of measure for the work within is the drop, caught upon vertical or horizontal planes. Coppeta’s synthetic rain is made of crystallized liquid, suspended on sheets of glass, paper, wood, methacrylate, or PVC. Rare is the solitary drop; they come in trios or quartets or scattered crowds. I would call them by the collective noun of patter, flung over a black or bronzed or transparent background or, in certain pieces, spread across a line of upright and parallel planes, one drop to each sheet, as if this rain did not fall but fly, its path tracked in glassine intervals like a sleek, modernist update on Muybridge’s birds. Read More

Aerial view of Alexandria, ca. 1929. Photo: Walter Mittelholzer. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

It’s my first Palm Sunday in Rome. The year is 1966. I am fifteen, and my parents, my brother and I, and my aunt have decided to visit the Spanish Steps. On that day the Steps are filled with people but also with so many flowerpots that one has to squeeze through the crowd of tourists and of Romans carrying palm fronds. I have pictures of that day. I know I am happy, partly because my father is staying with us on a short visit from Paris and we seem to be a family again, and partly because the weather is absolutely stunning. I am wearing a blue wool blazer, a leather tie, a long-sleeved white polo shirt, and gray flannel trousers. I am boiling on this first day of spring and dying to take off my clothes and jump into the Roman fountain—the Barcaccia—at the bottom of the Steps. This should have been a beach day, and perhaps this is why the day resonates with me so much.

Two years before, in 1964, we were probably celebrating Sham el Nessim, the Alexandrian spring holiday, which for many of us usually marked the first giddy swim of the year.

But in Rome at the time I am not thinking of Alexandria at all. I’m not even aware that there might be a connection between Rome, this eruption of beach fever, and Alexandria. The yearning to jump into a body of water and drink it whole, and always that search for shaded areas, away from the blazing sun—these are what my body wants, now that the wool I’m wearing is unbearable. Read More