My guest this week on the poetry of Daily Life is Angela Jackson, who lives in Chicago, Illinois in the historic district of Bronzeville. She fell in love with poetry in the first year and wrote her own poems in third year. She wrote poems in high school and college. Angela says that she loves each book when she works there, especially her last, “more than meat and clothes”. This very received poet lists more on her in credits at the end of this column. It is currently used for Illinois as a winning state poet. ~ David L. Harrison
Rules of imagination
“Poetry is distilled life,” said the longtime poet of the poet Gwendolyn Brooks. It’s concise; But what does that mean? This means, if I understand that poetry is a place where the rich complexity of life can be gathered and compressed with music and feel proper. Memory and coexisting dream. I selected one of my poems to show what I mean. Other people have expressed a penchant for this, so I feel safe by offering it as an example.
Because the Nat King Cole Show was televised in 1956 or 1957, I know that I was in the first year or roughly when the seed of this poem was planted in memory. And it is a very early memory of my mother lying on the sofa by watching this famous show with the rare appearance of a black man on television. This poem comes out of private memory, but it has its own life. I only wrote it much more than twenty years after the fact that I was invited to create a number of poems on the imaginary tenants of an imaginary building. I had tired poems on me using “I” (I paraphrase Audre Lorde). I wanted to turn my poetic gaze to others. I didn’t want to say that the poem concerned my parents. I didn’t want them to know!
The mother behaves like a young woman with a
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Lover when Nat King Cole comes to the box
She takes off her racing shoes.
She removes her stockings again.
She decompresses her re-alien skirt.
She separates from her polyester blouse.
She goes to bed on the sagged sofa.
The husband and children hide in the dark living room.
The glow of television slides on its shift
Like the moonlight.
Nat King Cole’s shiny hair shines like an onyx.
His voice shines in his eyes. She closes them.
Her song ends on the edges of her
Mona Lisa Smile.
∘
Midnight sighs above the silence of sleeping children.
She sleeps and on the sagged sofa.
Until the husband invites him to his bed.
∘
His voice
newly tender,
newly televised.
❖
Of course, the imagination guided the poem to be. My mother’s devotion to Nat King Cole was real. But I did not observe and do not remember his actions. Aside from it lying on the sofa, I imagined its actions. The body of the poem is the process of imagination. This is the case with poetry: imagination is the guide. What a gift imagination for us! I have never been married, but this poem provides me with a moment of magic of the marriage of ordinary people transformed by a musical icon. And the romance, good and bad, is an old favorite subject of poetry.
Yes, “poetry is distilled life”. And it is the raised memory, the revealed dream and the decision of imagination. What a gift is!
Angela Jackson wrote award -winning poetry, novels and plays, including a biography of Gwendolyn Brooks. She received Shelly and Lilly Awards for Poetry, an American Book Award, the John Gardner Fiction Prize and the Illinois Arts Council Fellowship for dramatic writing. Learn more abouthttps://poetlaureate.illinois.gov/past-deatures/ferered-poet-jackson.html.