Response to Morgan Parker’s There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé

            I’m just going to start by throwing out some of the lines from this collection that stuck with me. From My Vinyl Weighs a Ton: “The sun bends it’s back over Struggle City.” And “It’s just one long slumber party in here. It seems impossible/that Mom will ever arrive, car running, to take me home.” From White Beyoncé: “Her daughter learns about beauty/Discovers nothing surprising”. From Welcome to the Jungle: “All Men Have Been Created Equally/To Shiver At The Thought Of Me” and “one of these days my whole body might just//go away like just standing in line at Whole Foods or purgatory”. And from Afro: “a Zulu folktale warning against hunters drunk on Polo shirts and Jägermeister.”

            These are small pieces from a collection that blended musical references and dark, self-deprecating humor, into poems that were both very lyrical and luxurious. I say luxurious, because though many of them were laced with pain, I also felt that they in some way embodied the idea of ‘self-care’. The material luxuries in her work: the baths, champagne, nail polish, lipstick, pills, etc. as well as the musicality and humor scattered throughout, are defenses against emotional stressors. But they are also ways to acknowledge and confront them. The act of writing poetry is itself a form of ‘self-care’, not just charcoal masking the pain away, but feeling it, trying to make sense of it, and putting it outside of yourself so it doesn’t have to stay just on the inside.

            Parkers use of spacing for me either indicate pauses in the flow or implied words. In The President Has Never Said the Word Black, what is implied by the spaces in the line “we lost a young boy today,” between ‘young’ and ‘boy’ is the unsayable. In 13 Ways of Looking at a Black Girl, where Parker lists near thirty names, adjectives, and phrases used to describe black girls, the only word that comes up exactly 13 times is ‘sex’. The spacing in this poem feels erratic, every one or two words are separated by gaps, and each gap seems like it’s filled with the word ‘sex’. It’s been scattered so thoroughly through the poem that it seems to fill every crack.

Take a Walk on the Wild Side also made interesting use of spacing: “I feel the bass you-know-where [                  ] exactly,” leaves space for the reader to imagine where she might feel it, or where they themselves feel it, or where to imagine the bass at other parts in the poem. I had forgotten the title until I got to the final line of this poem, “And the colored girls go:” the colon leaving a huge open-ended space that my brain filled up with the end of Take a Walk on the Wild Side, with doo doo doo’s fading into the distance. So, I listened to the song, and looked at the poem again, and then looked up the song lyrics, and looked at the poem again, and thought about Parker replacing the doo doo doo’s with the voice of an actual black woman.

Parker’s work feels intimate: brimming with pop-culture, sexual desire, and identity politics, Parker’s world is our world, and it is consuming. Her poetry is exploration of her own identity as a black woman, as an artist, as an American, and she navigates all of this beautifully and unapologetically.