Powerful.

Often poetry has a visual component to how it is presented, at least as I’ve seen in my admittedly limited experience with poetry. But the way in which Tiana Clark uses the visual component of poetry to make the message fly off the page in her “The Rime of Nina Simone”… It steals my breath every time.

The regimented lines of the grad student’s words are stuck to the left side of the page, normalized and predictable in western poetry. It looks as it should, and therefore it looks correct. The free form lines that envelop the space left by this “correctness” is taken up in whole by Nina Simone. Within her first three lines, Nina Simone’s spirit has already touched every part of the horizontal plane of the page, spreading out and claiming it as her own.

“Come here, she says.

Sorry, I can’t—I’m late. I’m—

                                                      I need to tell you something   about yourself”

Nina Simone tells this graduate student of her story, of how she wanted to play classical music like Bach and Beethoven, but all her white audience members wanted were jazz and blues, typically African-American styles of music. She broke free, however, and played what she wanted. She was still called terrible names, but she was doing what she wanted in spite of and in the face of those that hated her most.

She tells the graduate student this so that the student will recognize the similarity. She can write whatever she wants, so long as it is also what her professors and contemporaries want. The student sees this written out in front of her, for the first time fully manifested, and she begins to think more alongside Nina Simone’s thoughts. Slowly, this student’s own lines in the poem begin to break free of the chains that bind her words and creativity to the left side of the page.

She leaves the poem with a line clear in its message and guaranteed to give anyone goosebumps.

“I can’t talk about the trees
without the blood.”

 

Clark, Tiana. “The Rime of Nina Simone.” Southern Cultures, vol. 24 no. 3, 2018, pp. 160-164. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/scu.2018.0039