Tiana Clark's 'My Therapist Wants to Know about My Relationship to Work' & Lucille Clifton's 'birth-day'
2 poems
A little more than a month ago, Poetry Foundation’s Poem-a-day, one of the early inspirations for this newsletter, shared the first poem that I write about in this post. I was glad for that gift, because, as it always happens, the poem flew into my inbox like an endnote to the chaos of arguments that were circling around in my mind at the time. I plunged headlong into the little whirlpools of the poem after reading its title - ‘My Therapist Wants to Know about My Relationship to Work’.
I smiled, and nodded vigorously at every playful turn of phrase, every essence of the everyday distilled in small globules of irony. The simplicity of Clark’s foray into the world of work had me in an instant. It is not a complex piece of writing, it doesn’t have frills or an air of saying something distant, deep and meaningful. It works because of its self-reflexive, self aware gimmickry. Unabashedly confessional, the poem jumps on the surface of modern life glazed with technology and instant gratification, like a water strider on speed. In its very form, it mirrors the sometimes futile, sometimes fulfilling, pursuit of meaning.
I could relate to her modus operandi, her own assessment of attention and its entourage of self doubt and anxiety. I understand what it means to chase something whose form changes inexorably.
Poets blow little smoke rings in a mist of echoing aphorisms, and hope to catch a drifting whisper of some consequence to store, and examine, and then revision. We are collectors of reality, snatching wisps from the air, looking over our shoulders suspiciously, lest the theft of time has been witnessed by another. The screen has magnified our creeping archive of cultural memes to enclose the entire universe, while still continuing to diminish in our own assessment.
This theatre of stimulus is both intimidating and exciting. Take it away, and I wonder what is left. What will happen of me, I wonder, if you steal my words. Will I ‘dry up/ like a raisin in the sun?’
Hang, on. I’m not done yet. I’ll keep this brief. Come on, I couldn’t resist the temptation to share the poem from where Clark draws ‘today we are possible’. Lucille Clifton. Ab kya hi batae - I’ve shared her writing so many times, and she has taught us all so much. I always go back to her ‘Did it make you feel?’ when talking about the questions we must ask of our poems. But this poem- look at it in the context of the previous poem I shared. Look at the way Clifton trims truth into neat edges. How she chips away at her sentences, leaving only iridescent specks that revolve slowly and dance in an effusion of surrender. This is what Clark attempts too. But the first line of Clifton’s ‘birth-day’ that she borrows, is a psalm, and by the time you reach the last two lines, I’m quite sure you would have forgotten Clark’s poem, and be happily swimming in a listless haze of bliss, without quite understanding how you got there.
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