http://www.warscapes.com/poetry/poem-history
“Brenda Marie Osbey’s long poem, “History,” from which we have published an excerpt here, comes from her recent collection History and Other Poems (Time Being Books 2012). The subject of these poems is colonialism, the slave trade, but also, the telling of history itself. We have asked Brenda Marie Osbey to discuss the relation of poetry to history, and to discuss the relation of history to the literary symbol, and we have transcribed this discussion below:
Noam Scheindlin: Your poems engage with a long tradition of the poet as historian. Your poems also seem to manifest something of the impersonal thrust of history: the disembodied voices, snatches of songs, unattributed quotations could be understood to perform the way history creates subjects. But there is of more than this: there is a counter-thrust; an opposition not just to the way things happened—but to the way-things-are-told. How do you understand the function / phenomenon of poetry in relation to that of “history?” Can a poem be history?
Brenda Marie Osbey: There is a longer tradition of the poet-as-historian than we readily admit. Isn’t history always the way/s in which things are told, who does the telling and on what authority? Antar ibn Shaddad, the Black Raven of Saudi Arabia, wrote that three things define man: “to make love, to make war, to make verse.” Long before his 6th century epic of war and love, the Gabon Death Rite Suites and hunting poems were composed, and the Khoikhoi lyric poems on the nature of the universe, all of which tell such a great deal about ancient sub-Saharan African social and political life, religion, mythology and warfare. The teachings of Lao-Tsu come to us in verse. Much of the accepted history of Western antiquity comes to us from Homer. And, of course, the Nahuatl philosopher-poet-king and master craftsman Nezahualcoyotl recorded in poems and songs much of what we’ve come to understand about life in the pre-Columbian Americas. Indeed, much if not most of what we know (or claim to know) about the ancient worlds of Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe, we know through poetry anyway. What ancient societies can we claim to know that didn’t have generations of peripatetic bards carrying news and history in some combination of song, lyric and narrative poem? More recently, so much of what we’ve come to understand about the experience of the Middle Passage we know from Robert Hayden’s brilliant narrative poem of that title. In the words of the late Audre Lorde, poetry is not a luxury. Literary critic Deborah McDowell writes passionately about “the myths, the fables, the abridgements, the approximations, and the outright lies that masquerade” in the name of history. This presumed divide between history and poetry really is a relatively recent one, and one that seems to underscore the recent need to segregate intellectual and creative work into neat and exclusive categories. Hence, the notion of history as the serious business of historians and, more and more, of journalists, and of poetry as an art form concerned primarily with personal identity and craft, precious, interesting perhaps, but signifying nothing. My own practice has always been to think of poetry first, foremost and always as a way of engaging and interacting in and with the world.”
If God knows everything, why should we tell our sins to a priest?
“When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, “Why god? Why me?” and the thundering voice of God answered, There’s just something about you that pisses me off.”
I had a full day watching Stan hoover the bedroom. and re-hang the curtainsHe found 5 pence on the rug.
How my heart speaks 