history

Confessional POetry Course

| Sheree

(Speaking about Robert Lowell’s poetry) “Lowell removes the mask. His speaker is unequivocally himself, and it is hard not to think of Life Studies as a series of personal confidences, rather shameful, that one is honor-bound not to reveal.”

M. L. Rosenthal’s article “Poetry as Confession.”

I’m taking a four week confessional poetry course with midnight & indigo. Founded in 2018, midnight & indigo is a small publisher and literary journal that provides a space for Black women writers to share their narratives with the world.

Tw weeks in and I’m loving the course, Tell Me Something Real: How to Write Confessional Poetry. Not only is the tutor, Schyler Butler knowledgeable, and thorough providing great examples for poetry within this genre all from Black women, but the group of writers signed up for the course bring it every week with their insight and feelings around each poem we read and discuss.

And then we get to trial out what we’ve learnt through these close writings within our own writing, as the sessions finishes with time to write a first draft of a poem and then share it with the group. I’m enjoying what I’m coming up with after being inspired. Because in all honesty, from time I’ve been a confessional poet but have never smashed the term on it.

Confessional poetry in essence can be distilled to 4 main components.

  1. Be of an intimate subject matter.
  2. Use the first person.
  3. Be autobiographical or seen/ appear to be.
  4. Use skilled craftsmanship.

I’m working on a new body of work now. So still in the draft stage but I’ll share a poem from time here, as evidence of my appreciation and dance with this form of poetry.

White Women

Within my family, there are white women.
White women who married black men. I forget,
neglect the fact that their blood flows through mine.

Trace the past, a sea of faceless white is mine.
The black men forefront, a mist of women
behind. Their names, I don’t know or forget.

They are the enigma, shadows. Forget
the cleaning and cooking, their duty and mine,
they went against the grain, steadfast women.

In the corner of the frame, you white women
are not forgotten. Your spirit is mine.

Family Album, 2011

PAD/ 017 – for god’s sake, we must stop this coloured invasion

| Sheree
Stop the Coloured Invasion Protest Meeting, Trafalgar Square, London, 1959. Taken from Black Britain: A Photographic History, Ed’s. Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy

a white banner shifts against Nelson’s Column, ‘KEEP BRITAIN WHITE.’

a bright white suspension of unwelcome and hate

ladies and gentlemen with heads turned up as if taking direction from God himself, listen to the message

from a man, on the platform, with Union Jack legs

as if whiteness and rightness runs through him like quickening sap/

the threat is real murmurs through the crowd/ a gathering searching for answers to stop the invasion

let me enter the scene/ from the extreme right/

let me mingle at the back/ near the man in a flat cap

let me feel the heat of the air/

let me sense the crackle of fear in their white, wholesome bodies

my body would be one of those coloured they want to stop

my body would be one of those aliens they want to exterminate

but what they don’t care to know is that this body belongs to a love evangelist

who’s at pains to show them how love can save us all

if only they’d part their ways and let me through

PAD/011 – Carnival, 1976

| Sheree

Each August Bank Holiday weekend,

Notting Hill’s West Indian community 

celebrates Caribbean culture. Calypso.

Crates of records. Stacks of speakers. 

Reggae, ska, groove, and samba 

vibrations of Carnival.

Mid parade, sweaty bodies wining

bodies growing, red stripe flowing. 

Pure joy seen as suspicious. 

The boys in blue are sent in, in force.

Black batons meet black arms, legs and heads.

Slicing through bodies like cutlass through cane. 

Cutdown revellers hauled into hospital 

or prison cells. Carnival; a unique

expression of love of self, freedom 

and resistance. Therefore it’s spirit

has to be demonised and destroyed.

PAD / 010 -trying to love your two mothers is a dangerous game if you have to put your life on the line in the name of justice

| Sheree
Black Britain: A Photographic History edited by Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy

PC Gumbs, London’s first black policeman
image 09/09/68

My mother says to rub vaseline into my neck
and the collar, to stop the rub; soften the wool.
They say make sure you wear the white bands on your arms,
otherwise they’ll only see ya teeth in the dark.
Only good enough to direct traffic, they roar with laughter.
Brillo pad hair. Toilet set lips.
I say nothing. I recognise the privilege
to wear serve Queen and country.

They say I’m a coconut, sell out, slave
to the white man and Babylon.
They do not spare their vitriol against me.
I survive in the liminal spaces, in the shades of grey.
No one admits the fight has to be from within.
The ranks have to unfiltered by difference.
My mother brought me up on wishes
from velvet green isle;

always with an eye and heart on the other mother.

My birth mother is proud even if this adopted mother
chooses to turn her back, allowing my brothers
in blue to kick the shit out of me too.

PAD/005 – Protest

| Sheree

Cinnamon sky rumbles
as electric clouds jag
over glass shop fronts.
Scarlet waves fire street

corners, claiming them forever.
Coppers and politicians
worry the faultlines
left behind.

PAD/ 004 – We are here, because you were there

| Sheree
Magnolia Tree

In pursuance of the powers vested in me by section 32 of the Police Act 1964, I, Right Honourable William Whitelaw, one of Her Majesty’s Principal Secretaries of State, hereby appoint the Right Honourable Lord Scarman to inquire urgently into the serious disorder in Brixton on 10 to 12 April 1981 and to report, with the power to make recommendations. *

Stories keeps being told, this is a tolerant country. It’s official.

Britain is tolerant, fair and just. There isn’t a race problem. Never was.

People who are different are treated the same. Tolerated. As long as they don’t make a difference.

Small minorities are accepted as long as they stay small.

Get to ‘swamping’, and then these minorities become a threat.

They start to threaten the whole fabric of the superior British characteristics.

Tolerance, liberty and civic duty. Values out the window, when the nation’s anxieties are raised.

Fear. And the country’s doors are closed.

The drawbridge raised.

Their shields are driving them back.

* The Brixton Disorders, 10-12 April 1981, Report of an Inquiry, By the Rt. Hon. The Lord Scarman, O.B.E, November 1981

PAD/001 – A Month of Poetry

| Sheree

Happy April. Time for showers, blossom and light. Oh and poetry.

Forsythia

As I mentioned last week, I’m honouring National Poetry Month with the challenge of writing a poem a day.

I’ve set myself this task many times over the years, and I’ve always been amazed at the creations along the way. Poems have emerged onto the page that I didn’t even know were in me and needed expressing.

So today I come to the page with an open heart and a rough idea of the themes or issues I want to explore. But who knows with the creative process. Anything could happen.

Anyway day 1 – PAD/ 001

Trying to understand “the difference between poetry and rhetoric”

After Audre Lorde

The contested site of black settlement in England

is shrouded a heavy fog of amnesia. The wrong colour,

the wrong body, the wrong sound.

Read the history books, you’d think we just landed

the day before last. 400 years of being here, lost

in the mire, weighted down with size 10, Dr. Martens.

Like transplanted birds of paradise, West Indians

struggled to put down roots. Alien soil. On corners,

skylarking and limin’, jobs, homes and a little bit of peace

denied; harsh whispers on the bitterly cold wind.

The contested site of black settlement in England

is captured in stills. Images speak for themselves.

Black faces filling the frame; black blooms pressed

against hothouse glass. But still an absent presence in failed memories.

April – National Poetry Month (USA)

| Sheree

Spring’s in the air. Filled with love. There’s magic everywhere. When you’re young and in love- The Flying Pickets ( well that’s who I heard sing it first and I’m sticking to it!)

April is just around the corner. The blossom will be blossoming. And I’m returning to my first love; poetry.

We’ve been in and out of love over the years, poetry and I. Sometimes she hasn’t treated me well, while other times I’ve neglected her and gone off with some other genre of writing.

I don’t even know if we’re good together, as I was brought up on dead white men’s poetry and I could never measure up to them and their creations. And then somewhere along the way, I gave up trying to.

But when I’m facilitating writing workshops, I say poetry is just ‘playing with words’ in order to break down the fears and insecurities we may be bringing into the creative space. ‘Playing with words’ eases the pressure and injects a bit of fun into the proceedings.

So I’m taking my own advice and going to spend April playing with words each day on the hope of creating some kind of whole at the end of each day.

For more ease of creation, I’ve decided to base my creations around one theme/ focus/subject which is loosely around Black British history through the photographs of the past that are in the public domain along with an exploration of the Race Relations, Commonwealth and Immigration Laws which came into effect during the 60s and 70s.

I’ll also be touching upon the uprisings that also happened during these turbulent times as a demonstration of push back against the messages of go back home even though for the second generation of immigrants onwards this has been the only home most of us have known.

So this is the intention, as I also attempt to tap into the surging, fresh Spring energy of the season, to reconnect my ancestors’ bodies with nature through the process of playing with word to create poetry this April.

I hope to document some, if not all of my creations here as a means of accountability and in the spirit of sharing stories.