Posts tagged Rattle
Words and Their Shadows, the Snaking Line, and the Tiny Blades of Language: Cortney Lamar Charleston on His Poem "I'm Not a Racist"

Cortney Lamar Charleston

Some write poetry with an eye towards beauty and their own experience, but it’s a different and very necessary kind of poet who arrives at the page with the intent to unsettle, to shake others from their sleep. From the instant I discovered him during my routine reading on the web, it was clear that Cortney Lamar Charleston is that other kind of writer – in his use of poetry both as art and as path to change, of everything from our relationships to the wider social fabric. In this time of violence against marginalized groups, it feels more important than ever to shed light on those artists who prod us awake to others’ pain, who keep us from rolling over and going back to sleep. I’m grateful to Cortney for the reminder, and for taking the time to do this interview – after just getting back from a retreat at Cave Canem, no less. – HLJ

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I came across “I’m Not a Racist” in  One Throne and instantly appreciated the truth-telling in it, this calling out of this country’s racial reality which is frankly a situation most people in my own experience are unlikely to discuss in “polite conversation.”  

I’m really happy that you found the poem! Interestingly, I think the unlikelihood of race ever being part of polite conversation is the conceptual foundation of the entire poem. Because people try to avoid the topic completely, it leads to a lot of “mental gymnastics” aimed at skirting around the subject, but language has evolved in such a way that different words, when strung together, can mean the same thing. I can say that I’d rather avoid going to certain neighborhoods because they’re “sketchy” – or, I can say I don’t want to go to that neighborhood because it’s full of poor people or black people, or something along those lines. Either way, whether it’s explicit or implied, the meaning is the same because the word “sketchy” does not have a clean history. I pay less attention to someone’s exact words than to the shadow those words cast on me as the listener or reader.

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I’M NOT A RACIST

                            I'm a realist: if I see a pack of hoods approaching, loitering,                                                   
acting a littering of public sidewalks, I simply 

                      move to the other

side of the street, play it safe. I keep it on me at all times,                                                                                         for safety purposes. 

                                      In the event of open fire,     

                       you'd be a hazard  I told them when I, regrettably, couldn't
                                                allow the lot of them into the party.

                 We're part of the same

political party, according to all the numbers I've seen.
When I shut the schools down, I was just

                                             doing what must be done

                                 to balance a city budget out of wack. When I put what
                                                             I found in his trunk on balance,

                  it was enough to tip the scale

towards a felony. I used to be a waiter, and they never
tipped very well in my experience.

                                 While we were placing bets,

                        I noticed him tip his hand ever so slightly and there was
                                                a  ̶̶r̶a̶c̶e̶ face card in it. He didn't seem

               like much of a bluffer, so I stood

my ground. On the grounds of merit – that's how I got
into Yale. I'm just not that into black 

                                             girls, personally. I mean, personally,

                                   I don't SEE color. I'm so sorry, I really didn't see you there.
                                                                  There they go, using that word again:

                                if they can say it, then why can't I?

I can't understand why everybody is so sensitive these days.
I admit, what I said sounded a little bit

                                             insensitive, but believe me, I'm not

                     a racist. I'm a realist: if I see a pack of hoods approaching, loitering,
                                        acting a littering of public sidewalks,

                     I simply move to the other side.

I keep it on me at all times, for purposes: in the event of a
hazard, open fire  I told them, regrettably,

                                              looking at the body splayed before me.

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Craft, Inspiration, NoPoetryMFA, Reading Recommendations, Submitting & RejectionHannah Lee JonesApogee Journal, Cave Canem, Cortney Lamar Charleston, Ghazal, James Baldwin, Love Poems, Ocean Vuong, One Throne, Race, RattleComment
"Embiggening", What Is Less, and the Human Soul Writ Large: Matt Muth on His Poem "Learning a Foreign Language"

Yep. That's Matt Muth. And a scimitar.

My encounter with Matt Muth at AWP in Los Angeles consisted mostly of sitting across from him at the book fair and watching him repeatedly throw a ball in the air while hawking his Seattle-based publication Pacifica Literary Review. In what would eventually turn into an amusing experiment in meta-conversation, the raw transcript of my Google chat interview with him is shot through with bracketed wisecracks that belie a dead-seriousness over big ideas. Incidentally this would be my first contact with his expression “embiggening”: a word that sounds a lot like “beginning”, and a place I sense this poet returns to often when he’s not running a publication or headed to his next hockey game. “I am a monument,” he writes in a recent Facebook post, and not without irony, “to failing upward.” – HLJ 

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Your poem "Learning a Foreign Language", recently out in RHINO, dances at the edges of everyday vocabulary. On the surface it would seem intimidating to a reader who doesn’t know what a postulate or onanism is, yet the poem as a thing is shockingly unpretentious. What triggered the writing of it?  

It basically grew out of a feeling of not being good enough for a significant other, but more specifically the feeling that when this person looked at me they were speaking a completely different language than I was when I looked at me, if that makes sense. And the poem is about that odd disconnect between who you thought you were and what you thought you were made of, compared to what an observer looks at you and sees. That was the generative emotional place of the poem.

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LEARNING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

I needed to associate like with like, object
with suggestion. I needed to be trained. I taped
index cards to my possessions: the nightstand

said onanist, the toilet said equivocator; my desk
was narcissist, and the venetian blinds
were all cowards. I had some nouns, but soon

this was not enough learning: I needed adjectives,
verbs, I needed fluency. Each pair of boxer-briefs
got a false advertising patch stamped

on the codpiece; I wrote won’t block shots
on the blades of my hockey skates in lip gloss,
each new term a wine grape in my mouth —

I burned vestigial into each rib and shaved
vapid on the side of my head. I’m getting better
with practice: soon we’ll be able to communicate —

you’ll sit across from me mouthing words
and pointing, your hands their own bright
postulates, and I’ll thrill with understanding.
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Craft, Habits, Inspiration, MFA, NoPoetryMFA, PoetryMFA, Submitting & RejectionHannah Lee JonesAdirondack Review, CP Cavafy, Matt Muth, Pacifica Literary Review, RHINO, Rattle, University of WashingtonComment