Joy Katz, Why Does a White Girl Get to Write About a Lynched Man?

The photograph** sat on my desk for ten years. (I am a slow writer, but this is the longest it has ever taken me to finish a poem.) Someone sent me the article thinking I’d be interested in the show. I was. I went to the show, but I can’t remember any image except this one.

I am writing this the week after Claudia Rankine’s reading at AWP. In that reading she presented Tony Hoagland’s poem “The Change” and raised an objection to its description of a black woman tennis player, a description that invokes racial stereotypes.

Hoagland’s poem uses stereotypes brutally. By “brutal” I mean that the poem doesn’t comment, except in the artifice of its making, on the fact that it uses them. It declines to sum up for me what I am supposed to feel, or what the writer felt. I am glad for that aspect of the poem; I don't want to be made safe. What white person, even a young white person, even a woman, even now, gets to safely say that she is absolutely not racist?

I tried for a kind of brutality when I wrote this poem. When I write brutally, I never want to attack you. I am writing to discomfort myself. It’s too easy to say I can write about a lynched man because anyone can write about anything. 

It would have been nice—healing?—if i could walk into the chasm between me and the photo, between me and this man. I would like to scoop up something from that space (a shovel full of mud or a rock, in the form of a stanza) and put it down on the page as something I could jump on, and then put down another and jump closer, in order to connect me to this man and bring you closer to the fact of the lynching, but I can’t. There is no path to get me there. I only feel a certain way when I look at the picture. I tried to get close to that.

So I did some wretched (to me they feel wretched) things. I rhymed “mother” and “murder” and I said that a hanging man has an expression. He has a facial expression as much as any corpse has an expression, which is to say doesn’t, because what I call an “expression” is a function of the physical hanging. Anything I say about his face is me imposing an idea about his face onto him. Any metaphor I make is uncomfortable on a million levels, not least because I am a white female, in a different century, eating a sandwich at my desk. I say he looks like a boy looking up at a kite. (When people look at the faces of corpses, they often say they look peaceful in order to comfort themselves or someone else.) His hands are tied behind his back; you could superimpose a photo of a man holding his hands behind his back politely, or with forced politeness. 

When I look at the photo, I am good at being objective while also feeling wretched. (Maybe this is also what the people who sent their neighbors to the gas chambers were good at?) I can concentrate on the composition of the photo because i was trained to do that in design school. The only perfect y-axis is the one the man hangs on. He hangs straight down. You can say an object  is “true” when it hangs plumb. He is true; the other two important compositional elements in the picture are curved (the tree) and skew (the trashy little step he climbed on to get close to the noose). The other "true" object in the poem is a bunch of grapes hanging from a fancy hook you can use to ripen fruit—you put it on your kitchen counter.

I say the tree leans in like a pet. Then I rhyme “pet” and “poet.” In that way, with two steps, hop hop, I jump closer to the man in the picture. I am a living creature. I lean in from where I sit, as the tree leans into the frame.  I mean to be brutal to myself when I ask  “what kind of a poet would say that”—and then I go on to say that there is a sturdiness in the heaviness of how he hangs. There is no one else in the picture. The white men who slung him up are gone. One more made the photograph. Saying the man looks casually abandoned, like a rake, gets at (I hope) that the lynchings were ubiquitous, more functional than remarkable to the people who came to see them. But I also suggest, by my last metaphor, that the man is no more dignified than a tool used for manual labor. It’s an uncomfortable place to leave myself, and you, but it didn’t seem like the poem ought to leave me in a safe place, because the photo doesn’t.

Joy Katz is the author of The Garden Room (Tupelo Press) and Fabulae (Southern Illinois University Press). Recent poems have appeared or will soon in The American Poetry Review, Notre Dame Review, Ploughshares, Cincinnati Review, Blackbird, and elsewhere. Her awards include a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. She teaches in the graduate writing program at the University of Pittsburgh and in the on-the-ground and low-res programs at Chatham University. She lives in Pittsburgh.


Joy's Poem originally appeared in The Notre Dame Review


**Editors Note: Because of the graphic violence of the photo in reference, we've chosen to provide links to an online gallery with an explanation of the image essay:
The Lynching of Joseph Richardson, September 26, 1913 From Without Sanctuary

Douglas Kearney, Black Automation

I need to warn you that I'm really about to gush. Now, I don't mean gush in a girly way, but gush in a deep-book-language-poetry-artsy way.

Doug Kearney is one of the most creative people I've ever met. That says a lot since my life, my career, and my recreation center around creative poetics and prose, and arts and culture. He refers to himself on his web page as Poet/Performer/Librettist/Educator, which in some ways doesn't cover the range of his talent, but more importantly, his skill. He has the visual sense of a graphic artist and the aesthetic consciousness of a painter. He has the ear of a musician. He has the mind of an architect who is also a linguist. He has the spirit of a poet, and the tongue of a storyteller. He has created poetry of the kind I have never, ever seen before, and yet, the work is immediately a delight, sometimes a privilege to be immersed in it.



I'm still gushing, I know, but the bottom line is that there is no limit of respect and awe I hold for this writer. I can say, personally, that I've read this book three times, which is a great testament given that I tell my own students, each term, their goal as writers should be to produce something that their readers are compelled to pick up and read again, to go back to, to remember while they are shopping in the super market, on the train. I imagine, off in California where everything seems a bit magical in some way, his instruction is a gift and his students are some of the luckiest young writers in the country.

His new book Black Automation is a treat for the eye as well as the ear. I cannot imagine being a reader of Contemporary Poetry and not having this text in your collection. Hats off to Fence Books for seeing real talent, and investing in it. I applaud his work, and I'm certainly not the only one, as you'll see if you read on.

I've taken the liberty of excerpting some information from Fence Books and thank them ahead of time for not blacklisting me for doing so (insert smiley here).

THE BLACK AUTOMATON
Douglas Kearney
Winner of the National Poetry Series

From ambivalent animals thriving after Katrina to party chants echoing in a burning city, The Black Automaton troubles rubble, cobbling a kind of life. In this collection bodies at risk seek renewal through violence and fertility, history and myth, flesh and radios.

"First, you have to see Douglas Kearney's visual poems, which cheekily diagram cultural memes as if they were parts of speech (as they are). The Black Automaton has its share of sharp, tender lyrics, too...these exploit the political possibilities of puns and the way meanings hinge on inexact resemblance. Kearney's poems tweak and skewer pop culture and literary sources from Paul Laurence Dunbar to T. S. Eliot to traditional ballads and blues...Kearney's work turns poetic and cultural conventions disquietingly inside out."

—Catherine Wagner

Douglas Kearney's work as a poet, performer and librettist has been featured in many venues in print, in-the-flesh and in digital code. His first book, Fear, Some, was published in 2006 (Red Hen Press). In 2008, he was honored with a Whiting Writers Award. He lives in the Valley with his wife and teaches at California Institute of the Arts. For more info, go to his personal web site: www.douglaskearney.com

"Douglas Kearney's innovative new collection makes me tremble like a "mouth and mind full of fish hooks." It makes me think of the despair at the heart of ecstasy; of restlessness as a kind of anodyne. These poems literally vibrate with Kearney's precocious intellect and passion. They hum, they bang, they bite. This is a jaw-dropping, electrifying book. What else can I say? I have never encountered poetry like this before."

—Terrance Hayes, author of Lighthead and Wind in a Box

"We inhabit a world of automata, complicities, complacencies, sound waves, soundless suggestive sales pitches and blaring lingo-infested jingles, machines, robots, rotgut and gut-wrenching city-burnt silences, slave ships, space ships, straitjackets, samples, metonyms and nimble meta-limbs angling gangly nomenclatures, singularities, consecrations and condemnations, assassinations and ass-backward nations, disgraced antonymic masses of matter jostling in unchosen seas, types in stereo singing syncopated tunes out of time with the lock-step of what we might have been supposed to think. What good is poetry in such a world? No good. Not good, useful: "righteous art is a rod./rods are very useful." The Black Automaton is a whip-smart lightning rod: use it."

—Jen Hofer, author of one and translator of sexoPUROsexoVELOZ+Septiembre (Dolores Dorantes)

"Kearney's poetry flows from a consideration of urban speech, negro spontaneity and book learning not easily parsed if you haven't fully digested every major hiphop lyric composed between 1979 and 1983 and spent a considerable amount of time backtracking the library stacks stuffed with Zora Neale Hurston and Ishmael Reed's neofolkloric trails. The Black Automaton is the graphic afterbirth of a Jeep with a booming system driven at 90 mph into a stack of Bibles, small press journals and the Tibetan Book of the Dead by a man who mistook his mouth for a sledgehammer."

—Greg Tate is a writer/musician currently working on a book about James Brown and is still HNIC of Burnt Sugar, The Arkestra Chamber

Radio

the first black you met was on the radio.

this is true even if you lived with blacks.

the first black to speak the word radio

knew it meant the same as blood.

the first black to know blood meant radio,

claimed radio meant love, to better lure you.

the first black you dreamed about was on the radio

and waited for you there each night to fuck you,

you still believe this and sleep with the radio

on or off; it all depends.

the first blacks to realize they were blacks became radios

at once, singing something that could never be english.

the first black to confess it was a radio

did so to account for the snow filling its voice.

the first black you heard was a radio

and did not speak english even if it did: radios cannot speak.

the first blacks to change radio's

meaning from love back to blood are still here

and want to fuck you. they are doing so on the radio

right now. you don't like it but go to sleep.

Tallahatchie Lullabye, Baby

cattail cast tattles Till tale,

lowing low along the hollow.

crickets chirrup and ribbits lick-up.

what's chucked the 'hatchie swallow.

skin scow skiffs upon pond scum skin

going slow along the hollow.

now may mayfly alight brown brow.

what's chucked the 'hatchie swallow.

maybe bye baby bye baby by and by—

lowing low along the hollow—

we will slip the knot not slip will we?

what's chucked the 'hatchie swallow.

who's a bruise to blue hue 'hatchie,

going slow along the hollow?

who's a bruise to whose hue, 'hatchie?

what's chucked the 'hatchie swallow.

Kodak flash tattles Till tale

going slow among the hollow.

who's a bruise to bruise hue?

swallow what the 'hatchie chucks.

—Emmett Till (1941–1955)