Now you are strong
And we are but grapes aching with ripeness.
Crush us!
Squeeze from us all the brave life
Contained in these full skins.
But ours is a subtle strength
Potent with centuries of yearning,
Of being kegged and shut away
In dark forgotten places.
We shall endure
To steal your senses
In that lonely twilight
Of your winter’s grief.
These are the words of Pauli Murray, from her poem “To the Oppressors”. She was a black, feminist, poet, theologian, attorney. I think I got those in the right order. Black, theologian, attorney, poet, feminist? Anyway, the number of things she could be labeled and the order of those labels is perhaps one of the least interesting things about her. She lived through the civil rights movement, and with her legal and theological perspectives, offered a very unique take on the world she lived in, bringing in themes of crying out against injustice in the oppression of her experience and her people.
She is the first poet that I’ve found really remarkable in this season. She has a unique way of describing pain and suffering that doesn’t minimize the experience of it, but places it in the context of a narrative of seeking justice. One remarkable thing I found about her poems is that she never sees her oppressed people as passive. They are waiting, they are enduring, they are beaten, they are kicked, but they are not doing nothing. If you want to learn more about her, I recommend her book Dark Testament (Silvermine Publishers, 1970).
The second poet is a very unique person: Nyogen Senzaki. He was a zen Buddhist monk from Japan who came to the United States, and during the second world war, was interned in a prison camp in Heart Mountain, Wyoming. Unlike Murray, whose poetry draws deeply from a burning hope of freedom that generations of oppression have not been able to quench, Senzaki’s perspective is… well.. zen.
Thus have I heard:
The army ordered
All Japanese faces to be evacuated
From the city of Los Angeles.
This homeless monk has nothing but a Japanese face.
He stayed here thirteen springs
Meditating with all faces
From all parts of the world,
And studied the teaching of Buddha with them.
Wherever he goes, he may form other groups
Inviting friends of all faces,
Beckoning them with the empty hands of Zen.
The thing that gets me, however, is that in Senzaki’s poetry there is no less recognition of his oppression, no less complacency with injustice, merely a different outlook. One is tempted to say that Murray’s outspokenness is “right” and Senzaki’s is “wrong”, but I think that to ask which is right or wrong is to ask the wrong question. I think both these people found a way of understanding their oppression and found something true about it. Senzaki finds within himself a deep desire to rise above the situation by recognizing that what he desires most is Zen, and that this, even this, the systematic incarceration of Japanese-decended Americans, is not an impediment to that.
One poem that always stands out to me is this one:
A swarm of demons infests the whole of humanity.
It resembles the scenery of Gaya where Buddha fought his last
battle to attain Realization.
We, Zen students in this internment, meditate today
To commemorate the Enlightened One.
We sit firmly in this Zendo while the cold wind of the plateau
Pierces to our bones.
All demons within us freeze to death.
No more demons exist in the snowstorm
Under the Mountain of Compassion.
On one hand, it’s about perseverance and seeking first the zen. On the other hand, this guy was probably actually freezing to death. Like I’ve been to Wyoming, and I can’t imagine the housing erected for these people whose human rights are about to be disregarded were all that good. I can imagine Senzaki in the camp, maybe even in his wandering Zendo, when someone says something about the cold. He then turns this perspective to say that the cold is something to be celebrated, since as the Buddha fought demons, so this cold fights demons with us. “No more demons exist in the snowstorm.”
The last line can be seen, on some level, as a pun since the camp is called Heart Mountain. However, Senzaki seems to be beckoning the listener to the fact that as big and insurmountable as Heart Mountain is, the Mountain of Compassion is greater. The atrocities they’re enduring are not beyond their compassion. If you want to read more Senzaki, I commend Like a dream, like a fantasy (Japan Publications, 1978).
The final poet who I’ve been enamored with is David Drake. He was a potter born in South Carolina around 1801. We know about his early life since we have documents such as financial agreements listing him as collateral. However, he soon became one of the best potters in all of United States. The production he worked in was the largest in pre-war America, and David Drake’s signature are on thousands of pieces of surviving pottery.
I’ll get to his poetry in a bit, but I don’t want to overlook his skill as a ceramicist. I’ve thrown clay before, and maybe, on a good day, I could turn a vessel that could hold one gallon. I’m thinking of the size of a milk jug. That would be ambitious for me, but I think I could do it. Skilled potters of the time would have been able to throw, max 5-8 gallons. Think the size of a 5-gallon bucket from the hardware store. Just thinking about centering that much clay makes me want to give up. How large did Drake work? 40 gallons. That’s literally like a bathtub.
However, the mystery does not stop there. His poems are written on the sides of his pots, and are often times just couplets, such as:
Dave belongs to Mr. Miles
wher the oven bakes & the pot biles
Keep in mind that South Carolina passed anti-literacy laws, making it a criminal offense to teach slaves to read or write before Drake was born. How was he doing so, and so visibly? He, according to several accounts, had lost his legs. The pottery wheels of that era and area were operated by kicking. How did he become such a master without being able to do the very thing that turns the pottery wheel?
Some of this is elucidated in Leonard Todd’s book Carolina Clay (W. W. Norton & Company, 2008). Todd does a deep dive into Drake’s biography, and pulls up really remarkable historical information on him. What makes the Todd book stand out even more is the fact that Todd is from the same place in South Carolina that Drake is from, and can trace his genealogy back to Drake’s masters. Along the way, Todd not only uncovers information about Drake, but about his family, and reconciles his slave-holding lineage with the life of this remarkable man.
Drake’s poetry has been interpreted and re-interpreted, sort of ad infinitum. For instance, take this poem:
The forth of July is surely come
to blow the fife = and beat the drum
I’ve read interpretations of this that say that Drake must be understanding the meaning of the Fourth of July as one inherently about freedom from liberation, and the call to beat the drum would have been symbolic of the war drums associated with black uprisings in the South. While this is definitely meaningful and persuasive to me, I feel like I really don’t know. It feels like an argument from absence.
What I do find amazing about Drake is not the poetry as a strict form, but Drake as a person. For instance, there’s a pot from 1854 that says “Lm says this handle will crack.” LM would have been Lewis Miles, Drake’s owner in 1854. However, the handle is still firmly attached to that pot. Over 150 years later. The fact that this man, this enslaved, country-born, perplexingly literate black man would be willing to flagrantly defy his owner is incredible.
If you want to learn more about David Drake, I do recommend the Todd book Carolina Clay. There is another book I read on this, Where is All My Relation by Chaney, (Oxford University Press, 2018). Chaney’s book is very different, compiling a bunch of shorter chapters by different authors. It’ll cover everything from like the way different kilns were constructed and operated to deep interpretive dives into the economic perspectives in Drake’s mentions of money or wealth. I personally found it much less readable than the Todd book, but it’s definitely very informative.
Craquelure 