It was quite delightful on this Saturday evening to read a book of poetry in the time it took me to drink a mug of hot tea. After finishing a lengthy book (Greg Iles’ The Quiet Game), it was nice to turn to a medium I’m so fond of, but read far too little of in book form. Tonight, I turned to Alice Walker’s 2003 poetry collection, A Poem Traveled Down My Arm. Essentially, two things happened to Walker to create this collection: a.) she decided she was done writing; and b.) she found that in having to sign her autograph thousands of times in preparation for the release of a previous poetry collection, writing wasn’t done with her. That’s the beauty of creativity and inspiration — it bubbles up when we least expect it and certainly, when we think we can “walk away from it.” Walker also found catharsis of a kind in doodling around her signature, so, this collection also features some of those silly doodles. Which I love! I adore people willing to not take themselves too seriously and be silly. This is Alice Walker, after all, the brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple. And yet, she embraced her whimsical side. Her collection also reminded me of another recent book I reviewed, Gretchen Rubin’s collection of aphorisms from this year, Secrets of Adulthood. Walker’s poems read like a series of aphorisms largely around anti-war, naturalistic themes, as well as the silly fact of our mortality. Why not be whimsical in the face of such silliness, when you get right down to it?
Like Rubin’s book of aphorisms, I’m going to touch on a few poems that made me think and I’ll provide expanded thoughts. One of the reasons I write is to know what I think!
Maybe my favorite poem of the collection occurs early on:
the right road
disappears
beneath
our feet.
Indeed, sometimes the difficulty with taking the right road in life is being unsure whether you’re on it, hence the road “disappearing” beneath your feet. That’s where moral courage conviction and courage comes in.
As I said, Walker is playful with her collection, and funny at times. This next poem reflects that:
You will
be
tried
in the
fires
of
small talk.
Ah, a baptism we all must endure as adults. The truly amusing fact of this poem is how sneaky small talk actually is in becoming endearing. Arguably, the older one gets, the more one relishes the small talk and misses it in the unyielding silences that replace it.
Similar to the first poem, this next one is about how counterintuitive the dimensions of the right thing are:
The straight
path
follows
an endless
curve.
I interpret this to be inspired by the line from Martin Luther King, Jr. (itself one he brought into the modern context from a 19th century abolitionist), “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. The straight path, a metaphor for doing the right thing, ultimately “curves” endlessly toward justice. The problem is we don’t often have patience for the curve. Understandably for those of us in the present.
Around 14 or 15 years of age, as I was developing my world view, which happens to coincide with all sorts of hormonal angst, I could have used the wisdom of this next poem from Walker:
Do not
cling
to being
lost.
There is a certain martyrdom in being “lost,” i.e., trying to find yourself. We venerate the journey often more than the end, or the “being lost” more than the “being found.” Being lost in this way became a sort of stand-in for a personality. Who are you once you’ve reached the end of that journey? Better to stay in the wilderness, so it appeared.
Walker’s next poem has her own italicized emphasis:
Civilization
was an
excuse.
I’m not sure what to make of this one, but I must include any I’m still ruminating upon. If I was to delve deep and perhaps extrapolate beyond what Walker intended, there is a sense in which we use the veneer of being a civilized people to obfuscate modern horrors. In other words, we’re a civilized people, ergo, we are not the barbarians of the past. Civilization becomes an excuse to rationalize present barbarism.
Similar in vein to the martyrdom of clinging to being lost, consider:
How long
we have slept
dreaming
of getting
everywhere
some
where
faster.
Why do we want to escape the present so much? Isn’t the future only another present?
Actually, this might be the most resonant poem in the book for me:
What is
the balm
for consciousness?
If only we could find that out. Consciousness is both the eternal curse and blessing of being a human.
Walker’s muse she tried to “retire” or walk away from wrote this poem:
I am not
so easily
killed
as
you
thought:
So firmly
am I
a part
of you.
The muse wants what the muse wants! We serve at its pleasure, not the other way around. Never forget it.
Finally, here is one of the more stark poems from a visual juxtaposition standpoint:
Do not
be
like cows
grazing
watching
the butcher.
Poor cows. Fortunately, humans have that pesky consciousness and the “straight path” and the “right road” available to them the cows do not. All those are metaphors for leading us away from the butcher instead of grazing and watching him.
I’m not sure Walker’s collection of poems will be for everyone. Poetry lovers will want more meat on the bone, as it were (heck of a follow-up analogy after discussing the butcher), and those who don’t care about poetry wouldn’t bother cracking its spine. Nonetheless, I enjoyed these pithy lines and cute doodles. Walker went out on a limb not knowing if it would hold her considerable powers, and if you ask me, it did.
Milam's Musings 