Morgan Park Response

I found a lot of the duality of social intersections being written about beautifully by Morgan Parker. In a lot of the poems in her collection we get a sense of some social navigation going on with her identity as black and woman and of a certain generation where the phenomenon of Beyonce has given strength to so many but has also been, I think for Parker too, a benchmark that is near impossible to reach.

And at the same time Parker is musing Beyonce’s identity too in a way with poems such as Poems written on Beyonce’s birthday which I found was a little poignant with the line “drinking cough syrup from a glass shaped like your body I wish was mine but as dark as something in my mind telling me I’m not woman enough for these days” here Parker seems to be getting at the social intersection of her identity as a black woman, and how there are impossible societal standards that were not made to be achieved by every American woman. Only by white women.

I found this sentiment in the third poem of her collection too with her line “I will never be woman enough” and it reminds me of the speech by Sojouner Truth entitled “ain’t I a woman too” in which she stood up in the face of many white people to declare that her being black wasn’t negating her status as woman too.

Parker also takes the time to realize her own identity as a multiplicity of sorts, a recognition that there are both good and bad parts to everyone. I loved that line from the first poem “I do whatever I want because I could die any minute/ I don’t mean YOLO I mean they are hunting me” I definitely resonated with that because there is this sense of freedom that is uninhibited but underneath there is a grim truth that ripples there. Parker ends her first poem with the lines “I am a tree and some fruit are good and some are bad”

Beyonce on the line for Gaga was a very threaded poem because it intertwines the cultural phenomenon of Beyonce and Gaga and to me, seemed like a poetic fan fictional account on a conversation between them. I saw Beyonce represented in the words “divas getting money” and “soft brown fingers” and I saw Gaga being represented by “glitter” and “Littler monsters” both lines have cultural significance to their representations in popular culture.

I also really enjoyed The Origin of the Universe poem, it was written in this narrative block style and had minimal line breaks, which I think was good for the energy and flow of the poem. I was caught by the line

“one day we learned to migrate. One day we studied/Mamma making her face./ Bright new Brown…” I found these lines profound because of the perspective represented here. We go from migration which is what many black people in America did once slavery was abolished, from the south to the north. Then we go to Mamma, which is zoomed into as a personal poetic tie, who is the origin of the universe.

And then I found a certain reclaiming of the word ‘brown’ here. Brown being bright, which is a tone of the color not often talked about, especially when applied to people.

Parker goes on in the collection to continue this metaphor of brown being bright and I loved that. I saw it again in My Vinyl Weighs a Ton where she gives description of the morning “…into the brown morning” in a later poem we even get “brown flower petals”

I also really appreciated the s sounds in the first line of that poem “sit down shut up slip me out of my sleeve” I found the poetic quality very high there

I found that Parker also played a lot with spacing in this collection of poems. I am thinking abut Delicate and Jumpy where the poem is given to us in couplets that seem to jump from one stanza to the next. “Turns out I feel my body/more than I should. My eyes dart

Like a small animal. I’m a museum…” with the space Parker gives, its like she is simultaneously creating space for the poem to shift.

I also saw spacing being played with in Take a Walk on the Wild Side where the spacing seems to be based on colloquialism.

“I feel the bass you-know-where                                            Exactly” like the stress of that line is on the word exactly

I also thought about spacing a lot when it came to the poem 99 Problems and about spacing and the ways to achieve a poem, by using its best form.

I saw the title’s allusion to the Jay-Z song of the same title. I like that the collection had so many hip-hop references

We even start with a quote from Kendrick Lamar who is a Pulitzer prize winning artist for his album DAMN which features a song entitled xxx, in which we get the story of a black person trying to win but failing to do so because of the social conditions he is placed under.

I loved the way social identity and the cultural phenomenon of Beyonce (self-identity and/v.s pop culture) were intertwined to make a beautiful statement on life.