For you, poem — / I’m not myself / I’m un-made / and re-made / of many words
My fingers went to work before my thoughts clocked the motions. With scissors and glue, extracting and applying, erasing and adhering. Altogether, now, I have 870 pieces of womanword; letters, phrases and philosophies, plucked from their source material. (So far, just Poor Richard’s Almanac by Benjamin Franklin, but, potentially, other texts and more almanacs to-come).
In this state of undone-ness, I struggle for structure and definition. It’s hard enough to explain to myself what I’m doing, let alone know how to answer when others ask me what project(s) I’m working on. The question only begets more questions. Often, it feels like I’m only able to see or understand what I have, after it’s done.
Nearly a thousand imperfect cuts later, and I’m just beginning to figure it out.
via @saaretsees
A BLACK WOMAN’S ALMANAC is a poetry collage and chapbook, an open-ended experiment that I’m arranging and rearranging, like a jigsaw puzzle. Almanacs are annual publications, meant to project the future. Traditionally, they mark special days or events of significance for and by specified groups. Generally, observers of Jewish, Julian or Gregorian calendars. My edition aims to subvert white, male value systems of time, place and importance. I want to use poetry to reimagine new astrology, aphorisms and expressions specifically for Black women.
Dr. Eleanor W. Traylor coined womanword in the preface of Toni Cade Bambara’s edited anthology The Black Woman (1970), both in honor of the writer and her words. Because womanword is “Toni-word,” an “encounter in which language explores itself.” It’s as much a celebration as it is “a re-creative disturbance of conventional expectations,” as “prescient” as it is “profane.” Womanword is “blackwomanword everywhere alive in the universe.”
Something inside of me is recognizing this affinity; the need to piece and assemble fragments, to discover and create kinship from disparate parts. I didn’t know I was looking for womanword until I found it. Or, until it found me. And, in these moments of discovery, I tell myself that, as slow and imprecise as my process may be, the searching and gathering, the cutting and culling, it’s never aimless.
woman / gird your spirit / protect against / turbulent winds / and emotions