Chin - CROSSFIRE: collected poems of staceyann chin

A Litany for Survival POEMS 19982019Staceyann Chin Foreword by Jacqueline Woodson 2019 Staceyann Chin Published in 2019 by Haymarket Books P.O. Box 180165 Chicago, IL 60618 773-583-7884 www.haymarketbooks.org ISBN: 978-1-64259-082-1 Distributed to the trade in the US through Consortium Book Sales and Distribution (www.cbsd.com) and internationally through Ingram Publisher Services International (www.ingramcontent.com). This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund. Cover photograph by Julia Pearl Robbins. Cover design by Brett Neiman. For Hazel and Zuri-Siale
who bookend my survival For those of us who were imprinted with fear And when the sun rises we are afraid it might not remain when the sun sets we are afraid it might not rise in the morning when our stomachs are full we are afraid of indigestion when our stomachs are empty we are afraid we may never eat again when we are loved we are afraid love will vanish when we are alone we are afraid love will never return and when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed but when we are silent we are still afraid So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive. from A Litany for Survival by Audre LordeJacqueline Woodson Step into the crossfire. from A Litany for Survival by Audre LordeJacqueline Woodson Step into the crossfire.

This is a world you know everything about, because in Staceyanns hands the minutiae of our everyday lives becomes a love song to anyone who has ever had to live a life. Step into the crossfire. This is a world you know nothing about, because in Chins hands, this love song to survival is her own crossfire of motherhood and love and hurt and pain and race and survival coming fast, coming hard, coming at her with intention and ferocity. With her brilliant hands, she has crafted this crossfire into a lullaby we all need to hear. A song that points us each toward the tools we must gather for our own daily survival. Step into the crossfire.

Ride the A-train and Amtrak. Move to America from Jamaica. Lose a mother. Give birth to a daughter. Remember that: You are only human. A frail light among many lights Step into this stunning world.

And be forever changed.

Staceyann Chin Many of these poems have been alive for more than two decades. They have begun in my journals, in my mouth, and then graduated to audiences in countless countries, where they have lived on numerous stages. They have been bellowed, whispered, edited, re-edited, discarded, retrieved, rejectedsome have been posted online, a few have been included in anthologies, journals, and media publications, but never in a collection of poems authored by me. Its taken me years to decipher why I have never published a collection of poems. In the early years, after Def Poetry Jam on Broadway and on HBOwhich, incidentally, feels like it happened only a few minutes after I landed in the USthere were many offers to publish the poems that had, for all intents and purposes, erupted from what felt like a self-imposed exile from my home.

But Im Caribbeana Jamaican girl educated at the University of the West Indies, in the revered tradition of the postcolonialso I thought any poem I wrote, the mere mewling of a young, unseasoned writer. But people kept asking for the poems, so in the performance tradition of the 1990s, I made a compromise and self-published chapbooks. I hawked those at my readings for a few years, then stopped. They didnt feel like real books: bound, attached to a press, with an ISBN number. I wanted to be a real writer, but I couldnt bring myself to think myself a real poet, like Derek Walcott. I felt I had to wait until I was at least thirty.

Thirty sounded more appropriate, more weighted, more like someone who had lived enough to write about itsomeone who could handle the task of metaphors and similes and meter and rhyme with depth and pathos. The more well-known I became, the more glaring the missing collection seemed. For years, I sent blocks of poems to professors who were teaching my work. Many of them became adept at transcribing the text from the plethora of performances posted on YouTube and other places online. The year I met Derek Walcott, I was still young. I made a joke about the way St.

Lucians pronounce the word chicken, and we both collapsed into a shared mirth that excluded the Americans in the room. We talked about two of my old professorscontemporaries of hisMervyn Morris and Edward Baugh. We talked about being caught between the cultural worlds of the United States and the Caribbean. We bonded over the dexterity required to pronounce and spell English words correctly while in each location. He took a shine to me, I suppose, and invited me to study with him, to audit his class at Boston University. I went for three days a week for six months.

I sat in his class with maybe ten other students, and read T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Seamus Heaney. We discussed what makes a poem good and what makes it operatic.

I learned a lot about poetry from being in Walcotts class that year. But something about the interaction bothered me. Every day, after each class, hed invite me to lunch with him. I wasnt a regular student on campus, so I was grateful for the company. And he was very funny; he told a lot of stories about his life as a poet. I learned that he had started publishing at a very early age.

His mother gave him the money to publish his first book of poems. His pen was immediately loved and accepted by those in power. He had a burning desire to write, and those around him respected his drive. He was always seen as a golden child, and he was fairly comfortable with seeing himself as such. I never had that. My work was despised by many.

Ridiculed by some. Mostly sensationalized in the Caribbean press. Every time I went home to read, there were numerous articles, ad nauseam, which discussed my sexuality as deviance, something I picked up in the amoral culture of the American North. No one ever talked about my worth as a writer. It was always lesbian this and Jesus that and questions about how Jamaican I could be with my homosexuality so prevalent in my narrative. Walcott was mostly kind to me.

He would often say that I too had the gift of the pen, that I could turn a good phrase, that my race politics were promising, that my poems had a precision of language that pulled the reader inthat was all good and well, he maintained, but I had to stop writing all this feminist foolishness. Nobody would care about sexual orientation and my vagina or its basic bodily functions a hundred years from now, he said. I was, of course, deeply flattered by his praise of my use of language, but greatly disturbed by his dismissive notes on the very core of my reason for writing. I didnt know how to write without centering my politics, my identity as a lesbian and a woman, my female body, and how it made me vulnerable in a world dictated by the desires and rules of cisgender men. Without knowing it, my time with Walcott further cemented the feeling that I was a poet who had the potential to be a good poet, but that I wasnt there yet. The poems continued to live, dynamic on stages, but dormant on my various hard drives.

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