Flowers For Socrates

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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