the unfold:

a journal by NZ Hazelton

  • No. 54 | Letting Her In

    The bell rang, and I could see in the square aperture of the video screen a woman, black, in a gray coat, slightly staggering away from the door. The buzzer failed, and rather than wait for a second ring that never came, I walked down the passageway to open the door myself.

    As they came in, the woman and her child, I could hear her repeatedly say to the child—a girl with long, newly placed braids—to fix her coat, to listen. Later in the program for the day, I overheard the woman say, “I’m trying to pass a pain that hurt me thirty-eight years ago.”

    I thought about what she said for a moment. She’d been trying to ease a hurt nearly four decades old, and though she was likely unaware of doing it, she shared it in such a fashion as to reveal the source of her demeanor—her stagger. 

    Without nerves or anxiety, the elixir of her choosing granted her what? Less pain? Less remembrance? Solace? At the same time, just the opposite was offered to the young girl, her daughter, who was with her—a daughter who knew, likely, and would know, no end to daughtering. And then a family member of the woman, also present, shared that when she was like that, no one ever said what it was—but that when she was like that young, she, this woman, watched her own baby.

    The woman, who would not give me her name—which I asked when I saw her lying prostrate on the front bench—was not bashful. At one point, she addressed me and asked, “You—not African—you from here?” I quickly responded that my family was from South and North Carolina. Momentarily I was pulled back to my younger years of being othered—years of being asked to verify my belonging here uptown, when the taunt was “African booty scratcher.” We, although together in that Harlem building, were likely all from the South, each trying to best the other in a search for normalcy amidst poverty, change, and the friction of family dynamics.

    In the moment, I did not think of Sula. But in looking back at notes from reading Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s The Poetics of Difference, I see that I jotted down words from Sullivan, quoting Janet Mock. Mock writes how she wishes she could be a woman like Morrison’s Sula—ok in her otherness, a woman with no pressure to verify herself (Sullivan, 194). Mock is responding here to having experienced a forced disclosure. Sullivan offers this experience as just one way readers reach for and into the “Black feminist literary interior.”

    I have found and find myself reaching into that same interior, aspiring to be like Sula were if not for the watchful eye of my own community. As said in the book, Sula subverts their eye, turning toward her own aim: to be consistent with herself alone. Sometimes it is also the conventions of marriage, of which I stand in, which makes it even more difficult to be a woman “ok in her otherness.” What does that mean, OK? Comfortable? Sure. Enthusiastic? Maybe not. Satisfied? Possibly.

    At the job, one of the things most people immediately notice is the murals painted on the inner walls. The murals act as a symbolic gateway to the work—transformative and brewing within the building. I think when I first interviewed there, I noticed the oversized slate doors at its entrance. Those doors lead to the passageway where murals—telling a story of community, seeding, ancestry—line the tall walls of the four-story building.

    There is some stone throughout, though not a Gothic kind of chiseling, not detailed, not like the many archways found in The Cloisters, where we went recently to visit the museum there. We learned from the museum guide about the portals—the doors to the chapels—the work, almost feverish in nature, of George Grey Barnard to purchase Gothic medieval works of art and the cloisters themselves in the early 20th century.

    The portals, designed with chisels, portraits of religious moments and stories, were seen as both a physical entryway and a symbolic gateway to heaven. They represented the threshold between the secular world and the sacred space within.

    Mommy used to say her work as a midwife was a doorway—a passageway between the here and now, and the there and then.

    I also left with a new set of waist beads—glow-in-the-dark, no less. I peeked over and saw another woman getting hers fitted, her belly exposed, her eyes dreamy. She was being cared for, attended to, waiting with the turn of her hip for her turn to be adorned.

    May that we enter spaces delighted in our coming, auspicious in our going.
    May that we adorn ourselves, our homes, as thresholds, as practice—
    May that we be writ in light, may that we become.

  • No. 53 | Poetry Show & Tell?

    I’d love to read a book of poetry a week with some one, or some few people, who have capacity – please let me know. We might just start from our separate books at home and work to do a kind of poetry show and tell once a week based on the book that we read that week.

    Noted books, references:

    ____

    I am taking a class with Rick Barot as offered by the Poetry Society of America. I love that it is mostly the reading of poetry books once a week and that it is not simply focused on writing at the same time. I had an opportunity to appreciate and sit with the book rather than splitting my focus between reading and writing. That said, I believe we are all learning a lot about the writing of poetry.

    The class is focused on elegies, which are poems that are generally written about something or someone that has been lost. I found it curious that de la Paz wrote these poems just as I was coming out of college, twenty years ago. He was deeply engaged in the writing of poetry back then when I was still finding my footing.

    Rick brought in a number of other references and names, including Svetlana Boym, Larry Levis, Alexander Petremov. Petremov was not necessarily related to the class but he is leading this class at Stanford’s continuing ed program and Rick recommended that. In the context of the book though, Rick brought in the work of Svetlana Boym because she offers the notion of reflective nostalgia and restorative nostalgia. Restorative nostalgia is a more conservative approach where  you are looking back to recreate the past as it was, whereas reflective nostalgia is more of lingering in the lyrical, reflective approach to looking at the past. 

    Then we got into a bit of the organizing of the book, noting that it was very symmetrically organized. de la Paz seeks the past to think about his upbringing and his childhood. The book, as noted by Rick, is “luxuriously brocaded” in language. It might have been here that Rick shared that the poet Larry Levis was very likely a strong influence for de la Paz. He noted his most recent book Vortex & Swirl, and The Poet at Seventeen. 

    de la Paz also reminded me yesterday to continue to read books by authors who may have some degree of similarity with my background or history, and to begin to place myself in conversation with them. The way de la Paz put it, it almost felt that he would read, make notes of what stood out to him in his ‘seed note book’ and then take up his sword, his pen when he wanted to join the arena, when he had something to say back. de la Paz also shared that reading has been a fount for him in his process. All poems, he shared, comes from looking at other poets, and deviating from there. He mentioned Levis here as Levis had a similar upbringing to him. 

    When he began speaking of Levis’ meandering style where he is braiding in narratives, I thought of my late English teacher Audrey Sheats, and how she taught the triangle or three-part way of handling essays. I don’t quite remember how I started each of those locks, or narratives that wound up in my college essay but with her, in her red winter coat and mostly white hair, she’d read over it and see how the braid was coming along.

    de la Paz goes on to speak about the idea that when he is structuring a poem, or book, that he wants in some way there to be a payoff at the end. The process of writing this book was really one of discovery and inquiry while braiding images, memories, and conversations from people. Braiding ideas together. His seed notebook includes lines he’s ‘stolen’ from other poets. It is from the wellspring of reading and notetaking that much of his work comes. He is thoroughly in response to other writers and staying in dialogue with other poets, and traditions. At the making of the poem, it is not quite collage but thinking about how other poems have solved other problems. 

    de la Paz closed with a response prompted by my question: What of poetry now, in this time? And he reminded us all that it’s really about paying close attention, not just looking from “ten thousand feet, but from one foot.” In that, we too practice care. This had me thinking what might I want to pay closer attention to, what do I want to bring my eyes and noticing closer to observe. de la Paz closed, with the banning of art and books. Art, he says, is banned because emotions are elicited from art. ‘And that it is so dangerous to have a feeling populace connected to our feelings, our emotional intelligence.’

    So that was all I was going to share today. I am so grateful to Rick Barot for the way he has shaped the class, and for the opportunity to hear from writers such as de la Paz and Victoria Chang. It has been truly inspiring and is bringing me to the page more consistently.

    Wouldn’t it be great to be in reading partnership on poetry? Reading a book of poetry a week, and sharing things that stand out We can determine books that we would like to read, perhaps from what we already have and then read those together. Please let me know!

  • No. 52 | Wavering Heights

    Days ago, I spent a couple of hours emptying a closet in my old room at my mom’s house. It’s a room with high ceilings and two large north-East facing windows. My brother painted it, a kind of majestic pink. This was after it had been beige for some time, which I believe he might have painted as well. It’s one of the more attended-to rooms in the house. It has been a process getting me out of there, for sure. I haven’t actually lived in that room, probably for four or five years, but I did keep mostly books in one of the closets there. Since a new person will be staying in that room, I was urged quite fervently to remove my things.

    As I looked through the books, packed roughly in large plastic cartons, I found quite a few by Alice Walker, including—I think Her Blue Body Everything We Know—Nalo Hopkinson, Colson Whitehead, and a couple of texts on writing by Annie Dillard. The Dillard texts stood out a bit to me because I kind of forgot that I had those books or had read them before. In fact, this week when I read an essay titled “Living Like Weasels” by Annie Dillard I thought that was the first Dillard text I had read since high school.

    We are reading Dillard now in a workshop titled Writing from the Mundane, led by Heather Radke. Initially, we as incoming freshmen were assigned Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek as we entered Northfield Mount Hermon School in western Massachusetts. It was likely part of a teacher’s lesson, or maybe it was, in fact, close reading, but I will always remember the phrase “the tree with holes in it,” which was how some of the newly sighted described trees upon viewing them for the first time. I remember how Dillard writes about the lover, and the scientist, and how in those states of intense attraction or connection to an object, one is able to offer a more true artistic rendering of that which they loved.

    For this class, we are reading Dillard’s essay on weasels, the first line of which is, “A weasel is wild.” It took a third reading for me to fall into the rhythm of Dillard’s writing. The degree of naturalist detail is quite, shall I say, shocking. It is heartbreaking in the Alice Walker kind of way—the way in which, in breaking your heart, you open it at the same time.

    Just before Dillard notices the weasel before her, she writes of where she has landed on the trunk of a tree, “ensconced in the lap of lichen.” She wonders wantonly: Could we live under the wild rose? At the end of the essay, she uses the word “yield” to describe the ways in which the weasel acquiesces in a real, habit-formed way to that which it needs. It must.

    Yielding and stopping are just some of what John and I are are learning in our driving lessons, We’re both not quite up in age, but in many ways, we really should have learned much earlier in life. This has been on our agenda though: getting our drivers licenses. After receiving a recommendation from a family friend, we finally signed up for classes at a location in Washington Heights. 

    I grow curious about my driving instructor, young, no more than twenty-five or thirty, and his gentle but constant counting of “one, two, three” at each stop sign we approach. I learned the other day in my lesson from him that he learned to drive from his uncle at fifteen, that it took a year, and that he would love to go to Japan one day, and Italy, and Dubai, and Egypt. As I’m making turns and all that, trying to park and keeping the steering wheel steady, he murmurs almost to himself, we got this, you’re going to be all right, and so many other ways of quietly encouraging me.

    His scolding—though I cannot really call it that because it invariably ends with “We got this”—comes in a whisper, as if it is someone else or some other part of him speaking; some other part of him noticing, always observing. Ultimately, some other part of him is always keeping the both of us safe.

    I have enjoyed these classes with him. He’s a big guy, and though when I finish parallel parking he always opens the passenger door where he is sitting to check that I am two hands’ distance from the curb, and I always lean over attempting to view that spacing, but because he has steer-like thighs—large and wide—I don’t view much besides more of him—but I nod too and say, yes, we got this.

    A few weeks back, a car sped past the Apollo Theater—world-renowned and famous—and struck delivery bikers, killing one and hitting a couple of pedestrians as well. Perhaps it’s because I’m learning to drive, and perhaps I’m also thinking of something John said, which is not to be afraid to have an accident, to which I responded, “Yes, I want to be afraid of an accident.”

    But I thought back then, listening to the news, whether there was any chance that the drivers might have considered that that Thursday night would be their last. Did they cross themselves or pray in some way before mounting their bike? 

    Admittedly, I have been a biker myself, crossing the median of that grand street–factually, in this case, following my brother, reckless, speeding on a bike through Harlem. I mean, yes, Harlem moves fast, for sure. But to experience it by way of watching the velocity of the driver’s car was so strange.

    The Apollo, after all, is a place where waiting and sauntering is a big part of being in its vicinity. I remember waiting to get inside one Wednesday for Amateur Night. I remember years later, driving past the Apollo with an elder in a cab, as we learned on the radio that Michael Jackson had passed. Later, I remember walking past and watching the MJ impersonators doing the moonwalk. So much of the Apollo, of Harlem, of 125th, was about the watch, the time, the passing of it, the observing of others. In many ways, Harlem defines the word stroll: broad boulevards, wide avenues. There’s so much space to see or be seen.

    After the driver’s lesson, the bus—the one that never comes—slinks toward the curb and stops for me. Somewhere on the straddle of Harlem’s Edgecombe Avenue and the Heights of Amsterdam, I waver moments by. The quiet of our only home, mere blocks away, beckons.

    We ride, then, the E to Jamaica Bay. Salt tears, songs for the road, flights to Lisbon remembered; My routine? Want of only home-like things. He, with near sea, rushing, please, against his tongue–Come, with me. Seated together, now warmth between us lay. 

    I ask how many stops left. “Two.” Then, none. He motions, making peace with his fingers. I look up, hissing, kiss? He brings his leaning tower before me; his pink-brown lips meet my open, waiting mouth. 

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