Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books and Questions That Grew Me Up by Remica Bingham-Risher 2022
This book is a collection of ten essays written over a decade based on the author’s interviews with ten poets. What’s more, it’s also a memoir, where the author describes her family life and the influences of the ten poets on her own work. The poets interviewed are E. Ethelbert Miller, Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, Lucille Clifton, Sonia Sancez, and others. In addition to the ten poets interviewed, Bingham-Risher also brings up the names and works of other poets within the chapters.
We began our book discussion on Saturday April 15th with a read-aloud of poems by Jericho Brown, Ross Gay, Honoree Jeffers and of course, poems by the author: Remica Bingham-Risher. There were eleven of us in the group. Hearing the poems read out loud gave us a greater appreciation for the works.
Barbara M began our conversation by mentioning the three different black poetry movements Bingham-Risher identifies. The first was the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 30s, then the Black Arts Movement from the 1960s until around 1975, and finally the movement that began at Cave Canem in 1996. In the Black Renaissance there’s a bluesey tone then, during the Black Arts movement, there's questioning and rejection of authority, but it’s still kind of bluesy. “But in the last phase they allow themselves to talk about love or the weather or the beauty of something. It gives me hope. They’re not locked into a certain norm,”
Shelara tried to make us see that the “bluesy tone” Barbara’s talking about has to do with what the patrons of those writers wanted to hear. The modern poets see that they don’t have to prove their humanity. “You can just be a human…it gives me hope too. You are a human being whether they identify you as such or not. As an artist, that’s liberation. If you don’t see the humanity in me that’s on you. “
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| Remica Bingham-Risher |
Wendy: I thought she addressed that very directly in a way saying, “It was in part because of the art and the poetry that had come before, that had led to this building on and honoring the people who made it possible to do this. And I was struck by the fact that several different chapters mention this duality: what these artists might want to do and then this piece of being part of this heritage that they felt the need to honor and acknowledge and bring to public awareness in a way.” E. Ethelbert Miller
Shelara: I think that funding also played a piece. Langston Hughes had a white patroness. The Harlem Renaissance poets had to meet their own needs and make sure their bills got paid. Poets have moved away from that old-style patronage, establishing ways to fund their community through outlets like the Wright/Hurston Foundation and Cave Canem.
Wendy: I thought the letters the poets who had spent the summers there at Cave Canem wrote back and forth to each other...to have found a space where people care about each other, and bounce ideas back and forth must be really nice.
Laura: Bingham-Risher described her time at Cave Canem as kind of a lovefest. And you felt it and it stayed with you afterwards. Sometimes when you go to a retreat or something you can feel it while you’re there, but it has a truly short half-life when you come back to real life and real stress. I got the feeling these people still carried each other from their letters.
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| Honoree Fanonne Jeffers |
Laura: A. Van Jordan also said, “One thing that I find is that there’s no way for a student to access poetry before they hear their own voice in a poem. No other culture asks you to read the work of someone else outside of your culture first and then come back to your own voice. He continued, of course, you have to read Whitman you need to read Keats but if that someway doesn’t connect to the direct iconography of your life, you’re going to have a hard time.
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| A. Van Jordan |
Patricia Smih
Wendy: One of Bingham-Risher's interests was music. Every time she quoted a song I would find it on my phone so I’d be listening to the song as I read that passage. Some of the songs were Missing You by Diana Ross, By the Time I Get to Phoenix by Issac Hayes, and If It's Magic by Stevie Wonder. I also found out that Cave Canem is Latin for Beware the Dog.
Shelara: I’m impressed with the peculiarity of poetry and the poet's community. It’s a particular club for people who think of language that way. As a kid my first poems were lullabies then they drop a Shakespeare. I didn’t struggle but it is asking a lot to say read this by the next class. I can see why people have this anxiety about it. Poetry is just language. It’s storytelling in a unique way, this is evident even in the letters they wrote to each other. It’s like they were on different frequencies. I never heard of these writers' retreats. Yes, it’s important to see yourself in your reading, but I never read a book and said, “I don’t understand what they’re going through.” You should not have to see yourself in a poem to empathize with another human. Why is it that our society has taught us that unless you see yourself, you can’t feel empathy? I think Toni Morrison has spoken about that. When you’re in a marginalized community, it’s much easier to empathize.
by Remica Bingham-Risher
What We Ask of Flesh and Starlight & Error
Wendy: I thought when she asked A. Van Jordan about never shying away from Race p.78 I feel like racism is the real social construct. It’s true it’s invented. Color was turned into this hierarchal thing and racism.
Barbara M. I also question what we’ve established as our benchmarks. Educators say, “You have to have Shakespeare.” These benchmarks put us all in a kind of prison. Shakespeare was a kind of rogue. Because we’ve locked ourselves into these benchmarks, we turn our young people off. I really get frustrated about it.
Shelara: The way we teach Shakespeare now isn’t even how it was presented when it was first done. The bawdy stuff was for the working class. It wasn’t “highbrow.” If we taught the kids, we would expand their understanding of language and what they can do with it.
Patricia: I wasn’t as enthusiastic about this book compared to some of the other books we read. I had to make myself keep going back to it. It was a harder read for me in that way. I was trying to pick chapters and just read them.
Marian: It was a difficult read for me because of the structure. When she interviewed these poets, it was over a ten-year period. She said in an interview that she had said to herself, “I should combine these essays into a book.” Her agent said, “Yeah, these essays about poets are nice but where are you?” So, she had to go back and add the things about her own life, and I think that in combining those two things, there were places where the separation was not as clear, but I can’t imagine reading the book if it was just about ten interviews. The part I thought was most interesting was about her and her mother and that big Family Reunion Breakfast: The Color Purple Breakfast. I want to go to that so bad; I want to get a DNA test so I can find out I’m in their family. Even the way she and her husband had been boyfriend and girlfriend at 13 and all these years went by then he looked her up online and then found out she had become a famous poet. She winds up getting married to him and received two children along with him. She received a family. All the things about her life made it rich. I’m a person who just likes life stories.
Shelara: I didn’t dislike the book. I like the poems. I think combining the interviews and the memoir was a bad choice.
Laura: There were so many poets and writers in my life when I was growing up because I was so much a loner…The relationship between me and books and writers is so strong that there was something so powerful to me about these people and their work and her becoming who she is. Especially the process about revision and revising your own life. If there was one kind of concept that grabbed me in the whole thing it was the idea of revision. There were three or four instances of her having a visceral reaction: one early on that a poem made her dizzy and one about each time she read a certain poem it made her breath catch at the same places. I kind of fell in love with this. I fell in love with Patricia Smith. She just received the Golden Rose Award for 2022. She did a one-hour spoken-word poem. She was just mind-blowing.
Patricia: I think this book was a little bit of a tease too, now that I’m thinking about it. You get introduced to all these wonderful poets and then the book goes off into something else.
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| Forrest Hamer |
Barb L.: I sort of had hoped for what you think of as an armchair book. You settle into your armchair and the book is self-contained. And then she’d talk about her reaction to a poem, and I wanted the poem to be there so that I didn’t have to get up and go look it up. You know I wanted to stay in my theoretical armchair. I don’t know if there are copyrighting issues to put other people’s poems in your book.
Marian: I loved it when she met Lucille Clifton. When she saw her get out of the car, everybody was awestruck: “Look, it’s Lucille Clifton!” Clifton was also the person who stepped in and offered her paycheck when one of the students had an emergency and may have had to leave the program, Lucille Clifton said, “Whatever money you are giving me, take it and give to that child.” I thought, “Wow, not only was she the star of the show, in fact, people signed up because she was there, but she proved to be so generous.
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| Lucille Clifton |
Erica Hunt, too, was an instructor that Bingham-Risher feared. The rest of the students feared her as well.
p.116 “We were afraid Hunt would hate our work, think it boring, without nuance, straitlaced. We thought she might eviscerate us in front of our peers, or let our peers nitpick our living to death, as had been the case in most of the workshops we’d attended before.”
p.117 “Not only did Hunt encourage constructive criticism of the work and the work only (not of our experiences, cultural or otherwise, that might have brought us to it), but she also carried a copy of my poem to other faculty, up and down the halls, showing it off in unabashed praise She did this for other poets too.”
The fact was that Lucille Clifton and Erica Hunt were such giants in Bingham-Risher’s imagination, and yet they proved to be so down to earth and generous.
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| Erica Hunt |
Not only does Bingham-Risher handle the interviews well and how the poets influenced her just as well, but she also really went out of her way to show their humanity and kindness.
Robin: Didn’t she say at the beginning of the book that she was advised by a teacher or a professor who said you have to go out and meet these people because you are way too much in awe. “
Indeed, on page ix in the introduction, Bingham-Risher wrote:
“I had endless questions for the writers I loved, and I drove Miller, the first teacher with whom I studied in graduate school, up a wall asking about them. He wrote me a letter, said I had to get over “this awe syndrome” I had about other writers and suggested I start conducting interviews to get some of those questions answered definitively, to assure myself that other Black writers weren’t so different from me.”
Shelara: Bingham-Risher mentioned Gwendolyn Brooks too, how she came to an open mike event, and she sat and waited while everyone read their poems and she graciously gave them feedback, not at all rushing to present her poems and leave. She talked about Sonia Sanchez this way as well, how Sanchez stayed throughout the whole event and then invited Bingham Risher to a house party. Sanchez later asked Bingham-Risher why she never called her back to finish the interview.
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| Sonia Sanchez |
Wendy: I just thought people were so giving in this community. I would imagine that there would be competition, but it didn’t come across that way. I thought this would be a great book to have as a course.
Maria: I would like to read a passage if I might. It’s by Natasha Tretheway , whose mother had been murdered by her former stepfather,
p.144 “Being restrained means withholding something and creating that silence.I think of the things that I’ve been given to write...and I remember turning in a poem when I was, early on, trying to grapple with my mother’s death in poems. Someone in the class said, ‘This just seems so sensational. It seems like something that came out of the newspaper,’ and I was just sitting there thinking, for some people, these things are real life.”
Natasha Tretheway is quoted on page 153: “I can’t remember who said that poets are charged with the collective memory of a people, but I think that we are. The duty is to create work that values the human spirit and dignifies humanity, in that it is willing to speak to and for, as much as possible, all of us.”
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| Nathasha Tretheway |
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