Transcriber: Take A Mile Reviewer: Ellie Green
Some young men possess disjointed psyches,
makes them destroy our discs and joints with swollen fists and coveted Nikes.
I have turned the last age you ever knew
and know what it is like to fear both love and being left.
Although his knuckles never kissed fractures into my bones or flesh,
I have been consumed and made excuses,
thrown myself at his words though they were fenced with barbed wire
and then cried about the acquired bruises.
I do not know how many times I passed you in the hall.
Did you press prayers like duct tape onto your brokenness?
I only ever noticed your smile, now I notice your ghost,
and too many girls, it could have been any one of us,
who love enough to actually return Adam's rib.
Did he ever ask if you would die for him?
And did you unknowingly answer, attracting fate with feverish promises?
I want answers from you.
I want to know how to carve your name on the wind
because that will never die.
I want you to tell me this is the last poem I will ever write
about a girl who danced with the night in her palm.
I wrote that poem 10 years ago,
after learning that a high school classmate
had been brutally murdered by her boyfriend.
That last question, "is this the last poem I will write about a girl like you?"
haunts my work.
The last 10 years, I keep writing about violence against women:
physical violence, sexual violence, psychological violence -
my work cannot get away from it.
I think it's partly because I know that poetry can immortalize a topic.
And so often, when violence against women happens,
it's a quick hashtag or a short byline,
and then the names and the stories are forgotten.
And this work of art is to elevate those stories, to elevate those pieces.
On the other hand,
I really, really hope
I don't have to perform these poems ever again.
A part of me is really trying to work toward obsolescence.
I do not want to feel that this poem is useful.
I want it to be antiquated.
I want it to be a bygone era where we feel like poetry is the only way
that we can talk about this kind of violence.
My partner and I have been talking about having children. Awesome, right?
Because you're like, "Yeah, I have a partner, we're going to have children."
(Laughter)
But on the other hand, my work has started contemplating what that would look like.
And now, I find myself writing all these poems
as advice to my future self upon being a mother.
And I find myself writing guide books
on how I'm going to have to raise a daughter to deal with this world.
And it's scary.
It's scary to contemplate how you will raise a kid,
particularly a girl,
in a world that oftentimes sees them as something that can be easily dismissed,
or easily abandoned, or not worthwhile.
I won't raise my daughter to be nice,
to give her laugh away, to smile polite
as some men plot and plan to turn her body into a weapon of war.
And if they try, she will know how to wield herself.
Don't tell me it's wrong to want to raise a child from this kind of fear.
I know for every finger that we loosen, another knuckle grows back crooked.
Another knuckle is looking to crack into my daughter's skin.
And I can't trust this world to teach their sons how to treat my daughter.
So I will raise her to be a sword, a spear, a shield.
To turn clasped hands into heated hatchet. To hold razors between her teeth.
To cut unkind advances with the sharpest eyes.
To hold all of this together with leather or lace.
To be chiseled, prepared for rebellions against her flesh.
My daughter will be carved from hard rock, sharpened,
shrapnel, a spear - her whole body ready to fling itself
and arrow the hand of the first man who tries to cover her mouth.
I think poetry is amazing
because it is so easily carried in the body.
We know how to deal with rhythm, right?
Most of us know how to deal with rhythm.
(Laughter)
And we know how to deal with song. And we know how to deal with stories.
And poetry allows us to carry these names.
It allows us to live knowing that we've all these other women with us.
Specifically women
because that's the challenge I want to give you on a little bit.
And to me, poetry is a type of artifact, right?
It distinctly says, this is the life and times
what someone recorded based of what they thought was important.
And I truly, truly hope that these poems I'm writing
will one day be artifacts at the bottom of a dusty box,
at the bottom of a museum, no longer considered necessary.
But I know that that's not the time we're in right now.
That's not where we are in this current moment.
And so, I have a challenge for everyone in this room.
I want you to find a woman poet; I want you to memorize one of her pieces.
And on the days when things feel really heavy,
when equality for women seems unattainable,
when one of your male co-workers says something
they don't even recognize is a microaggression,
when yet another person asks you,
"When are you going to get married and have kids?"
And you're like, "Bro, I don't want none of that."
(Laughter)
On the days when you hear yet another story about a girl who's disappeared,
a woman who's been brutalized,
when it just feels like we can never escape this reality,
recite that poem to yourself.
Because at the end of the day,
all poetry, even when dealing with these heavy topics,
our poems, they're hope.
The whole point is for hope, right?
Hope to be heard, hope for all of us to heal,
and hope that these poems will be obsolete.
That we don't need them.
I want to close with a poem that's not my own,
but it's from one of my favorite poets, and is one of the first poems
I ever memorized by someone other than myself.
It's what I recite on my heaviest of days,
that I give to myself as a gift and that I give to another woman
whenever I know that she's struggling with something.
And so hopefully it will inspire you to find a poet for you to memorize.
So that's your challenge.
Think about a poet, find a poem, memorize it.
It doesn't take much to memorize twelve lines.
And then you have it for the rest of your life.
This is a poem by Lucille Clifton.
Won't you celebrate with me what I have shaped into a kind of life.
I had no motto, born in Babylon, both non-white and woman.
What did I seek to be except myself.
I made it up, here on this bridge between stars shine and clay.
My one hand holding tight my other.
Won't you celebrate with me that every day,
something has tried to kill me and has failed.
Thank you.
(Applause)