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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: No Images

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Curtis Fox: This is Poetry Off the Shelf from the Poetry Foundation, February 8th, 2008. I'm Curtis Fox. This week, poetry in song and song in poetry. February is, of course, Black History Month, and to celebrate, poetryfoundation.org has put together a selection of poems from our always-expanding archive of African-American poets. The selection includes everyone from Langston Hughes to contemporaries like Kevin Young and Rita Dove. On this program, we're going hear a few poems from that selection. First up, a poem written by Waring Cuney when he was just 18. Waring Cuney was born and raised in DC, but he was ultimately associated with the Harlem Renaissance. In 1926, he won a prize from Opportunity magazine, which was published by the Urban League. The award was for a compact poem called “No Images.” Poet A.B. Spellman says Cuney was influenced by imagist poets like William Carlos Williams.

A.B. Spellman: Imagist poetry relied on very clear, direct language and spoke simply using very powerful words that would be intuitively felt by the reader.

Curtis Fox: Spellman says that Cuney's poem speaks about an issue that was important at the time.

A.B. Spellman: And is not unimportant today. That is to say, the conception of beauty in African-American people.

Curtis Fox: Decades later, the jazz great Nina Simone sang “No Images,” except she called her unaccompanied song “Images.” Here's the first half of the song, which contains the entire lyric with a few lines repeated.

(RECORDING PLAYS)

She does not know
Her beauty.
She thinks her brown body, she thinks her brown body
Has no glory.

If she could dance
Naked,
Under palm trees
And see her image in the river

She would know. Yeah, she would know.
But there are no palm trees
On the street. No palm trees on the street.
And dishwater gives back no images.

(RECORDING ENDS)

Cornelius Eady: She has an incredible voice and has an incredible presence as a human being. She was a great artist.

Curtis Fox: Poet Cornelius Eady wrote an elegy for Nina Simone, who died in 2003.

Cornelius Eady: And I think a lot of times what we like to do in the American community is sort of give praise song to people who have passed and made a big impact upon us. And, so, this is an old tradition, right? And I thought I'd just sort of, like, honor that tradition by writing the poem.

Curtis Fox: Here's Cornelius Eady reading “Nina's Blues.”

Cornelius Eady:

Your body, hard vowels
In a soft dress, is still.

What you can't know
is that after you died
all the black poets
In New York City
Took a deep breath,
And breathed you out;
Dark corners of small clubs,
The silence you left twitching

On the floors of the gigs
You turned your back on,
The balled-up fists of notes
Flung, angry from a keyboard.

You won't be able to hear us
Try to etch what rose
Off your eyes, from your throat.

Out you bleed, not as sweet, or sweaty,
Through our dark fingertips.
We drum rest
We drum thank you
We drum stay.

Curtis Fox: “Nina's Blues” by Cornelius Eady. Going back to Washington, DC now for our final poem by Thomas Sayers Ellis, that he read over this go-go track. Go-go music originated in DC in the late 1970s when Ellis was coming up. Now, he sometimes reads to go-go music, as in this poem, “Take me out to the Go-Go.”

(RECORDING OF GO-GO MUSIC PLAYS)

Thomas Sayers Ellis:

Nikita zips across stage
Trailed by a troop of white-gloved
One-wheelers: Killer Joes,
The 12 & Under Crew
In disguise.

A sixth sense guides him
Beyond darkness. An
Inner voice says when,
Don't stop, don't stop, don't stop,
I'll tell you when.

A constellation of funeral homes.
Jumpsuits. Red & white
Ribbons in the sky. The total
Groove, a carnival of roses
Circling the moon.

Mere call & response
Never knocked socks this way,
Lifting nicknames & dates
From the faces of tombstones
And mere call & response never will.

God, God, God climbs inside,
Asking for souls —
Something we weren't taught to share.

Take me out to the Go-Go where you wanna go, where you wanna go.

(RECORDING ENDS)

(GO-GO MUSIC CONTINUES)

Curtis Fox: That was “Take Me Out to the Go-Go” by Thomas Sayers Ellis, one of the many poems in the selection of poems celebrating Black History Month on our website, poetryfoundation.org. Ellis's poem and Waring Cuney's poem are also featured on our DC poetry tour, which you can take online or download to listen to it while walking the streets of Washington. Let us know what you think of this program, email us at podcast at poetryfoundation.org. The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintet. For Poetry Off the Shelf, I'm Curtis Fox. Thanks for listening.