A Good Poem
advice
by Ntosake Shange
from Nappy Edges (1978)
i get mad & scream/ there is no ground
only shit pieces from dogs horses & men who dont live
anywhere/ they tell me think straight & make myself
somethin/ i shout & sigh/ i am a poet/ i write poems/
i make words/ cartwheel & somersault down pages
outta my mouth come visions distilled like bootleg
whisky/ i am like a radio but i am a channel of my own
i keep sayin i do this/ & people keep askin what am i gonna do/
what in the hell is goin on?
did somebody roll over the library wittta atomic truck
did hitler really burn all the books/ it’s true
nobody in the
english anymore/ i must have been the last survivor of
a crew from mars/ this is where someone in brown cacky comes
to arrest me & green x-ray lights come outta my eyes & i
can leap over skyscrapers & fly into the night/ i can be
sure no one will find me cuz i am invisible to
ordinary human beings in the
who go to their unemployment officer/ sayin i wanna put
down my profession as ‘poet’/ they are sure to send you to
another office/ the one for aid to totally dependent persons/
people keep tellin me these are hard times/ what are you gonna be
doin ten years from now/ what in the hell do you think/ i
am gonna be writin poems/ i will have poems/ inchin u p the
walls of the
rye bread with horseradish/ i am gonna send my mailman off
with a poem for his wagon/ give my doctor a poem for his heart/
i am a poet/ i am not a part-time poet/ i am not an amateur
poet/ i dont even know what that person cd be/ whoever that
is authorizing poetry as an avocation/ is a fraud/
put yr own feet on the ground/ writers dont have to plan
another existence forever to live schizophrenically/ to
be jane doe & medea in one body/
i have had it/ i am not goin to grow up to be somethin else
i am goin to be ol & grey wizened & wise as aunt mamie/
i am gonna write poems til i die & when i have gotten outta
this body i am gonna hang round in the wind & know over
everybody who got their feet on the ground/ i’ma let you
run wild/ & leave a poem or two with king kong
in his aeroplane to drop pieces of poems
so you all will haveta come together/ just to figure out/
how you got so far away/ so far away from words
however/ did you capture language/ is a free thing.
posted by perrykat at
4:05 PM
5 Comments:
I have such great memories of you reading this poem. Thanks, and thanks again.
As an aside, it's funny the things that get us excited. I have been reading about a programming language, Ruby, and a framework "Ruby on Rails", and AJAX and using MySQL and WEBBrick or mod_something? for Apache...
And it gets my stomach achey as I think, if I knew all this how many amazing things could I make? And how much time and effort and achey-hands would it take to learn it, to really learn it? And there is so much I am already trying to learn.
But that stuff sits there, like the proverbial Jimmy Choo shoes (you know that proverb, right?), waiting, tempting.
If I chase this, what might be lost in the gain?
Who was it that said, "the price of something is the amount of what I call 'life' that must be sacrificed in order to get it"...
So much to create, so little time.
:) I'm using it in my last chapter. It is fun to be near it again.
I do not know the Jimmy Choo proverb. Do share.
Oh I don't think there is a proverb per se. They are much beloved among shoe lovers. I think there was a sex and the city about them.
They've got a shop in the Galleria in Houston. Come round and I'll show 'em to ya.
I have heard of the shoes, I thought maybe the name came from a proverb or something. I would love to visit.
Soon.
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