☀ What Sparks Poetry: Amaud Jamaul Johnson on Gwendolyn Brooks's "A Lovely Love"

January 31, 2022

What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems. In the occasional series, Reprise, we republish some of the most loved essays from What Sparks Poetry’s archives. Each Monday's delivery brings you an excerpt from the essay.

Curriculum

Ari Banias

My view has a sooty cathedral in it.
Often I pass a fountain
with the face of a merman
about to spit water through
chipped lower lip but
holding it in. There will be
another postcard rack.
Another stall at the market
displaying African wax prints
on tote bags, dresses, broad skirts
sold by a white man. I copy a list
of French colonies and their dates
into a blank white notebook.
On a bed of ice lay
haphazard piles of silver-gray fish. "The eye
should be clear," said my mother.
I don't want to look
at the eye. What's visible
from inside a Brutalist building.
Institutional green
linoleum tiles c. 1961, of a sturdy kind
the year my mother emigrates.
What's visible alongside
the nearly motionless canal.
Alongside a river
brownish-green, predictable,
like a few-weeks fling
that soon splits in two directions.
Irrepressible bodies of water
surrounded by buildings from centuries prior
whose filigrees gather soot
as excess definition.
Wreathed in trash
something classical
and repulsive endures.
The exterior of the famous museum
once a fortress
is power washed
behind large scaffolds fitted with tarps
screenprinted to mimic
the exterior of the famous museum.
One vertical band of newly washed portion
bare and ridiculous beside the
car-crammed thoroughfare. Piss
against trees and walls and the seams where walls meet
trickles and stinks like a moat.
In a concavity where the likeness
of another wealthy person once stood
pigeons sit.
The oxidized face
of a statue of some goddess
streaked in it.
In the gay club the dancer showers in front of us live
behind glass coyly
not revealing his dick
while screens project him digitized
in slight distortion on either side of him.
He snaps a small white towel
in front of himself and keeps it up
against the glass with his own weight.
Under this dancefloor
across from the bathrooms
a red room cordoned off.
It doesn't have to be there to be there.
At the market's end
split tomatoes, nectarines
so soft they're left for free.

from the book A SYMMETRY / W. W. Norton & Company

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Amaud Jamul Johnson's handwritten version of "A Lovely Love"

What Sparks Poetry:
Amaud Jamaul Johnson on Gwendolyn Brooks's "A Lovely Love"

"I was twenty and an undergraduate at Howard University, taking Dr. Jon Woodson’s Survey of African American Poetry. He was suspicious of labels and spent the first weeks of class arguing against his own course title. His first lecture began with a summary dismissal of Maya Angelou, who a year earlier was Bill Clinton’s Inaugural Poet. He would hand out poems with the authors’ names blacked out, and ask: “What makes this a Black poem, or is this good or bad?” We had to defend our answers. Our shortcomings were immediately evident. This is how I was introduced to Gwendolyn Brooks’s 'A Lovely Love.'"

READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE

"How Do We Find the Words for Our Grief?"

"In English there is no name for someone who survives their child. In Sanskrit, one of the oldest languages, there is a word—vilomah—for a person who has experienced this loss. (The words widow and widower also derive from Sanskrit.) I find it curious that, in so many languages, one of the most terrible things that can happen to a parent is beyond language, to the extent that it cannot be named."

via THE YALE REVIEW

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