It is Monday night in Glen Park and the neighborhood calms as its residents assume posts in bars and warmly lit restaurants along Diamond Street. I have found my way to Bird and Beckett Books, where I know poet Arisa White, author of the recently published Hurrah’s Nest, will be reading.

The group of people that has already assembled greets me warmly, and I assume (correctly) that I am surrounded by a number of fellow poets. I recognize and appreciate their affinity for this place, a small storefront piled high with myriad books. Each overflowing shelf leads to another, and despite the smallness of the venue I find myself momentarily overwhelmed by its contents. A makeshift stage bears a beautiful upright piano, and I learn that Bird and Beckett, in addition to monthly readings, hosts celebrated jazz events. I make a mental note to return here often.

As the reading begins, few chairs remain empty; the turn-out is impressive for a Monday night, the atmosphere low-key and yet thrumming with artistic support. Q.R. Hand takes the stage, and though I am unfamiliar with his work, the gravity with which he selects pieces from his portfolio assures me that something impressive is about to unfold. Q.R. performs his fast-paced, sonically explosive poetry and the audience collectively leans forward, interjects with yes or wow and even this is it, this is it!

He concludes and is ushered from the stage with friendly slaps on the back and congratulations. The host assures us there is “plenty more where that came from,” and encourages us to seek out more of the poet’s work.

And now we are introduced to Arisa White, who smilingly admits that it is her first time to Bird and Beckett. A comment is made about her impressive number of publications and awards, particularly for such a young poet. Modestly, White acknowledges that yes, she has been fortunate in this regard. I cannot help but feel a pang or two of good-natured envy.

Like Hand, White takes the stage quietly, her copy of Hurrah’s Nestin hand. The book’s title, she explains, is antiquated slang for a state of disarray, a nautical term for “chaos.” This immediately lends certain ideas about her project, which takes the poet’s large family (White is one of seven children) as its focus.

As a lover of formal poetry, I am glad when she begins with a piece entitled, “To you, named the messenger of god,” which borrows prosody from the sestina. The names of White’s six siblings churn and cycle within the framework of six-line stanzas; seven stanzas, in total, hearken to the poet as part of this family unit. Clever? Absolutely. It takes a careful writer to navigate a sestina’s scaffolding in this fashion, without the choice smacking of gimmick. “To you…” is an immensely successful poem, both utilizing and breaking formal constraints to fuel the collection’s musicality.

Musicality is what energizes the entirety of White’s reading. Hearing the work in the poet’s voice was a delight, but the symphonic flux of the words is evident even on the page. My mind, my ear go again and again to a stanza that opens “The small places I go,” which recalls a traumatic incident in which the poet was struck by a vehicle:

I hide from the light

beneath the cover of lids,

and where I go is tinted

with the color in which

we mark our errors.

This sadness makes me

stamp size. (48)

It is this constant, shifting assonance that makes White’s work so melodically memorable for me. While the content is often of tragedy, the tone is of song, of celebration. A lineage of trouble becomes lauded for where it has led; the journey is inviting in such a warm light.

I notice as she reads that White frequently employs a unique syntax, in which agency is often assigned to unexpected objects. This is strongly present, for example, in “P.S. 21′s assembly for the blackface documentary,” in which White’s phrases include “My favorite t-shirt spoils beneath my chin,” and “He fumbles the dark, the lamp to shatter” (23). In one of her most powerful pieces, “Tenderized,” these shifts are vivid:

The herd of myself wrangled to a waterhole, stationed on hooves

with god-given stripes to come close to the embarrassing curtsey of words.

I offer myself like one of the carved tchotchkes on the mantel.

For the ways I imagined myself vicious,

they’re as inanimate as carnival prizes. I barter

my sentinels, concede myself as my mother does to his aggression. (51)

The rawness of these syntactical shifts grinds, in all the right places, against the natural music of White’s voice. So suited is this choice to a subject matter that includes, among other things, hunger, abuse, neglect. There is a prosodic arsenal within the pages of Hurrah’s Nest and it has clearly been constructed with care.

When Arisa White has finished reading, a brief moment of silence is punctuated with applause and generous vocalizations of appreciation. Her first visit to Bird and Beckett has been a great success, and I feel certain her first book will enjoy a similar response. I leave, bolstered by the energy only such a reading can manifest.

Hurrah’s Nest
By Arisa White
Virtual Artist’s Collective, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-9440480-1-6

 

The Narrator: Poetry Review: Hurrah’s Nest by Arisa White

http://narrator.nywriterscoalition.org

This week’s poetry review is contributed by Chelsea Lemon Fetzer, whose poetry has appeared in Stone Canoe, Callaloo, Tin House, and Mississippi Review.  She is the founder of The Create Collective, a non-profit organization working to bridge the gaps between artists and community based organizations. Chelsea currently leads NY Writers Coalition workshops for homeless LGBTQ youth at CAMP Brooklyn.

In her debut poetry collection Hurrah’s Nest, Arisa White offers a lovely and haunting family portrait. Drawing from he life as a young girl raised in Brooklyn, Arisa is neither guarded in her honesty, nor self-indulgent. The collection poignantly recovers moments of a childhood, simple as they are impacting, dark as they are colorful, while it explores a refreshing range in style and form.

Ultimately, a narrative is assembled in Arisa’s lines, and we come to love and hope for her characters — seven siblings and their mother, who cannot be protected from her own struggles and search for love. At the same time, Arisa’s style shapeshifts into the abstract, expertly playing with the possibilities of poetry, so that the story of a family grounded against its will is ultimately told in a language that leaps into dreamlike flights.

I had the privilege of interviewing Arisa on her experience writing Hurrah’s Nest.

What sparked or guided this collection?

My obsessions. I was writing – and writing the things that I was obsessed with, which were my family and my relationships that played out family dynamics. There were moments from my childhood that stuck with me and those moments would appear over and over in my poetry. They were a part of my cosmology, my vocabulary.

Those moments became my metaphors to constantly riff off of. I discovered something more about myself and others from the moments of pause that writing welcomes. I got to look closely and feel deeply and see things more clearly. And to really sit with those givens in life: Everything changes, things do not always goes as planned, life is not always fair, pain is part of life, and people aren’t always loving and loyal all the time.

Can you describe your process of translating memory, especially the often chaotic narratives of family/childhood memory, into a poem?

All of my writing is translation, regardless if it comes from my memory or another’s memory. I’m often working from this place of how to write the emotion I am feeling, how to make it seen and felt. Because I know that I am not going to be able to remember every thing that happened, I rely on my emotions as guide. I start from a central truth that I know everyone can agree on — everyone in this case of Hurrah’s Nest would be my family. That this event happened.

From there, it’s an exploration of my feelings — I’m trying to locate images and sounds, how it sits on the page, to speak my emotional narrative.As much as I can, I allow myself to take personal and artistic risks when writing. I allow my vulnerability to occupy the poem. There is no point in writing if I am not tapping into my vulnerability because that is where the beauty is. That is where language seems to freshly flow. And I feel like I’m reconnecting to something great in myself, something untouched by circumstances, something essentially good.

That is when I know the translation has been successful, because I managed to reconnect with a moment in time that felt incomprehensible to me. There is less chaos between what is felt, seen, and heard. The poem is what makes peace between them all.

Why did you choose “Hurrah’s Nest” for the title?

While researching nautical terms for the poem “An albatross to us both,” I came across the definition of hurrah’s nest, a bundle of cords or rope in disorganization, which later came to mean, disorder and confusion. I like the multi-layered meaning of hurrah’s nest. If you don’t know the definition, it sounds kind of jovial, celebratory, lively. Coupled with ‘nest’ you have that feeling of nurture, home, care, being tended to, a starting place.

All those conflicted feelings one can have about home and family are embedded in hurrah’s nest. It felt like a perfect title because that is what I wanted to convey. I wanted that sense of celebration and frustration of family. The hard and gentle lessons that come from our childhood, how it shapes us and cracks us, opens and closes us to our selves — forever these seasons of water and burn. From every thing that has happened to me, I have been given and made more aware of my tools to be an adult, a writer, comfortable in my skin. And I can nest in that.

We alone together is me, one egg in the pigeon’s nest
between my rusting ten-speed and brick wall.
The wind blocked my body from her.

Night and day we were audience
to feathers tossed and shit about.
It’s hard to listen to courtship.

She tells me, With children you will never be lonely.

-from “Disposition for Shininess” by Arisa White

ALBANY POETRY EXAMINER

http://www.examiner.com/poetry-in-oakland/poetry-book-review-review

POETRY BOOK REVIEW

by Cherise Wyneken

Oedipus plucked out his eyes in order to relieve his agony.  Oakland poet, Arisa White, opens hers wide as she shares her emotional and physical agony with readers in her new narrative collection of free verse, HURRAH’S NEST, from Virtual Artists Collective.

In the first poem, TO YOU NAMED THE MESSENGER OF GOD, we learn that the family’s nest was no “Hurrah,” except for the siblings’ care and love for each other.  Like a spider Arisa spins a complex web through her childhood, where lack of motherly affection traps and pulls her away from her essence.  Although her poems describe a challenging family life she doesn’t whine; rather, she takes us there where we can feel the bad times with her.

Arisa seizes our attention through her insightful use of vivid images and original vocabulary such as, It’s frightening how she has an epitaph’s unmistaken permanency; the way the script attempts to smile in marble. Or, that cocklebur of a mantra, both from DISPOSITION FOR SHININESS.  Similes like laughs like a jackhammer, put the sound right into your ear, and metaphors such as an artery which stands for her mother, whose blood she shares, are unmistakable in their reference.  Her voice never drones, but vibrates loud and distinct.  She uses specific events to introduce new crises in her life:  I’m getting rid of you all, words from her mother in CHORE and You flee for the police in SISTER, a reference to her physical surroundings. His body leaves a draft, describes how she felt when her brother left home, and, We fold the smaller one into the bigger one, poignantly shows how the children protected each other.  Her sadness is beautifully expressed in THE SMALL PLACES I GO:  This sadness makes me stamp sized.  The narrative comes to a resolution as she seeks healing through therapy:  IN THE GRIP OF DIRT.  The collection as a whole is an elegy for her childhood.

The narrative comes on so strong, I first felt incapable of working with it, but as I read on, I found a thought provoking collection of moving poetry — one that helps us understand each other and refrain from making quick judgments.  I highly recommend the book.

In the last poem in the collection, found on the back cover, and printed below, Arisa reveals a lingering sadness for what she missed in her childhood.

What you come to meet at ends:

ports and shantytowns,

me folded like a note

waiting to toss

myself to any wave

muscle enough to get me back.

Really, what is the point

of the sun’s ritual,

the light and heat of its circling,

if what rivers through me

is a hunger—

the draught and flood of it?

 

Life and Times.com: The Word

http://lifeandtimes.com/the-word

Interviewed by dream hampton

Arisa White’s debut collection of poetry Hurrah’s Nest works in many ways as narrative prose. Her vivid collection works as a kind of biography of a family, or a neighborhood. But always there is flow – almost musical – which can’t be entirely credited to her Caribbean roots. White is casual yet careful with construction, she makes deliberate look easy. Her poems are not without politics, but they do tend to come with no judgment. In her poem “Subtext…” she unpacks a life in seven stanzas:

“Pregnant at fourteen, swayed by a boy
not gentleman enough to take off her coat.
Six kids later, she sleeps with a Jamaican mechanic
Who gets drunk and leaves her a bouquet of bruises.”

Here, I talk to the Sarah Lawrence and UMass, Amherst, grad about her first reads, making a living as a poet and the hierarchy of page poetry over spoken word.

Life+Times: What were your earliest experiences with literature?
Arisa White: Mostly I did a lot of reading. I read anything that was at my mom or grandma’s house – encyclopedias, Agatha Chrisie, Jamaica Kincaid, Terry Mcmillan, Octavia Butler. Around 6th grade, our teacher was really into building our vocabulary and part of those assignments were to write stories with SAT words. I’d rewrite the lives of characters from A Different World. I rewrote Dwayne’s life. I put Whitley in the ‘hood. My teacher shared our stories with her sister and her sister couldn’t believe these stories came from 6th graders. And that’s when I realized you can put on a guise and create a whole world that doesn’t necessarily connect to the author’s personal history and something about that fascinated me—I could be a trickster.

L+T: Hurrah’s Nest is concerned with family. It reads like your family. How did you navigate issue of privacy?
AW: I just wrote and then I realized it was going to be about family. Initially I tried to change their names, but that didn’t work because the poems were constructed with the music of their names: Kayana, Uriah, Jamar. So I got their permission to put it out there, which meant giving it to the family to see what they thought and I was nervous. I thought they’d think I betrayed their privacy, but they loved it. I was relieved. However that came at the end when I was putting the manuscript together. During the years it took to write these poems, I focused on the writing, on getting my truth out, otherwise I would’ve never written these poems—I can be very sensitive to what others think.

L+T: How do you make a living as a poet? Do you have to teach? A lot of poets would love to know some of the practical things they should know when they think of doing this…
AW: Number one: don’t focus on the money. What I do is I work. Around 2008 I realized I couldn’t just do poetry, I had to do something else. For me poetry is about all the things I’m doing in my life, which includes my work. So it came down to me doing work that allowed me to keep poetry as a top priority. For me that means writing for magazines and working remotely, so if I have to travel or go away a month for a fellowship, I can. I’ve been a bit resistant to academia and teaching, but I’m considering. I do writing workshops in the community. I recently did one with high school students in Oakland and that was an ideal group to work with. I’ve been more proactive about making more of those opportunities happen. It’s also about being realistic—yes, as a poet I have to have a job or a rich partner [laughs].

L+T: Who are your favorite poets?
AW: There are so many, but some of my favorite poets are Hart Crane and the Irish poet Medhbh McGuckian, who I just adore. For contemporary poets: Tyehimba Jess, Rebecca Seiferle, Claudia Rankine and Terrance Hayes whose recent chapbook deals with race from a sci-fi perspective.

L+T: What do you consider the differences between spoken word and poetry?
AW: Growing up in New York, I’d go to Brooklyn Moon and Nuyorican and Kokobar and all these places where there was spoken word, so it holds a totally special place for me. I can see where it diverges from page poetry but they both work the same for me. With spoken word, I came into my own political voice and sensibility as a young woman growing up urban and poor. It provided a space for me to make social and personal connections and to think of myself as a citizen. When I’m working on the page, I focus more on the word, the syntax, the actual line. I have respect for spoken word, I consider it a genre of poetry and it has its place in the canon. When I’m working with kids whose poems come off more performative and spoken word, I give them tools to better their line structure or improve their metaphors. I believe each has its place.

 

 

Phenomenal Nobodies: Knowing the Unknown

http://phenomenalnobodies.com

“Sound Cannot Be Denied. The Music In Ourselves Cannot Be Denied,” A Conversation With Arisa White

The Museum of Natural Historicity and Phenomenal Nobodies celebrate award winning writer Arisa White and the release of her debut poetry collection, Hurrah’s Nest. White is a writer of rare courage, lyrical styling, and insight. What follows is an excerpt of the conversation PN had with White over the course of the last two weeks. As you’ll see White’s ability to think critically and deeply is buttressed by her unique sense of humor and perspective. We hope you enjoy reading her thoughts as much as we enjoyed hearing them.

Phenomenally,

Editor-in-Chief, Phenomenal Nobodies

PN: Good Morning Arisa, I hope all is well in Oakland. I’d like to begin our conversation with a two part question: Why write; why read?

AW: These questions are deceptively hard in their simplicity. Why write? It is a way to forge connection. I’m sitting here in the 16^th & Mission BART station, looking at all the lines around me: in the tiles, the rails, the lines of this notebook; the actual sentence. The shortest distance between A and B is the line. And since I’m A, I write to arrive. At Beyoncé, maybe. At the bee in flight. At being. At how to just be.

Why read? To meet other minds. Reading, I believe, is our teleportation—Star Trek just made it look more interesting with sparkles! If you think of each individual writer as his or her own universe, then reading is an opportunity for adventure. It is like someone pulls back the curtain, and says, Go, there is beauty to be discovered here.  It is an act of liberation, in the sense that it helps me to confront my truths about myself. And those truths can be in agreement or in disagreement with what I read. It is intimacy, and intimacy is about relationship. And as we all know, relationships are hard work. Within those dynamics with self and other, we learn our edges, where we have built our walls, we learn where we let unconditional love die away, we learn what was lost and what it is we wish to reclaim.

PN: The idea of writing as a process of learning for the writer, and writer as universe is always a fascinating one for me, and it makes me think of Ginsberg’s poem “Cosmopolitan Greetings” in which Ginsberg writes “Universe is person.” If this is so, than how does a writer get over the idea that what they have said has already been said before? How do you continue to write, especially in a world which is so invested and overwhelmed with blinking and beeping machines, televisions, reality shows, etc… so much of which is not about learning?

AW: A good friend of mine gave me a copy of James Baldwin’s short stories and essays from Vintage, and I read “Sonny’s Blues,” and this passage confirms my actions as an artist, as a poet, and drives me to keep writing: “[They] are up there keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard.”

This world is always going to be invested and overwhelmed by something. This is life, no? These challenges are what keep us balanced, what may even drive us toward wellness, to stillness, to finding the thing that speaks deeply to us. It is all about moderation and changing things up, so you’re not overusing the same muscle and numbing yourself out. Nothing’s fun when you’re numb!

I love reality shows, TV is a great invention, blinking and beeping machines can be cool and it’s all about learning, about the evolution of humanity. Learning doesn’t look one way and that is what we have to be open to. When I’m sitting and watching television, I am watching it critically. Paying attention to the tropes and stereotypes and clever ways they sell products to us and tell us we are in constant need, that we are in a perpetual state of lack. That is the sad part and the part that can keep you thirsty and unfulfilled if you measure your worth based on that shit.

All of this stuff, the distractions, the blinking and beeping enters the writing. I want it to because it is a part of my culture, a part of my times. Blinking and beeping offers new metaphors for me to play with, forces me to shift my perspective, see things differently. Thinking in that regard, I appreciate rappers for their ability to pull in so many cultural and popular references with excellent wordplay. When I need to feel hype—thank-god-for-art hype— I listen to Nikki Minaj or Lil Wayne on Pandora and read a few lines of Hart Crane and Medbh McGuckian, and I’m like, “How you like me now!?”

PN: You mentioned Beyonce. Can you speak a little bit on the subject of the role and responsibility related to black womanhood an artist has? Are there aspects of the identity you try to challenge or subvert in your work? Or is social identity something a writer must ignore as they work?

AW: The moment you say responsibility, I feel this weight and pressure and that is the thing I don’t want to feel when I am writing. Talk about a killjoy! Some people thrive with responsibility, but as the older daughter in a bunch of seven, I’m tired. As a woman, I have to battle with that role of being mother, nurturer, and selfless giver. I have a defiant streak, so whenever I’m told that I have to be something or be a certain way or act accordingly to these socially accepted notions of womanhood, I find other ways for expression. I don’t necessarily trust what everyone else agrees on, I need to question it, see it in operation before I consent to participation.

In Hurrah’s Nest, you can witness that wariness in approaching womanhood, black womanhood in particular—since that is what I knew. As I understood black womanhood then, from listening to my mother’s stories, it seemed fraught with violence and loss. I remembered being afraid to turn 14 because that was when my mother had my oldest brother. I was firmly cautioned to not do the same thing. I was going through puberty, my body was changing, and all of sudden I became sexually visible—something for the taking. And too, it become my responsibility to protect my body, to keep it from being violated and disrespected, to tame it so it didn’t court any kind of advances. Womanhood, felt like too much defensive work! I wanted to avoid that work of womanhood. It’s strange to have a relationship with your self where you feel like you have to be on constant guard—it reduced me to corporeal fragments, to object. I wanted and still want a way to be free in my own body, without contempt, fear, or shame. It is a journey, a journey where I am giving myself the permission to live wholly (holy) in myself.

I try to approach identity fluidly. To show its shapeless, shifting nature. How we name ourselves, label, and identify—these are false containers. It’s like money—not real! We agree that it is real, so it gets to have power over us. And it gets to limit our interactions and connections and therefore stunts what we can know and learn about each other and ourselves on a deeper, humanistic level. Fluidity allows for movement and we need it to grow and evolve. I’m a Pisces; I need movement otherwise my spirit dies.

I don’t ignore social identity; I recognize how it shapes our existence, however I approach it like it’s a part of my toolbox. It’s a mode of inquiry and a set of experiences that I can delve into and manipulate as needed. As a result of being black, woman, queer, and a whole other set of identities, I have information I can use, stories to tell, language I can switch in and out of. When I think about the way people speak and the idiomatic expressions and the arrangement of words, I get a sense of how folks position and have been positioned in society. I get a particular vantage point from syntax. In Hurrah’s Nest, I have a story in the middle of the collection called “You smellin ya’self, gal?” and what stands out for me is the sound: how my brothers spoke, how I spoke, how my stepfather’s sister who is Guyanese spoke. There is a meeting of island talk and city talk. Grown bodies, young bodies. These collisions that make us pay attention in surprising ways, because we show ourselves more honestly; we see the masks coming down, the slip-ups, the vulnerability. It is getting to that vulnerability that challenges me—how to use language to speak about and speak to the ways we keep ourselves from showing it.

PN: Your mention of how we use language makes me want to understand two things about your work. First, can you talk about the relationship between message and musicality. How much is your work driven by the sound of language? How much of it is driven by the idea or feeling you’re investigating and working to communicate? In other words, does the sound of language, the pursuit of some inner cadence bring you towards discovery?

AW:    “Greatest Love Of All”

I believe the children are our future
Teach them well and let them lead the way
Show them all the beauty they possess inside
Give them a sense of pride to make it easier
Let the children’s laughter remind us how we used to be

Everybody’s searching for a hero
People need someone to look up to
I never found anyone who fulfilled my needs
A lonely place to be
So I learned to depend on me

[Chorus:]
I decided long ago, never to walk in anyone’s shadows
If I fail, if I succeed
At least I’ll live as I believe
No matter what they take from me
They can’t take away my dignity
Because the greatest love of all
Is happening to me
I found the greatest love of all
Inside of me
The greatest love of all
Is easy to achieve
Learning to love yourself
It is the greatest love of all

I believe the children are our future
Teach them well and let them lead the way
Show them all the beauty they possess inside
Give them a sense of pride to make it easier
Let the children’s laughter remind us how we used to be

[Chorus]

And if, by chance, that special place
That you’ve been dreaming of
Leads you to a lonely place
Find your strength in love

This was the first song I had to memorize for a graduation ceremony. Whitney has a powerful voice and her ability to go deep and high makes me get goosebumps–gets me feeling. With writing, the majority of the time I start off with an emotion and then I find the language to match it. It is a matter of translation. I am an emotional being trying to communicate and I will use what is at my disposal to help you, the reader, the listener, the observer, feel it. Sound cannot be denied. The music in ourselves cannot be denied. With all our busyness and running, we have to be reminded that we feel.