As
you might imagine, I have been reading a ton of poetry this month in search of writers
and verse. No matter how much you enjoy it, it can
be numbing after a while. Yesterday, for instance, I was frazzled and growing a little desperate in the search. I wanted to find someone new, someone frankly
completely outside of my generation
and experience. I was web
surfing almost at random, dismissing much, contemplating what might be good enough to get by. Then I found it. It was one of those rare experiences of
complete electric recognition so
powerful that at my desk, my socks exited my feet at terminal velocity.
I
am embarrassed to say that I was unaware of the work of Krista Franklin, who lives and works in Chicago. Once again I am
reminded of how being exiled to the
distant Pluto of the city in McHenry County at the edge of its solar system, removes me too much from
the vital cultural life of my old city.
Franklin
was born in Dayton, Ohio, which
clearly now has more to brag about than the Wright Brothers. She earned
her B.A. at Kent State, an institution with its own bitter history. There she,
like a generation of young Black women,
was influenced by Nikki Giovanni,
who was featured in this series yesterday
as well as by the whole Black Arts
Movement. In Chicago, I see that she
received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Book and Paper from Columbia College, where I studied
writing back in the Stone Age.
 |
| One of Franklin's stunning collages. |
Franklin
is not only a poet, but a stunning and successful visual artist as well, specializing in dramatic collages that have graced both gallery exhibitions and the covers of several poetry collections, including John
Murillo’s Up Jumps the Boogie and
Lita Hooper’s Thunder in Her Voice
both published in 2010.
In
an interview with the Experimental Arts Examiner, Franklin
said:
Typically my
poems and collages start with an image in my head or a line from something that
evokes a picture in my head, and I work from there. Over the past year I have been
trying to think up ways to connect the poetry to the collages, and I've been
engaged in the work of bringing the two together a little more. I used to think
of them as two separate roads, but now I’m more interested in the places where
those roads converge.
As
a poet Franklin has inherited a tradition that fuses elements of Black culture and identity. Just as Langston
Hughes and the poets of the Harlem Renaissance
made their work sing and swing with jazz, as Gil Scott Heron helped
invent hip hop and Nikki
Giovanni reveled in it, Franklin has the
ear and voice of her generation. But she
also has a vision that pushes all of the expected boundaries. Her work has been identified with Afrofuturism and AfroSurrealism.
Willow Press published her chapbook, Study of Love & Black Body in 2012. Her work has also been widely anthologized
including The Bust Guide to the New Girl Order in 1999, Bum
Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam in 2001, Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating
Cave Canem’s First Decade in 2006, and Haymarket Books’ just released The BreakBeat Poets:
New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop which includes our
featured poem.
By
the way, I found the poem in the April
issue of venerable Poetry which
demonstrates once again that it continues to promote the work of the most promising
and able American poets.
Manifesto, or
Ars Poetica #2
Give me the
night, you beasts hissing over the face of this dead
woman, I climb
into your eyes, looking. To those who would sleep
through the
wounds they inflict on others, I offer pain to help them
awaken, Ju-Ju,
Tom-Toms & the magic of a talking burning bush.
I am the queen
of sleight of hand wandering the forest of motives,
armed with
horoscopes, cosmic encounters & an X-Acto knife. My
right eye is a
projector flickering Hottentot & Huey Newton, my
left eye is
prism of Wild Style, gold grills, lowriders, black dahlias,
blunts &
back alleys. At twenty-one, I stood at the crossroad of Hell
& Here, evil
peering at me behind a blue-red eye. I armed myself
with the
memories of Pentecostal tent revivals, apple orchards, the
strawberry
fields I roamed with my mother & aunts in the summer,
& the
sightings of UFO lights blinking in the black of an Ohio
nightsky. I am a
weapon. I believe in hoodoo, voodoo, root workers,
Dead Presidents,
Black Tail, Black Inches & Banjees. I believe in the
ghosts of 60
million or more & black bones disintegrating at the
bottom of the
Atlantic, below sea level, Not Just Knee Deep. I believe
that children
are the future: love them now or meet them at dusk
at your
doorstep, a 9mm in their right hand & a head noisy as a
hornet’s nest
later. Your choice.
Black, still, in
the hour of chaos, I believe in Royal Crown, Afro-Sheen,
Vaseline,
Jergens & baby powder on breasts, the collective conscious,
cellular memory,
Public Enemies, outlaws, Outkast, elevations,
“Elevators”
& Encyclopedia Britannica. Under my knife, El-Hajj Malik
El-Shabazz
laughs with Muhammad Ali, a Lady named Day cuddles
with a Boxer
named Mister after traumatically stumbling on strange
fruit dangling
from one of the most beautiful Sycamores evah. Under
my knife,
Marilyn Monroe enjoys an evening out with Ella Fitzgerald,
meanwhile, Life
shows me a gigantic photo. I am a weapon. I chart
voyages of
unlove, high on a man called crazy who turns nigger into
prince. I
believe in Jong, Clifton, “Dirty Diana” & Dilla, paper, scrilla,
green, gumbo,
coins, Batty Bois & Video Vixens. I believe that beads
at the ends of
braids are percussive instruments in double Dutch.
In the
reflection of my knife, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington &
Thelonious Monk
argue in a Basquiat heroin nod. I am a weapon.
I believe in
goo-gobs of deep brown apple butter, alphabets, Alaga
Syrup,
Affrilachians, A-salaam Alaikum, Wa-Alaikum-Salaam,
& African
Hebrew Israelites. I believe in Octoroons, Quadroons,
Culluds, Cooley
High, Commodores, Krumpin, Krunk & Burn,
Hollywood, Burn.
I am Sethe
crawling a field toward freedom with a whitegirl talking
about velvet. I
believe in tumbleweaves, hot combs & hair lyes, Chaka
Khan, Shaka
Zulu, Mau Mau, Slum Village & Buhloone Mindstate:
“Empty your
mind, be formless, shapeless. Like water.” I believe
in water. My
body is pulp. I bleed ink. I believe in the Fantastic, Vol.
2, The Low End
Theory, Space Is the Place & The Hissing of Summer
Lawns. Tucked in
the corner of my right ventricle sprouts a Tree of
Knowledge, lives
a Shining Serpent & a middle finger. I’m on a quest
for the
Marvelous. My face is a mask of malehood, malevolence, one
big masquerade.
Metaphysically niggerish, I am a weapon wandering
the forest of
motives, a machete in one hand, a mirror in the other,
searching for
the nearest body of water.
—Krista Franklin
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