Toi Derricotte: Selections

How can we wake
from a dream
we are born into,
that shines around us,
the terrible bright air?
Having awakened,
having seen our own bloody hands,
how can we ask forgiveness,
bring before our children the real
monster of their nightmares?

–Toi Derricotte, “A Note on My Son’s Face”

Poet, educator, and memoirist Toi Derricotte has written six collections of poetry, including “I”: New and Selected Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), a finalist for the 2019 National Book Awards. She has received numerous honors and awards for her collections of poetry and contributions to literature, including a 2023 Pegasus Award for Service in Poetry, the Academy of American Poets’ 2021 Wallace Stevens Award, and the 2020 Frost Medal from The Poetry Society of America for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry. More than 1,000 of Derricotte’s poems have been published in magazines and journals. In 1996, Derricotte cofounded Cave Canem, an organization committed to furthering artistic and professional opportunities for Black poets, with poet Cornelius Eady. Derricotte was born in Hamtramck, Michigan, and earned a BA from Wayne State University and an MA in English literature from New York University.

All this poet’s work is composed with devotion to the process, to learning, to the search itself, to art and to poetry as life-changing, the poet as archeologist poring over a bone shard. Beneath the intensity of her gaze her work embodies both pain and wonder.

– Anne Marie Macari for Terrain.org

Toi Derricotte is a poet who is fiercely committed both to telling poetic truths and to guiding readers to see the beauty in their own frail humanity through the body’s memories of joy and survival, the failures of our kin, and our own oversights in love. While there is room for multiple truths in Derricotte’s poems, there is no room for the darkness of hard living to swallow up one’s spiritual light. In her work, which interrogates her family’s strict Catholic upbringing, abuse by her father, motherhood, and race and colorism, there is an insistence to look closely at her subjects, to examine their nuances, and not to look away. 

Her images leap from the page and precise diction illuminates her metaphors and similes, pushing us past the dazzle of sensory details to profound meaning. Derricotte shows us how to stay with a thing until it transforms, transmutes whatever is imposed upon it, and becomes something else—something tender, something beloved that witnesses for us and gives us permission to be an active, unashamed witness in our own lives. It is with that bold, generous heart that she has served not just as an educator, poet, and memoirist, but as a cofounder, along with Cornelius Eady, of Cave Canem, the distinguished national organization dedicated to cultivating the artistic and professional growth of Black poets. Their stewardship and leadership has brought forth programs and professional development opportunities for more than 500 fellows who have transformed American letters with esteemed, award-winning books for the past 25 years.

—L. Renée

The best way to describe how Toi Derricotte has impacted my life is to say, and I think Toi feels the same way, is that there was clearly a before Toi world I lived and walked through and an after Toi world from which I speak to you now. How best to describe it? Like living in a cave, before fire, and after it's lit… Toi has been my guide, my defender, my questioner, the brake pedal on my impatience. The reality check to my ego, the flint and spark to my voice when it’s dampened by fear. She’s that kind of a friend. I thank the fates I didn’t get to live a different 25 years.

—Cornelius Eady, VS. Roll Call, “Radical Literary Friendships”

Toi Derricotte’s selected poems in order of publication

1980s

“Blackbottom” (1989)

We wanted our sufferings to be offered up as tender meat,
and our triumphs to be belted out in raucous song.
We had lost our voice in the suburbs, in Conant Gardens,
    where each brick house delineated a fence of silence;
we had lost the right to sing in the street and damn creation.

We enter the world of this poem immediately on the move; the speaker’s family hosts relatives traveling from out of town and drives them “slowly down the congested main streets” of Black Bottom in Detroit, Michigan. The car becomes both metaphor and symbol, a vehicle of upward mobility from which the family may safely, passively spectate on the spectacle of Black living in an economically disadvantaged community without having to engage. Or, as the speaker says, “Freshly escaped, black middle class, / we snickered, and were proud; / the louder the streets, the prouder.” 

The Black Bottom neighborhood was a mostly Black neighborhood demolished in the late 1950s to early 1960s and replaced by a freeway and new residential district. It took its name not from its densely populated Black residents, but from its marshy soil, since the location was in a riverbed that was buried as a sewer in 1827. The neighborhood became increasingly overcrowded during the first half of the 20th century as Black Southerners migrated to work in auto factories; housing covenants and racial discrimination prevented them from living elsewhere in the city. By the 1950s, Hastings Street, which Derricotte references in the poem, was nationally famous for its jazz and blues scenes, nightclubs, and Black-owned businesses.

In the poem, Derricotte pairs action—snickering and laughter—with evocative imagery to support the tone of the first stanza: “We laughed at the bright clothes of a prostitute, / a man sitting on a curb with a bottle in his hand.” She casts the family as high on the hog, looking down on other Black folk from their own advantaged perch through car windows. It is a fierce honesty that highlights the socioeconomic divisions within race. 

This laughter is transformed into desire when the family smells “barbecue cooking in dented washtubs” and their “mouths watered.” The sensory details of intimate memories jar the family back to their roots, back to their common bonds. It is an enticing proposition—not just the “want” of the barbecue, but to live without hiding hallmarks, like foodways, of their identity. The stakes of sliding backward were just too high, though, and the speaker says, “As much as we wanted it we couldn’t take the chance.” 

By the second stanza, the tone shifts, also with the assistance of strong verbs, as the family’s longing intensifies. They roll down the car windows so the sound waves of a woman crooning the blues—“‘I love to see a funeral, then I know it ain’t mine’”—roll over them “like blood.” Sound becomes a key sense here, as the speaker shares that the family wanted “our triumphs to be belted out in raucous song” too, but “had lost the right to sing in the street and damn creation.” By moving on up to Conant Gardens, “where each brick house delineated a fence of silence,” the family lost their voices. It is a high price to pay for jobs in “the post office and classroom.” Unlike Black Bottom, Conant Gardens sprawled with tree-lined streets, large lawns, and single family homes surrounded by open fields. Black families with means flocked to this neighborhood beginning in the late 1920s because it lacked deed restrictions. Residents of Conant Gardens were highly educated and built the area to become the Black neighborhood with the highest median income in all of Detroit.

Perhaps the genius of this poem is its structure—two 13-liners that tower over a final compact stanza of four short lines as if it might buckle from all of the weight stacked on top of it. The visual representation of this poem on the page illustrates the double alienation this middle-class family feels—(1) cut off from other Black people who live loudly in under-resourced areas, and (2) subject to scrutiny in manicured, suburban neighborhoods where they must conform to norms of being model Black people in tacit agreement with white expectations. In that last tiny stanza, the speaker reveals what they gave up to “escape” to the middle class. Returning to Black Bottom “to wash our hands of them” only did the opposite. Instead, it “tore us down to the human,” reminding the family of the emotional tax attached to making it and prompting them to question how much they really had to thumb their noses at.

1990s

“Passing” (1997)

She keeps examining my face,
then turning away
as if she hopes I’ll disappear. Why presume
“passing” is based on what I leave out
and not what she fills in?

This poem is deceptive because of the seamless way in which it weaves the speaker’s present-day life, personal history, and United States history as reflected in literature around the theme of racial passing, a term primarily used to describe a fair-skinned person of color who assumes the racial identity of a white person to thwart discrimination and violence. The poem begins with the speaker as an invited guest to a college “Black Lit” class in which the students are reading Nella Larsen’s acclaimed novel, Passing. Published in 1929, the book recounts the narratives of two mixed-race Black women who were friends as children and reunite in adulthood after making different decisions about their racial identities: one identifies as Black and marries a Black man, and the other identifies as white and marries a bigoted white man while keeping her Black ancestry secret. 

What is exposed in the novel’s plot is also expressed in this classroom when the speaker reveals her own Black ancestry—something that would come as no surprise to one of the Black students, who previously said “‘…I can always tell.’” The word black is repeated at or near the end of every line for five out of seven lines opening the poem, which emphasizes how Blackness is ever-present against the white page and the white gaze. The speaker also describes a white woman in the class who “shakes her head desperately, as if / I had deliberately deceived her.” The student’s disbelief is a persistent engine: “She keeps examining my face, / then turning away / as if she hopes I’ll disappear.” The use of that exacting diction—“keeps examining”—the constant, incessant eye of assessment to determine how to categorize, and, therefore, how to interact with or treat another being (cue social mores, cue class structures, cue assignment of privileges) is painfully, honestly, laid bare. The speaker inverts the fault lines of passing often ascribed to the person of color who is believed to be hiding their true racial identity and demands an accounting for faulty assumptions: “Why presume / “passing” is based on what I leave out / and not what she fills in?” 

The word fill allows the speaker to masterfully leap to memory at the end of the poem, ruminating on a story her father, who looked white, told her about applying for his driver’s license each year. An official filling out the form at a window would ask: “White or black?” Though her father “wouldn’t pass,” he “might / use silence to trap a devil”—forcing the man at the window to look at him, assess his skin, and disclose assumptions about race to complete the form. This act of refusal inverts the power dynamics with this official and compounds with the speaker’s own refusal to reveal what the man at the window ultimately wrote. The poet challenges the reader to interrogate their own beliefs in order to answer this question.

2000s

“Holy Cross Hospital” (2000)

all the girls were cheering when i went downstairs. i was
the one who told them to be tough, to stop believing
in their mother’s pain, that poison. our minds were
like telescopes looking through fear. it wouldn’t hurt
like we’d been told. birth was beautiful if we believed
that it was beautiful and right and good!

In her essay “Writing Natural Birth,” published in The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (Wesleyan University Press, 2003), Derricotte writes, “it was a terrible thing, especially, for a black middle-class girl to come up pregnant. Part of the lifelong work of our class and gender was to prove beyond doubt that black people were civilized, not beasts.” In “Holy Cross Hospital,” Derricotte uses a bleeding title to usher us into this terrible cold world with searing opening lines: “couldn’t stand to see these new young faces, these / children swollen as myself.   my roommate, snotty,”—an intentionally gross word to end a line on and a memorable use of enjambment to highlight the adults who branded the speaker’s roommate untouchable. In this world, the speaker, the i of the poem, is lower case, as if lowered from the shame others attached to her pregnancy. The poem unfurls to drop us down to this home of pregnant girls sequestered for secret deliveries before returning to their old lives, wondering in the meanwhile “would our bodies be the same? could we hide among the / childless?”

In stanzas of varying lengths, the speaker acts as documentarian, detailing the communal support these strangers stationed together by circumstance offered each other in tactile images that evoke sight, sound, and touch, like “the t.v. room / where, at night, we sat in our cuddly cotton robes and / fleece-lined slippers—like college freshmen, joking / about the nuns and laughing about due dates—jailbirds” or “laughing, / on a christmas shopping spree, free (the only day they / let us out in two months), feet wet and cold from snow.” The narrative voice shines like a precise camera lens when it zooms in for close-ups of individual girls: the roommate who “always reminded me of a lady at the bridge / club in her mother’s shoes, playing her mother’s hand,” the older one, 26 or 27, who “talked with a funny accent, the pain on her face / seemed worse than ours…”, or the gentle girl with “flat small bones” whose “great round hump seemed to carry her around!”

The speaker focuses on the “gentle girl,” whose story is entangled with her own as a foil, for multiple stanzas. This 17-year-old, diabetic girl, worried she or the baby or both would die in childbirth, feared keeping the baby would be “wrong” and wondered whether she would have another child if she gave the baby up for adoption. In contrast, the speaker uses white space to punctuate her certainty: “i never felt stronger, eating / right, doing my exercises.     i was holding on to the core” and later, “i would keep the child.   i was sturdy.   would be a better / mother than my mother.    i would still be a doctor.” But this certainty falters when the visceral “stain of pink blood / on the toilet paper” shocks and once the speaker feels “the first thing I could not / feel, had no control of, dripping down my leg.” At the height of her pain in delivery, she, ironically, holds onto the “image of innocence”—recasting the pregnant girls as faces that shone like “children in the nursery” with their unknown, yet-unfelt birth pangs.

2010s

“Speculations about ‘I’” (2016)

(Is “I” speaking another language?)

I said, “I” is dangerous.
But at the time I couldn’t tell
which one of us was speaking.

This poem is crafted in 13 sections composed of short lines and plenty of white space to linger. Each bite-sized stanza is deceptively dense in its philosophical wanderings, albeit spartan with language. Each word is precisely chosen to illuminate, question, and surprise. It is apt that this poem opens with an epigraph from Henry David Thoreau to frame the poem’s theme: “A certain doubleness, by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another.” “Doubleness” is the conceit and marvel of this poem: “I” unspools, multiplies, and observes as both a singular and twinned voice. 

The poem interrogates the autonomy and reality of the I. The “I” in the poem often emerges as a shadowy, omnipresent voice after the speaker endures a trauma or act of violence. As the speaker searingly states in a pseudo-creation myth that opens the poem’s first section:

I didn’t choose the word—
it came pouring out of my throat
like the water inside a drowned man.
I didn’t even push on my stomach.
I just lay there, dead (like he told me)

& “I” came out.
(I’m sorry, Father.
“I” wasn’t my fault.)

In this instance and throughout the poem, parentheses function as another doubling to inject both a wry tone and revelatory narrative details deepening the speaker’s interiority. One of the most heartbreaking parentheticals, a kind of death of the self as a child, is shared in the fourth section: “‘I’ was the closest I could get to the / one I loved (who I believe was/smothered in her playpen).” The speaker’s visceral images throughout the poem scorch the mind’s eye and ground readers in an embodied experience of the I that moves us beyond philosophy alone. This is further emphasized when the poem’s “I” is defined by comparison in putrid similes like: “I loved ‘I’ like a stinky bed,” or “(What is ‘I’?)” “[…] More like opening the chest & / throwing the heart out with the gizzards,” or “like the Trojan horse. / I’d sit on the bench / (I didn’t look out of the eyeholes / so I wouldn’t see the carnage).”

Derricotte was inspired to write this poem after pondering why she wrote “so-called personal poetry for so many years,” as she said on an episode of the Poetry magazine podcast. “And during that time, it occurred to me that it wasn’t personal in the way most people think of it. And I learned that through writing this poem.” This poem is a clear challenge to any perception that writing what one knows or what one has experienced, as with confessional poetry, is somehow a simpler art form compared to other topics. As the speaker notes in a clanging metaphor, the “I” acts as both a means toward freedom of expression and a barrier to be confined by singular stories: “I am not the ‘I’ / in my poems. ‘I’ / is the net I try to pull me in with.” The work of the poet vacillating between I’s is a labor; “I treated ‘I’ as if / ‘I’ wasn’t human,” the speaker admits in the 11th section of the poem. By the next section, it is this humanity, the persistence of the human spirit to endure, that is both a requirement of possibility and a fraught sequence of death sentences insisting that we continually begin again: “But why pretend? / ‘I’ is a kind of terminal survival.”