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[Music intro]
LYNNE THOMPSON: Hello! My name is Lynne Thompson, Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles and I’m so happy to welcome listeners to this installment of Poems on Air, a podcast supported by the Los Angeles Public Library. Every week, I’ll present the work of poets I admire, poets who you should know, and poets who have made a substantial and inimitable contribution to the art and craft of poetry.
LYNNE THOMPSON: Diamond Forde’s debut collection Mother Body was not only a finalist for the Kate Tuft’s Poetry Prize but it also garnered the 2019 Saturnalia Poetry Prize. A Callaloo and Tin House Fellow, Forde has an MFA from the University of Alabama and currently serves as the Assistant Editor of Southeast Review. As poet Patricia Smith says, Diamond Forde ”brands her …work with a subversive, self-assertive signature…”
LYNNE THOMPSON: Today’s poem is "Trying to Write a Music Poem" by Diamond Forde.
Trying to Write a Music Poem
Momma sings in the kitchen, phonic value of a few small noes beaten out in egg wash I try to decide the sound: solemn sighing of a small dog sinking to sleep. I’m afraid to write my mother with the pots and spitting pans. The world had written her domestic already, turned her clattering hand hard against the down to motherly yoke. I’m so tired of looking at the lyrics of these lines, at Momma twisting her wrist to whisk the egg foam. Momma folding dough, weaving Toni Braxton solos through the buttery seams. There was a time without her music when the MS took her dead and weighty legs, the numbness constant, so constant, she welcomed needles of pain. Describe the sound of a woman hollowed and filled with unsound nerves. Describe the silence of a woman losing leg rhythm. This is the way of writing music. Searing stanzas for symphonies, missing my mother. Forgetting I missed my mother. Present her any way I can: hips un-blued by rhythm, feet tapping in staccato, gentle give of her working hands.
LYNNE THOMPSON: The Los Angeles Poet Laureate was created as a joint program between the City’s Department of Cultural Affairs and the Los Angeles Public Library and this podcast is available wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening!
[Music outro]
- Back to Poems on Air: Episode 56
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