As I approach the graduation date for my MFA, I’m realizing how much I will miss exploring poets and looking closely at poems which I found intriguing.
So I’ve decided to publish some of these thoughts here. Some of the posts will be work I wrote in the MFA; others will be new poems I’ve encountered which I feel I’d benefit from dissecting. I hope you find these posts interesting; my goal here will be to keep delving deep in my reading, even though I won’t have mentors and deadlines asking this work of me.
—
Qwo-Li Driskell’s Walking with Ghosts exposes the intersection of two marginalized populations in the US: the queer community and the indigenous population. The focus of Driskell’s academic work, Cherokee Two-Spirits and Cherokee gender identities prior to colonization, seems to also be the focus of Driskell’s poetry. I think this intersection is important for me to consider because it is one answer to a question I’d like to explore further: how can the sacred (for Driskell, the sacred is embedded in cultural identity: language, heritage, tradition) and activism find common ground within poetry?
At the heart of the collection is the poem “Eulogy for the 40th.” A eulogy itself is a type of sacred text, a testament to a life, a meditation upon or prayer for a deceased loved one. This poem is a critique of America’s “sacred” grounds: war, bigotry, and Christianity, set up for us by an epigraph from the book of Matthew. Alongside these critiques, we find a counter-narrative of sacredness in Driskell’s ghosts, here referring, I think, to AIDS victims and other gay men who lost their lives during the Reagan administration.
Driskell’s use of the first person plural evokes a liturgical responsive reading: “We’re tired,” “We don’t care,” “We sing,” “We died” (8, 15, 42, 56). The imperative “say it” towards the end of section I and at the start of section II further sets the piece up as something spoken aloud as a group. Section II brings in a counter-liturgy for the oppressor, the “you” in the poem: “Go on, rewrite / history. Name him Father of Peace” (28-29). “Father of Peace” is the rewriting of “King of Lies” from section one. Both these titles have a biblical feel about them, “Father of Peace” being a conglomeration of “God the Father” and “Prince of Peace” (Jesus), whereas “King of Lies” brings to mind “Prince of Lies” (the Devil). Reagan is represented by these opposing views as a hyperbolic biblical figure of either good and evil, respectively.
Repetend, such as the repeating of the Matthew epigraph in lines 27-28 and 36-41, strengthens the cadence of “Eulogy for the 40th,” evoking song refrain, chant, or mantra, as well as public speech. The first line of the poems is also repeated, but as the poem progresses, words are removed to alter the meaning. This erasure mimics the lives lost to AIDS, but it also has redemptive power. The original phrase reads, “When I kiss my lover, a generation of ghosts rises like dust” (1). It is repeated verbatim once and then is pared down over three repetitions to ultimately read, “When I kiss my lover, / a generation rises” (24, 68, 75-76). I am reminded by this final rising of Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise,” which may have been an intentional reference by Driskell.
The final repetition is the beginning of the letter to Reagan in the poem’s final section. Because the letter is written to Reagan a week after his death, it takes on a spiritual tone, bringing to mind an incantation. The power of the incantation lies in the gentleness of the language and the immediacy of the imagery. While other sections of the poem sweep across years and histories, this final stanza is a single moment at Reagan’s funeral. With this focused-in lens, the poem becomes tender, less a raging fire and more a candle flame, a spark of hope.
“Eulogy for the 40th” doesn’t address Driskell’s spirituality as directly as other poems in this collection. However, Driskell’s heritage of the sacred, informed by his Native American roots, is central to his identity and thus invades the poem in subtle ways. I think the central image of the poem, the ghosts rising, which is also reminiscent of the collection’s title, certainly has the feel of the spiritual. Ritual incantation and chant inform the structure of the poem. Also, because Christianity was forced on native peoples as a way to erase them, the use of the Matthew passage and the erasure of “When I kiss my lover, a generation of ghosts rises like dust” create an anti-spirituality, a desecration of true sacredness, which, for Driskell, lies in the remembrance of ancestors and the rediscovery of lost culture.
Driskell, Qwo-Li. “Eulogy for the 40th.” Walking with Ghosts. Salt, 2005, pp. 40-45.
Hannah Marshall 