Jasmine V. Bailey | November 2020

The need for poets to find the form that makes the poetry they want to write possible remains constant. In her discussion of “organic poetry” from “Some Notes on Organic Form,” Denise Levertov wrote about the experience or “constellation of perceptions” by which a poet is “brought to speech.”1 She would ultimately postulate individually-achieved “organic form” drawing on previous forms but not beholden to them as the necessary shape of modern poems. Yet, we find that contemporary poets have not dispensed with traditional forms even as organic forms abound. Form is a central component of the poem’s physical presence, its body. And as we might expect, form has traditionally been instrumental in all poetry of the body. For African American poets who choose to engage history in their work, violence to the black body, and black bodies’ erasure through violence, presents a unique challenge: can poetry serve as a space in which black bodies can be shown and even re-instantiated? Can the poem compel the reader to see the black body, especially those bodies which have been harmed, broken, or killed, and which politesse and myth would instead encourage readers to go on ignoring? In fact, African American poets have forged a tradition in which poetic form, organic and traditional, has been a central mode of restoring the black body to the history their work engages.

Tyehimba Jess’s Olio is an extended study in form, and his Millie-Christine poems constitute one of his most memorable formal experiments; this is at least in part because the individual poems operate using a visual form of two conjoined poems, and the entire group of poems is then arranged in a conjoined pattern that visually reinforces the pattern at the individual poem level. The subject of these poems are the historical figures Millie and Christine McKoy, conjoined twins who were born into slavery, freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, and who amassed a great deal of wealth and fame touring in Europe. The women were also the subject of Marilyn Nelson’s formal poem, “Millie-Christine.” Nelson’s poem was published before Jess’s poems in her New and Selected Poems, 1996-2011 in 2012, and before that in African American Review. Is it remarkable that two distinguished poets took on these twins as their subject matter in such substantial works? Is it significant that each poet, in very different ways, chose to use exacting forms, Jess’s original, Nelson’s a rondeau redoublé, in writing about their shared subject matter? Can we consider such different forms, one unique, developed organically for the project, the other from European poetic tradition, a gesture with much in common? Do these formal gestures generate similar meaning through the way the poets use them or emphasize different perspectives? In fact, we shall see that very different forms operate to achieve at least one common goal, and that the McKoy twins will be important to both poets because they are black people whose bodies/body are gaped at. Though they may not have been loved or thought beautiful, theirs was a body/bodies that refused erasure.

We can speculate to what extent Nelson’s poem influenced the choices Jess makes in his cycle. One clue to Nelson’s influence is that, although Jess refers to the conjoined sisters as “Millie and Christine McKoy” in his opening section “Introduction / or / Cast / or / Owners of this Olio” and in the title of the first poem about them, he refers to them as Millie-Christine in the titles of the ensuing four poems, then as the “McKoy Twins” in the “Syncopated Star” that combines those five poems into a shape roughly the equivalent, on a larger scale, of each of the individual poems. Marilyn Nelson’s choice to hyphenate the names of the conjoined twins in the title of her poem is a formal one and, although subtle, of profound importance to the complicated psychological portrait she is painting. Although the speaker of Nelson’s poem, Christine, refers to her sister as “Millie” in the poem, and to herself as “Aunt Chrissie,” the title intentionally represents the speaker’s deep ambivalence about their unity and individuality, foregrounded in the opening stanzas. Christine begins with direct address of her twin as a separate person. This is particularly notable because it is the first line of a poem whose title and epigraph both hyphenate their names. Direct single address is a perspective which is enabled by Millie’s imminent death: “Millie, the universal loneliness / of singletons, from womb to grave alone, / was not our fate, nor the brief happiness / of self-forgetting love which makes two one.” Though she dives into the weighty existential questions inherent to sharing life as conjoined twins, what is perhaps more significant, given the title and epigraph, is that Nelson has chosen to make this a dramatic monologue primarily in the first person, which she is only able to do because of the extended moment in which she sets her poem: the “seventeen hours”2 after Millie’s death when Christine lives on alone before she also dies, an event they had been informed would happen and dreaded most of their lives: “In bed we used to talk about the grief / of being the one left behind for hours.”

Nothing about togetherness and aloneness in this poem is simple, and among the unresolvable questions it examines rigorously is the mystical preoccupation with union between lovers as an antidote to the mortal loneliness of the self. Already we know that the relief of “self-forgetting love which makes two one” has been denied to Millie-Christine, a declaration which is not treated by the speaker as important because of the missed experience of romantic love, but because it shows that, in a life where one is never alone, neither can one, even temporarily, be absorbed enough in another to forget oneself. When Christine says in the second section, “I’ve always been duplex, always dual, / always both ‘I’ and at the same time ‘we,’” she is speaking not only as herself, but as Christine–Millie, a self-containing two selves, at once singular and plural, which highlights the

importance of the word she used in the second stanza of the first section, “ourself,” a slight variation on the normal “ourselves” that shows the ambiguity of the twins’ identity. Indeed, the poem, though spoken by Christine, switches between the singular and plural first person in order to represent this complicated reality. Section VI is a series of sentences outlining the plot points of their entire biography, each beginning with the word “My.” It is clear, with the noted exception of “My mine-alone eyes. My eyes mine alone, at least,” that she is speaking for both of them using the first-person singular pronoun. This moment also shows the extent to which Nelson uses the hyphen particularly when she wished to signal grammatical ambiguity of number.

When Christine addresses God in the seventh and final section, we can see that the loneliness of her predicament, not only the predicament of surviving her conjoined twin, but the predicament of her entire life, is her great existential torment: “Pray I will die before Millie grows stiff, / my heartbeat crushed by iron calipers. / Pray Millie-Christine will depart from life / as we came, side-by-side, through heaven’s door.” As everything in this poem is multifaceted, “science,” or the physical invasions of men curious about their bodies, becomes in this final section an angel of mercy if it will prevent this newly-alone woman from feeling death in her own body before she, her new single self, dies. She makes, in her final moment, a prayer very much like that which Jesus makes in the Gospel of John, asking that she not be condemned to go to Heaven without the companion she had on earth. This, finally, is the poem’s answer to the mystical yearning for union. The traditional portrayal of mystical union is that through union with an earthly beloved, a person is able to achieve the only important union: that with God. At the end of the poem, Christine looks toward heaven, but her heart is broken over the union that could never be completed on earth, with the person who, ironically, she could also never, until now, be free of.

Nelson’s other concerns in this poem include extended meditations which are grounded in this question of identity and union, and which the complexity of their together-separate identity is able to illumine. She explores the dichotomy between the disabled or the “we who are not as others” and the “normal,” and concludes that “Those who exploit innocence, who slay hope; / liars and thieves; the greedy and the cruel… are freaks beyond ridicule.” The rejection of this dichotomy between the normal and the abnormal as well as between the singular and plural self ultimately serve a political stance which emerges in the poem about the post-Civil War United States. She describes the War “as if connected twins / had punched each other bloody, blind with rage, / for reasons they couldn’t wholly comprehend,” and the struggle the speaker has to understand her individual self as part of a shared self becomes a metonymy for each American’s struggle to belong to a union that includes people unlike them. When she says, “Leave me that closet, in this huge shared house!” she seems to be speaking at once of their shared body, the actual house her family bought from their former masters, and of the American house. When she ends the poem, “Maybe someday…we’ll be remembered as an Ancestor / (or two). God bless you” the poem seems directly addressed to the American body that lives on after her/their death who might look to her/their life as an example in how it’s possible to survive the predicament of togetherness.

Both Nelson and Jess use forms that are highly symbolic of their subject matter. Nelson’s rondeau redoublé is a form which centers on two sets of rhymes alternated and repeated that clearly speak formally to the existential question of single and simultaneously double identity at the heart of the poem. Jess uses a form he has in interviews called “syncopated sonnets,”3 in which most lines are divided between the left of the page and the right, and some lines extend across the middle of the page, for an overall visual impression of two halves conjoined in the middle of the poem. Jess has said the Millie-Christine poems “splice [sic] the words of two sisters joined at the hip.”4 Certainly, this is truest in its visual manifestation, as the voices of the twins are only distinguished in the poem “Millie-Christine’s Love Story” in which the I voice emerges to make the case that their relationship is equivalent to a love affair, using the language of romantic love and marriage (“my other half…Millie’s embracing contranuptial”) to imagine that “this is how I know love,” a kind of answer to Nelson’s assertion that they did not know “the self-forgetting love which makes two one.” When Jess ends this poem, “I love this burden that we’ve been given— / to ride the shared wake of one blood’s rhythm,” we could read this as a nearly direct refutation of Nelson’s project, which seems to be to explore the deep and irreparable ambivalence towards the existential predicament of conjoined sisters. In Jess’s other Millie-Christine poems, the speaker(s) use the first person plural pronoun, and the poems focus on the events that constitute their experience, as opposed to how those experiences can be understood as part of a complicated identity. Given that this is the case, it would really be more precise to say that the twins share a voice, but that that voice is visually represented on the page in a way that reflects the visual impact of the physical body from which it emanates. It seems, given this, that Jess’s choice to use Nelson’s hyphenated double name to refer to the McKoy sisters reflects his intention to represent them using a shared voice. Their narration of their experience emphasizes this, as in the poem, “Millie-Christine Buy Land,” in which biographical events, as opposed to identity, are the focus: “We pay mortgage on our old plantation…we buy liberation from each gawking crowd.” Here, Jess’s focus, as in the biographical poems throughout Olio, is on how the biography of Millie-Christine illuminates the injustice and deep ironies of the lives of black Americans who lived through the Civil War and experienced both slavery and freedom and, in most cases, only won financial comfort by circumventing or exploiting the institutions of economic slavery that survived the Emancipation Proclamation.

Jess’s characterization of the Millie-Christine poems as “sonnets” does not reflect regular meter or rhyme in the poems according to standard sonnetic forms (unlike, for example, Marilyn Nelson’s “A Wreath for Emmet Till,” which is comprised of fourteen linked Petrarchan sonnets and a final Petrarchan sonnet comprised of the linking lines). Though he has used this term in interviews, Jess seems to show readers in Olio that, while the poems are fourteen lines (physically, if not in terms of the many iterations of possible readings) and the rhymes he uses are often effective in sonically connecting the line halves separated by space on the page (“been photographed half-nude, verified to prove veracity. They’ve scanned each side / like prize bovine”5), it is the visual impression of the poem overall that creates the formal point he wants to make about Millie and Christine, which, ultimately, is the physical ambiguity of conjoined twins. The poems’ refusal to stand alone or completely combine in ways that the reader can readily, clearly assess reflects the physical reality of two bodies as one with no clear togetherness or separateness. Jess emphasizes this by beginning the sequence with an image of a butterfly followed by the five poems all shaped in this way (upper and lower quadrants apart, middle conjoined), and then reprinting the five poems together as a “star” of the same general shape. Millie and Christine McKoy’s biography serve the overall project of Olio well in that their story presents unique and fascinating glimpses into the lives of enslaved and exploited Black Americans during the period of American history Olio explores. From a formal perspective, however, Jess’s syncopated sonnets serve to reinforce the physical, bodily reality of his subjects, a gesture that is very different from Nelson’s probing psychological, existential inhabiting. Jess’s point in reinforcing the body through form seems to speak to one of the points of the larger book: The body is the appropriate metaphor.

The subject of Millie and Christine McKoy also has metaphorical resonance in both poets’ projects because of the “twoness” central to black artists’ experience, a term coined by W.E.B. DuBois and discussed by Marilyn Nelson and Rita Dove in their essay, “A Black Rainbow: Modern Afro-American Poetry.” They write,

“Twoness” can be seen in the work of poets as a division in their address to their Black and white audiences. Most approach this division by choosing to address one or the other group; a few choose to combine their audiences, overlooking the differences between them in a hopeful attempt to speak to the whole of the American people… the Black poet must choose to write in the standard English preferred by the white audience, or in what Dunbar called the “broken tongue”… Black poets who address the Black audience often resolve this problem [limiting one’s already small audience] by writing poems intended to be performed, rather than silently read.6

Since Marilyn Nelson was coauthor of this analysis, it’s especially interesting in how it dilates the significance of the extended meditation on duality in “Millie-Christine.” The poem itself established its connection to the civic context of the United States before, during, and after the Civil War, but here we see that the metaphor can also be cast inward, into the identity of Black American poets working in a language that is the language of the enslavers, oppressors, and exploiters of their people—questions at the heart of Olio, which, surely no accident, references a black musical tradition. Jess has performed pieces from Olio extensively and dazzled listeners with his oral interpretations of the written poems. But Nelson and Dove are right to point out that these questions do not have to be conscious or explicit in order to be universally applied to black artists’ work. There is a burden of scrutiny on the choices black poets make that extends beyond formal choices and which is a double standard to which white poets are less frequently subjected: their modes of language and dialect as well as their choice of subject matter may emerge for readers as political, whether they interpret them as inclusive, exclusionary, or otherwise. Black poets who work in strict, “traditional” forms (those from English and European poetry) and who reference classical Western mythological traditions do so with a greater spotlight on their engagement with these traditions than white poets making the same choices. What kind of scrutiny do black poets invite when they choose to engage race directly, using their own original or traditional European forms to reinforce the fact of the human body that matters in their individual and larger histories?

David Perkins, the great 20th-century weigher-in on English language poetry, is still assigned as a stalwart authority in English graduate programs. In the second volume of his totemic A History of Modern Poetry, he wrote that Countee Cullen believed that black poets should write “in the same styles and for the same audience as their white contemporaries,”7 which, to the degree that it’s true, suggests that Cullen identified two of the same central quandaries Dove and Nelson lay out as confronting black poets. It also aligns Cullen with a generation of Black American poets who predate the “militant, separatist phase” of black poetry that Perkins says “justifies [his] discussing poetry by blacks in a chapter by itself.”8 It is hard not to see Perkins’s decision, which he defends so suspiciously, to discuss Black American poets in their own chapter, as a gesture meant to exclude them from the larger tradition of American poetry as a comeuppance for their having dared to criticize and reject the literary institutions which had for so long rejected them, and which in many ways continue to reject poets of color today. Perkins seems to imply that a return to the perspective of Cullen is the best possible outcome of the progression of black poetry, saying, “By the middle of the 1970s the self and its concerns might be represented without political intention and even without self-consciousness about race and color,” though he hardly stops there, adding, “Many poems of Audre Lorde (b. 1934), for example, express experiences in sexual love, raising children, and other intimate aspects of a woman’s life with no special emphasis that she is a black woman.”9 Although he does not make an explicit normative statement condemning the engagement of race in poetry, Perkins’s language suggests that color is not central to a human being’s experience when he implies that including one’s experience of race in a poem would entail “special emphasis.”

That he uses a black woman as an example is particularly ironic in that, with the exception of a brief section on Gwendolyn Brooks, this is the only line about a black woman poet in this book published the year Rita Dove would win the Pulitzer Prize. Dove herself receives no mention. The characterization of “a woman’s life” here as including sex and child-rearing also sends a message that is not isolated to this thirteen-page chapter on “Black Poets of America”; it suggests, at best, that women’s experience is a sub-genre of human experience characterized by physical womanhood. Though it is not clear whether men’s experience of sexuality and parenthood qualify as part of men’s lives, or whether this is also women’s lives, it is clear he does not see anyone’s life as necessarily involving their race. Even if we take Perkins’s authority at face value, we have to acknowledge that his perception that race-conscious poetry (his word is “militant”) was a “phase” that subsided in the 1970s has been disproven by history: contemporary poets, male and female, feel that it is necessary to make “special emphasis” on their race in their poems. Poets of color have, to frame it differently, decided for themselves what aspects of their identity they should engage in their work, and it should come as no surprise that race, even when not explicitly named, is at play in the poetry of Black Americans, as it was in that of Audre Lorde.

For Derek Walcott, an Afro Caribbean, the question of writing in English has been one of dealing with colonial legacy as well as the legacy of black enslavement since his country of origin, St. Lucia, gained independence only in 1967, around the same time many colonies in the West Indies and Africa were gaining independence. Perkins is good enough to “mention” Derek Walcott in his chapter entitled “British Poetry in the 1960s and 1970s.” Because the paragraph is so short, I can quote it almost entirely. Walcott is “very much influenced by twentieth-century English poets. So far as his subject matter reflects his Caribbean background, he dwells on the realities of life in the Caribbean as contrasted with the Romantic vision put forward by tourist agencies. The lack of an artistic tradition within his native country is one of his themes, and he perhaps reflects this in his readiness to adopt the voices of other poets.”10 Perkins writes three years before Omeros is published, and it is easy to imagine that Walcott would have been much elevated in his esteem because of it. This reflection speaks to Dove and Nelson’s point that the language and tradition a poet engages in his work may endear him to either a white or black audience, and that the ambition of appealing to both audiences remains an ambition.

Walcott’s use of traditional forms can be an organic response to his own bringing to speech as a person of color (and descendant of slaves) growing up in a colonial and then post-colonial context and being educated in England. He tells us this himself in “A Far Cry from Africa” when he writes,

I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?¹¹

For Walcott, the choice to write in forms from the English poetic tradition has political consequences that for him, as a person who is black, biracial, and postcolonial, are unavoidable unless he is to write like someone he isn’t. His use of form in Omeros is nowhere so noticeable or so historically poignant as when, in Section III of Chapter XXXIII, he breaks the form he’s used throughout the book, of tercets rhymed in a pattern reminiscent of terza rima, in favor of rhymed couplets in iambic tetrameter. Many of his lines are headless, notably the many anaphoric lines that begin with “House,” and the lack of an initial unstressed syllable jars the reader sonically into attending to this form, the tone of which so unmistakably demands attention anyway. It begins, for example, “House of umbrage, house of fear, / house of multiplying air // House of memories that grow / like shadows out of Allan Poe.”12 Rhymed iambic tetrameter couplets have their own tradition in English, and it turns out that that tradition points us to poets who share aspects of Walcott’s own unique and complicated English tradition. The preponderance of headless iambic tetrameter lines in this section recalls perhaps most exactly the third section of Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” although Auden’s use of this form was itself a gesture back to Yeats’s poem, “Under Ben Bulben,” in which Yeats talks about his own death and selects the location and inscription of his future headstone. Yeats, an Irish poet who was instrumental in the Irish Nationalist and Independence movements, and who lived to see his colony become its own country, writes in this poem, “Many times man lives and dies / Between his two eternities, / That of race and that of soul,” as if speaking directly to the crisis of identity Walcott articulates in “A Far Cry from Africa”: how to be oneself when the corrupt forces your soul requires you to reject nevertheless form part of your identity. In Section V of the poem, the penultimate section that precedes Yeats’s instructions for his grave, he writes explicit instructions to the Irish poet who will, presumably, have to fill his role after his death:

Irish poets learn your trade
Sing whatever is well made,
Scorn the sort now growing up
All out of shape from toe to top,
Their unremembering hearts and heads
Base-born products of base beds.
Sing the peasantry, and then
Hard-riding country gentlemen,
The holiness of monks, and after
Porter-drinkers’ randy laughter;
Sing the lords and ladies gay
That were beaten into the clay
Through seven heroic centuries;
Cast your mind on other days
That we in coming days may be
Still the indomitable Irishry.¹³

We can imagine that for Derek Walcott this poem would have been at once a beacon and a call-to-arms for him as a fellow post-colonial poet writing in the language of the occupying state of which, until recently, he had been a subject. Here, Yeats outlines concerns that are strikingly descriptive of Walcott’s own concerns throughout the epic of Omeros. Walcott’s attention to the diversity of humanity in his poem, which engages Afro Caribbean characters as well as white colonists, his engagement with so much of history simultaneously, and his obvious attention to the mastery of poetic form—everything that we can say makes Omeros unique is here applied to the Irish context.

In 1927, twelve years before Yeats wrote “Under Ben Bulben,”14 Countee Cullen had used the same notable form for his poem, “Heritage.” In this poem, Cullen explores his feelings about Africa as an American of African descent who has suffered discrimination in his own country because of his race, but for whom Africa remains mythical and foreign. Cullen’s project in “Heritage” is similar to Yeats’s in “Under Ben Bulben” in that he is attempting to articulate a way to be a poet when one’s linguistic heritage is intertwined with the historical oppression that continues to threaten the poet’s humanity. While Yeats relates to Walcott as a British post-colonial, Cullen relates to Walcott as a black man living in the Americas in the midst of the perennial damage sown by the institution of slavery. When Cullen writes, for example, in the short penultimate stanza that serves as the poem’s volta, “Quaint, outlandish heathen gods / Black men fashion out of rods, / Clay, and little bits of stone, / In a likeness like their own, / My conversion came high-priced; / I belong to Jesus Christ,” he is showing us that the religion of Africans is to him not only foreign but profane. At the same time, the poem implies that these are his people, and his own estrangement from them leads him to pinpoint the historical moment of his ancestors’ conversion, which we can understand would have been when they were enslaved and brought to North America. The devastating understatement of “high-priced” frames the exchange he sees between his people’s bodies in slavery for their souls in Christianity.

With one formal gesture, Walcott is able to establish a lineage for his work that combines artistic, political, racial, and spiritual antecedents and instructs, far more powerfully and permanently than white critics’ opinions, how he should be read. English, like other colonial and imperial languages, always points back to the historical facts of invasion, capture, slavery, oppression, colonization, and the ongoing nightmares of racial violence and discrimination. Form can be a way for black poets to connect themselves to poetic traditions that reflect and include them, and it can also be a way to engage the audiences they, uniquely, are pressured to engage. In all cases, form is a way that poets, as Millie and Christine McKoy did in taking over the home of their former master, make historically violent and subjugating languages serve their artistic aims. Among those aims, one of the most important is the need to instantiate black bodies within poems and, in doing so, restore them to history. History is, finally, a servant of who will command it.

Jasmine V. Bailey is the author of two poetry collections, Disappeared and Alexandria, and the chapbook Sleep and What Precedes It. She won the 2019 Laurence Goldstein Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review, and the 2020 VanderMey Prize from Ruminate Magazine. She holds a doctorate in English and is Translations Editor for The Common. Her translation of Silvina López Medin’s That Salt on the Tongue to Say Manglar is forthcoming. jasminevbailey.com

Notes

 

1. Denise Levertov, “Some Notes on Organic Form,” in Twentieth-Century American Poetry, ed. Dana Gioia et al. (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2004), p. 237.
2. Marilyn Nelson, Faster Than Light: New and Selected Poems, 1996-2011 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012).
3. Kristina Marie Darling, “It’s All in the Wind: A Review of Olio by Tyehimba Jess,” Tupelo Quarterly, November 29, 2016, http://www.tupeloquarterly.com/its-all-in-the-wind-a-review-of-olio-by-tyehimba-jess/.
4. Darling.
5. Tyehimba Jess, Olio (Seattle: Wave Books, 2016).
6. Rita Dove and Marilyn Nelson, “A Black Rainbow: Modern Afro-American Poetry,” in Twentieth-Century American Poetry, ed. Dana Gioia et al. (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2004), pp. 466–467.
7. David Perkins, in A History of Modern Poetry: Modernism and After (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 600.
8. Perkins, p. 602.
9. Perkins, p. 603.
10. Perkins, p. 448.
11. Derek Walcott, “A Far Cry from Africa by Derek Walcott—Poems | Academy of American Poets,” Poets.org (Academy of American Poets), accessed September 9, 2020, https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/far-cry-africa.
12. Derek Walcott, Omeros (London: Faber and Faber, 1990).
13. William Butler Yeats, “Under Ben Bulben by William Butler Yeats,” Poetry Foundation (Poetry Foundation), accessed September 9, 2020, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43298/under-ben-bulben.
14. Richard Ellmann and Robert O’Clair, The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry Second Edition (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1988).