As I noted earlier this week, for the next few days my focus here will be on presenting work by several of the poets we’ve published in The Common. Today we turn to the inimitable Vievee Francis.
THIS MORNING I MISS SUCH DEVOTION, by Vievee Francis
There is a sister whose voice is gentle as a lullaby. A lulling. Even when angered she won't yell. A particular upbringing that eschews the loud, though such a woman can be found embracing those whose voices swell in the streets. Perhaps less saintliness than a vicarious expression of her own rage? Frustrations? Drawing the brawler, the harsh and violent close. The softness embedded in her accent. An oiled woman. Pink lipstick on her brown lips. A woman who pulls biscuits on a Saturday from the oven. Bathwater woman. Sweet liquor in a white cabinet woman. I have found this woman in Tennessee. In Texas. In Alabama. In Mississippi. And clung to her. Darling, and Dearest, and Hush Honey on the tongue. Not silence but delicacy, a blue slip in the drawer. A breeze through the oak leaves. Cuss and she won't shush you, she'll laugh and take you inside. Feed you cake, brush out your damp hair, pull you onto her lap, draw the cedar from the wound.
Born in West Texas and raised there and in Detroit, Francis is the author of three books of poetry: Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University Press, 2006), Horse in the Dark (winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Poetry Prize for a second collection, Northwestern University Press, 2010) and Forest Primeval (winner of the 2016 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award). Her work has appeared in numerous print and online journals, textbooks, and anthologies, including Poetry magazine, many editions of Best American Poetry, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. She has been a participant in the Cave Canem Workshops, a Poet-in-Residence for the Alice Lloyd Scholars Program at the University of Michigan, and teaches poetry writing in the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop (USA, UK, and Barbados). In 2009 she received a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, in 2010, a Kresge Fellowship, and in 2021, the Aiken Taylor Award from The Sewanee Review. She serves as an associate editor of Callaloo and is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH.
In an interview Francis has said: “I want to know how poetry serves us collectively and as individuals in ways that meet this era, this moment; however, in order to gain that understanding, contexts cannot be ignored, nor can history be set aside. It is the intent of my instruction and an inherent objective of my own poetry to upturn how we think about poetry, its lineage, and the cultural impact of received aesthetics.” And of her own poetry, Francis says, “I’m very much saying that how African-American women are defined is inhuman in its narrowness, and that I, for one, am not going to allow it.”
The idea of giving oneself permission, no, not just the idea but the act of giving oneself permission—permission to confront and dismantle such pathological definitions, to write against them and in doing so upend them—to give oneself permission to be an intellectual, as well as permission to love, to be loved—infuses all of Vievee Francis’s work. We read Francis and it’s a give and take: we take her example and give ourselves permission to do the same.
Here are three more poems by Vievee Francis (first published in The Common):
THE BEAUTY OF BOYS IS
that they are not men,
that they have not settled into their beards and
remorse, their crow’s feet and givens.
There is not yet an investment in houses
settling onto their foundations, hair, or
yesterday. The boy senses his time is precarious,
growing shorter as he sprouts up, so he spends
time believing, in everything,
he climbs and
he tumbles and tunnels and spills and
puts to good use his stones and his quarters,
penknife and book, even the stick he uses
to defeat his awkward shadow. He will dream
into existence a raft, a rocket, a fort of mud.
From a cloud
a gift of horses.
From the sand
castle and moat,
kingdom and cause.
Every boy knows he is a lone king,
that above hover dragons
from which he cannot withdraw, and so he must
pull from his quiver the makeshift arrow,
so he must, draw the bow, and not yet divided
from his body all is possible.
He looks up
toward a darkening horizon, certain. So certain.
ON LEAVING THE MOUNTAINS AND COMING
TO THE CITY I THOUGHT I LEFT FOR GOOD
Without the backdrop of leaves and scat,
the possum playing possum, its mate
the same. Without the tip of the road,
its black pitch wound like a widow’s wail
through the wet trees. Consider the undergrowth
and what hides there. The brown bristle
of the hedge. The singular call of a bird
its beak red-tipped, it’s feathers black
as a pool in the moss. Without the reflection
of a dog’s tongue in the water, or the stone
lobbed over the surface in order to see
the surface ripple like a skirt being pulled up.
Only the city, present, in the face like a shout,
like a lie yelled as if to assert its veracity, but
everyone hearing it knows it’s just not true.
I reenter the city still standing, its back turned
to the forest of bears and bluing brush, and
the inedible red fruit, the berries hung just at the mouth’s
reach, that beckon easily as they would poison. Me
and the city that wraps me in its leather coat and spikes,
tragic ink, and garble: vodka after vodka, after
shot after shot, my slurred proclamations
of love where love doesn’t go far, but lays
dead as a clever rodent. In the alleyways
I kick my boots against a crumbling wall
that will always be crumbling but never fall.
The smell of sausage spilling from a factory
of sausages assuages the memory of a canopy
of green, and the verge pressing into my waist
like the hands of a man eager to take
my measure, the heat like a cologne
emitted from the skin, like a fear of
the wild before entering another, wilder.
–Vievee Francis
MOAN SOFT LIKE YOU WANTED SOMEBODY TERRIBLE
(C.S.)
And if it comes to pass, the would be politician, or the lover,
and what was said was never meant, is now distant
as those moments your desire swirled about you
like new snow, cold and brisk and enlivening, remember
it was you feeling adrift,
misunderstood, calamitous, and alone, you dear,
who so needed the need grew into a rally, a rant
of promises now un-promised –
And the night is a hand slid over your mouth. Demanding
your silence. It surprised you,
the shift, the sudden denial, the smooth indifference –
though truth be told –
there were hints of the turn of weather in the air. Remember?
All that bluster you took
for courage. All of those copperheads you took for care.
–Vievee Francis