We Jazz June: Guest Editor’s Discussion, Summer 2023
Emily Hooper Lansana
Dear Readers,
This month, we celebrate the birthdays of Gwendolyn Brooks and Lucille Clifton and remember the transition of June Jordan. For Poem of the Day, I have selected a series of poems from Black women and femme-identifying poets and have also included a supplementary list of poems from women of the African diaspora at the end of this post. These poems illustrate intimate spaces of care and cultivate a commitment to radical change. For us, this language is more than form and craft; it is how we breathe and continue. These poems travel and transform; they break us open and birth possibilities.
I fell in love with poetry when I discovered Nikki Giovanni. Sitting in my room alone, a 12-year-old Black girl in Shaker Heights, Ohio, reading My House and Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day, my world expanded. There were words for so much of what I hadn’t known how to speak. In those words, I could travel to Tennessee and New York and so many places I hadn’t imagined Black girls like me could be. Not only was I there, I was laughing and dancing and cooking and dreaming, and I felt like boxes around me were breaking open.
In 1988, I graduated from Yale and moved from New Haven to Chicago to pursue a career in acting. Most of my friends were moving to New York, but something about this cultural community where Black people had built institutions felt like home.
One of the first projects I was invited to participate in was a tribute to Gwendolyn Brooks in which a group of actors would perform in her honor. I was excited and anxious about performing for such an icon. We each had the opportunity to select one of her poems. I chose “to the diaspora”:
When you set out for Afrika
you did not know you were going.
Because
you did not know you were Afrika.
You did not know the Black continent
that had to be reached
was you.
I was searching to find home both literally and figuratively. Ms. Brooks's words were a balm and a guide. The poem suggested that the vastness of identity, though physical and geographical, was also deeply personal.
Ms. Brooks attended the event; my performance touched her, and we corresponded. Over the years, I was blessed to call her a mentor and a friend. Several times, I also had the blessing of driving her to poetry events. I learned that escorting Ms. Brooks meant that the evening would go much longer than the scheduled ending of the program. She patiently greeted every person in line. She carefully autographed every book. Only after she fully accommodated every request would she be ready to return home. She embodied patience, humility, generosity, and grace. Her work was brave, and her words continue to help us see one another and ourselves.
The poems I selected for this month carry on that tradition. They challenge readers to see one another and themselves and to love with tenacity and tenderness.
—Emily Hooper Lansana
Special thanks to Nile Lansana for assistance with this month’s selections.
The guest editors of Poem of the Day represent the readers of the newsletter and of poetry: a broad and diverse group with many talents, interests, passions, and reasons for bringing the arts and humanities into their lives. Guest editors select a number of poems for the month and write editor’s notes for each selection in addition to a blog post summarizing their experience and themes. Subscribe to Poem of the Day to read the guest editor’s selections and to experience future unique perspectives in poetry!
Read more about Poem of the Day in the archive editor’s blog.
Emily Hooper Lansana curated the following reading list of poems to accompany her Poem of the Day selections.
racket of collapse. To bathe with tap-
drip the tint of hands’ sun sides. Life
among ruins means something is falling
at all times. Means knowing how long I have
to get out from under a spreading...
I be the LP.
If you be the buffed wall,
I be the Krylon.
If you be the backspin,
...
upstream.
I grasp.
I grind.
I control & panic. Poke
balloons in my chest,
always popping there,
always my thoughts thump,
thump. I snooze — wake & go
boom. All day, like this I short
my breath. I scroll & scroll.
I see what you wrote — I like.
I heart. My thumb, so...
near longtown, what might not technically
constitute a lake but i prefer that word for
the open mouth of its vowel, how it called
us to its throat & held us there, in the...
before i learned
black people aren’t
suppose to dream
i wanted to be
a raelet
and say “dr o wn d in my youn tears”
or “tal kin bout tal kin bout”
or marjorie hendricks and grind
all up against the mic
and scream
“baaaaaby nightandday
baaaaaby nightandday”
then...
that write this letter.
Left palm pressed flat against paper,
as we have done before, over my heart,
in peace or reverence to the sea,
some beautiful thing
I saw once, felt once: snow falling
like rice flung from the giants' wedding,
or strangest of...
I stand in my one place
and I can see a good piece
down the road. I am yonder,
further than the chunk of your stone.
Right now, directly,
I am persimmon falling free
and the prisoner opening up
in me.
Don’t come...
it is easier to work
after our bodies
meet
paper and pen
neither care nor profit
whether we write or not
but as your body moves
under my hands
charged and waiting
we cut the leash
you create me against your thighs
hilly with images
moving through our word countries
my body
writes...
to earth as a dissolute sky dissolves,
a mozambican woman turns mother,
her water breaking loose to pool with the flood
licking the trunk below, a country-sized
puddle calls forth the child whose name,...
when even your friend, after hearing the story,
says, My mother would never put up with that.
Fight the urge to rattle off statistics: that,
more often, a woman who chooses to leave
is then murdered....
and that heart of yours will be totally mended,
and there will be no more burning within.
The owl, calling in the setting of the sun
and the deer path, all erased.
And there will be no...
Emily Hooper Lansana is a community builder, a storyteller, an arts administrator, a writer, and an educator. She currently serves as senior director of programming and engagement for the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. She teaches storytelling in a variety of venues from universities to community centers. She has taught at Columbia College, the University of Chicago, DePaul...