André Le Mont WilsonGHOSTS AND POETS2. Poets1"I want you to hear this," I greet Monique Harris (or Miss Harris as she likes to be called) as she tiptoes her feet to drag her wheelchair into the small business center just after the ten o'clock morning break. I extend my iPhone to her and forget she types with a headwand and is unable to type with her ringed fingers. Words rush from my mouth, "I alternate reading my parents' poems. It sounds like they're arguing." I press my phone against her brown ear pierced with a row of purple-beaded, gold rings. Her expression brightens and she nods her head at each recorded verse on my voice memo. The recording finishes and she smiles and nods again. I boast, "I'm going to publish my parents' poems side by side as a conversation." A bespangled, black Buddhist who believes in reincarnation, Miss Harris deadpans, "I don't want to wait to die to publish my first book of poetry." On a telephone table behind her stands her framed poetry-art print, "Eyes," next to a little Buddha sculpture and a vase of lucky bamboo. To the right of her feet sits two, stacked, plastic storage bins that hide more of her framed and unframed poetry-art prints beneath supplies and inventory for her graphic design business, Communication at Ease. Her eyes. Fear. I Velcro my iPhone back into its belt case.
Unlike my extreme makeover of Tyrone Cobb's prose into poems2, my edits of Miss Harris's poetry require a light hand3. Ninety-nine percent of her words and talent exist on the printed pages she presented to me for my edits. She assigned me the novice-monk's tasks of raking pebbles of words and rearranging boulders of sentences like a Zen garden at a Buddhist temple. I refine a poem to please the eye, the tongue, the ear. I strive to enhance the clarity of her voice to live and breathe upon the page unobstructed. Miss Harris wrote her first poem, "Eyes," around the year 2000 in response to prejudice she witnessed and experienced towards the disabled because of appearance. "People should think before they open their mouths," she advocates in her poet's statement. "Close your eyes and imagine you are that person." She begins her poem with a question, "Why can't people act as if they don't have eyes? / Then people couldn't see disabilities." She next lists various prejudices from skin color to weight. A digital graphic artist who accesses Photoshop with a rubber eraser-tipped wand strapped to her shaved chocolate head, Miss Harris conceived "Eyes" as an art print rather than as a standalone poem. For ten dollars unframed and twenty dollars framed, her poem's printed black words stood out against a soft focused background of golden California poppies, green swirls, and angles to illustrate her poem's refrain, "Then we could see the world as yellow as the sun and as green as the grass." She sold a small number of these poetry prints. When a woman complained about being unable to read the poem because of the semi-abstract background, Miss Harris refused to budge from her conception of the poem and the artwork as an inseparable unit. But to submit the poem to Wordgathering she finally removed the poem from its context. Stripped naked of their garment of colors, standing alone on the sterile page, her words exposed themselves to my examination. My only edit: I broke one line of the refrain at a different word to follow the natural flow of the voice. A comment about her knees inspired another poetry-art print from the same period, "My Knees." Her dark miniskirt raised a curtain on her "black, crusty knees that have scars" and elicited the remark from a gray-haired, African American woman, "You need to put something on your knees." Miss Harris shrugged and bit her bottom lip. She simmered over the comment for two weeks before she jumped out of her wheelchair with a poem, an anthem celebrating her "lumpy and bony knees" that "carried me from one room to another / When I was pregnant with the greatest gift of all–my baby son." She slung words back at all of the rude questions she endured such as "Do your knees hurt?" or "Why are your knees dark?" Strangers even rubbed her knees and grilled her, "Why are your knees so rough?" Unbound, Miss Harris sings: My knees can crawl through grass, gravel, and dirt. This manifesto redefines disability on Miss Harris's own terms rather than by society's oft-repeated term "confined to a wheelchair." Once Miss Harris removed the poem from the art print which looked like swirls of sandpaper to represent her knees, I insert commas, capitalization, enjambments, and line breaks to enhance the poem's conversational tone. I rearrange blocky stanzas to create patterns and rhythms upon the page and for the voice to pause before lurching forward. Towards the end of the poem, the long lines weigh like "concrete and hot asphalt." A result of running out of space with a 16 point font for submission, my favorite line contains the single word "scars" centered and isolated. It invites readers to stare at that one word as people stare at Miss Harris's knees. The edits of "Speed" required three sets of eyes. The first set belongs to Vivian Taube, Miss Harris's independent living skills worker who gathered her misspelt words and fragmented ideas into recognizable order. The second set belongs to me, André Wilson, who gleaned the lines for readability and pattern on the page for the voice and the eye. The third set belongs to Miss Harris who listened to rap and spoken word poetry at an Oakland nightclub and the next morning asked me to revise her verse on velocity for more vivid language. She replaced the vapid line "I could be the greatest dancer in the word" with the animated line"I could be an Alvin Ailey dancer" after we watched a YouTube video of the black dance troop undulating and twirling onstage. Once I grasped where she was going, we sprinted towards more descriptive language, but she reined my deployment of words like "bouquet" and "wedding day roses" because, as she said, shaking her head, "It doesn't sound like me. " We removed scores of commas, periods, indefinite articles, prepositions, adjectives, and the auxiliary verb "might. " We asked ourselves, "Would the poem still work if we eliminate this? " In most cases, after I read the trimmed lines back to her, our deletions sped up the poem which is the whole point of "Speed. " Also, I had been reading Constance Hale's Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch and employed verbs as shock troopers to power the poem. Miss Harris engages all five senses to describe speed. She compares it to the touch of feathers, the sound of seas, the smell of lavender, the sight of roses, the taste of lobster. Colors abound from white to blue to lavender to red to the implied colors of red lobster drenched in golden butter. "I love speeding. / It's freedom to me, " she states. The sensory display of the poem's beginning heightens the vivacity of the poem's center to illustrate "I can be anything I want and go anywhere I want. " Globetrotting, she transforms into "an Alvin Ailey dancer / Spinning onstage in New York City, " "a Vogue model / Strutting a Paris runway," "a geisha / Wearing a kimono, eating sushi, and drinking sake, " and to Oslo "to win / A Nobel prize in economics / Despite my learning disability. " If she could speed fast enough, faster than the speed of sound, faster than the speed of light, she could travel back in time to when cousin Varnardo pushed little Miss Harris in a wheelchair down the middle of the street as fast as he could.
Darkness. Darkness. A voice. My voice. My voice as Harris's voice speaking: Why can't people act as if they don't have eyes? I open shut eyes. An audience of poets and logophiles lean forward from white sofas and stools mushroomed around the basement nightclub, the AIR Lounge, buried beneath a red brick Victorian in Old Oakland. White Christmas lights dangle from the blue-lit ceiling like fireflies caught in spider webs. Ensconced upon a royal purple wheelchair, her velvet chocolate body adorned with red leather, gold ornaments, and a newly shaved African head, Miss Harris sits erect beside my standing form in front of an open microphone as she surveys her realm at her first public poetry reading. My subsequent, cringe-inducing, misremembered performance of her poems "My Knees" and "Speed" almost elicited her shout to the palace guards, "Off with your head!" Miss Harris's attendant wheels her away from the mic, but the poets who had read tonight or will read follow her as bees after the queen. In ones and twos they rush up to bow, shake her hand, and praise, "Thank you. You inspire me and give me strength to read my poetry tonight." A day from now I will crown Miss Harris with headphones and proclaim, "You got to hear this. It was my mother's favorite spoken word poetry album, The Last Poets," and I will watch as she closes her eyes and sways her head Stevie Wonder-style to words spoken in her ears. I recline my body on a white cushion inside the nightclub's shadowy niche and witness the birth of a poet in the limelight. The hostess of the AIR Lounge Open Mic claps her hands, unhooks the microphone from its stand, and exalts, "It's always exciting to hear new voices." Indeed.
Notes 1. Part 1 of André Le Mont Wilson's essay, "Ghosts and Poets," appeared in the March issue of Wordgathering. 2. Tyrone Cobb's adapted poems, "Broken Mirror" and "Limitations," appeared in the March issue of Wordgathering. 3. Monique Harris' poems, "Eyes," "My Knees," and "Speed," appeared in the March issue of Wordgathering.
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