About work

After the fish were cleaned

What the poem is really about. What the picture is really about. I want to tell you but I don't want to tell you. It's not that I want to control you. It's that I'd like a little more mystery in the process. If the poem is about something essential, something personal, not really funny,  do you really need all the context? Or would the context make the experience better? Would the critique be less helpful if the readers already knew the whole story?

The theme of the last poem (Hack)--the theme of work--is something I talked about with Yusef Komunyakaa when he came to Butler last year. Work as a theme. Work's power to heal, its rhythms, its traditions in a family and a culture.

In my own family, my father (circa 1964, above) worked all week at a not-so-glamorous white-collar job, worked all weekend around the house, sweating beer. When I work with my son--shoveling or raking or digging--I feel like I'm working side-by-side with my father again. I'm interested in that physical, sensual experience of two humans at work together. Or an animal and a human having the same physical experience at the same time, like when I run with my dogs. I'm planning to expand that poem into more sections and grapple with the larger theme and its origins.

For Komunyakaa, the theme of work touches on issues about race and sexuality, at least it does in his poem "Work," for example (the poem (on someone's blog!) and some interesting analysis). I think when he spoke to me about work as a theme, he was talking about something else--how the process of working can lead to something larger. Here's what Komunyakaa said about the work of writing:

"The body and the mind are indeed connected," he has said. "Good writing is physical and mental. I welcomed the knowledge of this because I am from a working-class people who believe that physical labor is sacred and spiritual."  (Source: "Control Is the Mainspring," Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews, and Commentaries, University of Michigan Press series; afropoets.net)

Labor, physical and not-so-physical, has a broader context for me too--in my life right now--the life I'm boxed into as a result of my own choices, just like everyone else. I want to rejoice in the work. I want to rejoice in the box.