by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

Please take this week’s title as a warning. If you find profanity offensive, this installment of Word Cloud is one you may want to skip.

An article I skimmed for this week’s post was called Poets Nobody Reads, which isn’t entirely true, but certainly Carolyn Rodgers (1940 – 2010) is no longer as well-known as she was at her controversial zenith, from the late 1960s to the end of the 1970s.

At a time when many male African-American writers were being praised for their use of ‘Black English,’ Carolyn Rodgers was being told to “tone down” the very language that had first brought her attention. And it seems that most of her poems that are laced with cuss words are not available online, while her books of poetry have become rare enough that prices have skyrocketed.

A few of her poems strike me as uneven, not because she uses black idioms, but because they read to me like second drafts, promising ideas not quite finished. However, the majority of her work passes Garrison Keillor’s test of a good poem: “Stickiness, memorability, is one sign of a good poem. You hear it and a day later some of it is still there in the brainpan.”
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This is a young poem, about that frustrating and difficult process of self-discovery.

Breakthrough

I’ve had tangled feelings lately
About ev’rything
Bout writing poetry, and otha forms
Bout talkin and dreamin with a
Special man (who says he needs me)
Uh huh
And my mouth has been open
Most of the time but
I ain’t been saying nothin but
Thinking about ev’rything
And the partial pain has been
How do I put my self on paper
The way I want to be or am and be
Not like any one else in this
Black world but me

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Knowing the Difference

Leave the sister and brother 
with the yellow/gold 
red/orange streak in their hair 
yeah, leave them alone. 
Traditions die slowly. 
Cultural patterns are never quite erased. 
ostriches 
cheetahs
lions
leopards 
honkies 
We have always imitated animals.

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I love this poem, for the deep and complex ties it reveals between mother and daughter, who are so different, and yet so much alike.

It Is Deep
(don’t never forget the bridge that you crossed over on)

Having tried to use the 
witch cord 
that erases the stretch of 
thirty-three blocks 
and tuning in the voice which 
woodenly stated that the 
talk box was “disconnected”

My mother, religiously girdled in 
her god, slipped on some love, and 
laid on my bell like a truck, 
blew through my door warm wind from the south 
concern making her gruff and tight-lipped 
and scared 
that her “baby” was starving. 
she, having learned, that disconnection results from 
non-payment of bill (s).

She did not 
recognize the poster of the 
grand le-roi (al) cat on the wall 
had never even seen the books of 
Black poems that I have written 
thinks that I am under the influence of 
**communists** 
when I talk about Black as anything 
other than something ugly to kill it befo it grows 
in any impression she would not be 
considered “relevant” or “Black” 
but 
there she was, standing in my room 
not loudly condemning that day and 
not remembering that I grew hearing her 
curse the factory where she “cut uh slave” 
and the cheap j-boss wouldn’t allow a union, 
not remembering that I heard the tears when 
they told her a high school diploma was not enough, 
and here now, not able to understand, what she had 
been forced to deny, still–

she pushed into my kitchen so 
she could open my refrigerator to see 
what I had to eat, and pressed fifty 
bills in my hand saying “pay the talk bill and buy 
some food; you got folks who care about you . . .”

My mother, religious-negro, proud of 
having waded through a storm, is very obviously, 
a sturdy Black bridge that I 
crossed over, on. 

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Poem for Some Black Women

i am lonely,
all the people i know
i know too well

there was comfort in that
at first but now
we know each others miseries
too well.

we are
lonely women, who spend time waiting for
occasional flings
we live with fear.

we are lonely.
we are talented, dedicated, well read
BLACK, COMMITTED,

we are lonely,
we understand the world problems
Black women’s problems with Black men
but all
we really understand is
lonely.

when we laugh,
we are so happy to laugh
we cry when we laugh
we are lonely.

we are busy people
always doing things
fearing getting trapped in rooms
loud with empty…

yet
knowing the music of silence/hating it/hoarding it
loving it/treasuring it,

it often birthing our creativity
we are lonely

being soft and being hard
supporting our selves, earning our own bread
soft/hard/hard/soft
knowing that need must not show
will frighten away
knowing that we must
walk back-wards nonchalantly on our tip-toeness
into
happiness,
if only for stingy moments

we know too much
we learn to understand everything,
to make too much sense out
of the world,
of pain
of lonely…

we buy clothes, we take trips,
we wish, we pray, we meditate, we curse, we crave, we coo,
we caw,

we need ourselves sick, we need, we need
we lonely we grow tired of tears we grow tired of fear
we grow tired but must al-ways be soft and not too serious…
not too smart not too bitchy not too sapphire
not too dumb not too not too not too
a little less a little more
add here detract there
lonely.

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Food for Thought

you understand how 
very often 
you are 
the one 
who creates the traps you fall into

the thing that destroys a person/a people 
is not the knowing 
but the knowing and not 
doing

strange 
how we women 
know 
when a man 
leaves us- 
even when 
he’s still 
with us…

when you need 
give

it is not ugly to dream in life 
but it is ugly to make life a dream

i wonder if 
the sunrays are like the fingertips of 
God? 

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This is Carolyn Rodgers’ response to her critics:

The Last M.F.

they say,
that i should not use the word
muthafucka anymo
in my poetry or in any speech i give. 
they say,
that i must and can only say it to myself 
as the new Black Womanhood suggests 
a softer self
a more reserved speaking self. they say, 
that respect is hard won by a woman 
who throws a word like muthafucka around 
and so they say because we love you 
throw that word away, Black Woman …
i say,
that i only call muthafuckas, muthafuckas 
so no one should be insulted.

and so i say
this is the last poem i will write calling 
all manner of wites, card-carrying muthafuckas 
and all manner of Blacks (negroes too) sweet 
muthafuckas, crazy muthafuckas, lowdown muthafuckas 
cool muthafuckas, mad and revolutionary muthafuckas, 
But anyhow you all know just like I do (whether I say
it or not), there’s plenty of MEAN muthafuckas out 
here trying to do the struggle in.

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There are still men who regard words as their special province, and rank women as equally at fault for being either ‘too feminine’ or ‘too masculine’ but never as true writers. I think you can guess what Carolyn Rodgers would call them.

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Carolyn Rogers grew up on Chicago’s South Side. She attended Roosevelt University and the University of Chicago, where she got her MA in English. Early in her career she was associated with the Black Arts Movement, attending writing workshops led by Gwendolyn Brooks and through the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC). Her collections of poetry include Paper Soul (1968); Songs of a Blackbird (1969), which won the Poet Laureate Award of the Society of Midland Authors; how I got ovah: New and Selected Poems (1975); The Heart as Ever Green: Poems (1978); and Morning Glory: Poems (1989). She died of cancer at the age of 69.
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VISUALS

• Bust of an African Woman by Charles-Henri-Joseph Cornier
• Leopard in grass
• Mother and daughter at Penn Station NY circa 1940s by Ruth Orkin
• Carolyn M. Rodgers
• Egyptian sun god Aten, whose rays end in hands
• Head of Benin Iyoba (Queen Mother) 18th Century

Word Cloud photo by Larry Cloud