This past Saturday, June 22, 2024, the new Poet Laureate of the City of Columbia, Jennifer Bartell Boykin, with support from the Academy of American Poets and the Mellon Foundation, as well as partnerships among the City of Columbia, One Columbia for Arts and Culture, and Richland Library, hosted the Inaugural Soda City Poetry Festival.
It was a dynamic and diverse day of readings, workshops, and presentations, culminating in an auditorium-filled open mic that kept me on the edge of my seat.
As someone who has been a working poet in this city for over thirty years (the first poem I wrote after I moved to Columbia in 1989 was “Field Trip to the Art Museum,” which appeared in The Paterson Literary Review and was reprinted in Callaloo, and can be found in my collected poems, Tongues in Trees), I was honored to be part of the festival, and it was gratifying to see this city finally coming together around the unifying power of poetry in ways that do not adhere to the old paradigms of divide and conquer.
The word “gratifying” comes from the Latin gratus, meaning pleasing or thankful. These are Southern words, with such polite and kind ripples.
What I mean is more than that.
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In my favorite film of all time, Smoke Signals, which I have watched and taught a million times and have memorized almost every line, Susie Song asks Victor and Thomas at the end of their long journey, “Are you hungry? Are you thirsty?”
And Thomas answers, “I’m both.”
In another scene, Victor is yelling about his father, whose ashes they have come to collect, being a drunk and an abuser who deserted his family.
Thomas responds, “He was more than that.”
Was the Soda City Poetry Festival gratifying? Yes. But it was also a revolutionary pen against the neck of entrenched histories of segregation and book banning and inadequate education and economic injustice in this city and state.
It was both.
It was more than that.
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I wrote a poem yesterday to try to express that. It was inspired by one of the last pieces of wisdom Nikki Finney gave the audience in her conversation with Jennifer on Saturday morning:
“Take your tongue back.”
But before I share my “green ink,” let me introduce it by sharing the first paragraph of Audre Lorde’s famous essay, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.”
The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are — until the poem — nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.
-Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” from Sister/Outsider
I do this because I consider Audre Lorde to be my poetic mother.
I do this because so many people use this quote without ever having read the whole essay, which can easily be found online, and which is so much deeper than a meme or gif.
I do this because while Lorde was saying poetry is not a luxury, meaning not extraneous to our basic needs of food and shelter and clean air and water, I also want to stress that poetry is not a hobby, either, not something for the elite who have extra time on their hands to compose literature while others do their labor for them.
It’s more than that.
Take Your Tongue Back
by Cassie Premo Steele
The still quiet morning greets the city with breezy kissing
as we make our ways down Huger, Assembly, crossing
rivers or acres or highways with deer to gather on this
day of bubble soda hope and words to cope and new friends
and old and together we turn pockets of empty jokes
and ancient wounds into something more, a many voiced
thing, not a thing, but living being, evolving, revolving,
the evolution of bodies after being tied down for so long,
after the outlawing of our songs, and the rhythm of shoes
on library floors morphs into hands clapping for more,
a celebration of finger snaps and hand shakes, back
slaps, as our skins regain their faith in the colors we
came in, incomplete until we let another in, and sound
rises above the hot main street food trucks and loud
speakers and church bells and requests for quarters,
silver and sleep harbors, and there is still so much lack,
so much pain, so much we don't yet even know that
we don't know, so much we must ask others to teach
us, and show us, the feelings and facts, but today, we
took up, took down, took care, took our tongues back.
You are so right! Poetry is so often thought to be read and appreciated by the elites, or leisure class those who have more time than those working, cooking, cleaning, farming etc! Thank you!🙏🏻
You right, poetry ain't no hobby, more like boiling live crabs trying to climb out the pot. More like wrestling steer.
Thank you for your work, Cassie!