In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 258.
How can memory make everyday objects and images sacred? How can reflecting on the tangible items we take for granted improve how we ground readers in images, time, and place? Because we don’t always know why we recall certain random snapshots of memory, there’s novelty in the mundane moments we remember, especially when placed within the confines of a poem. There’s something holy about including a seemingly dull thing within a framework where everything is gathered on purpose like a bouquet. And as a Black woman from the South in a time of rampant erasure, I’m particularly intentional about exalting objects of the quotidian as an act of love and veneration.
During a recent unit on odes, one of my classes read Joshua Bennett’s “Owed to the Durag” and “Owed to Your Father’s Gold Chain.” The objects immediately summoned memories of cousins and brothers with their heads cloaked in nylon and the indelible glimmer of cords draped just below the neck of a white undershirt. In addition to the personal and cultural nostalgia evoked within the poems, the students specifically admired how the use of the word “owed” surpassed celebration to emphasize an indebtedness to what we would normally consider trivial. The discussion soon turned into a meditation on gratitude. Who are we without the grace of small things, especially those that manage to somehow stand out in the cluttered archive of our memory?
As Bennett beautifully states in “Owed to the Plastic on Your Grandmother's Couch,” what better way to say thank you than to “promise / to preserve all small / & distinctly mortal forms / of loveliness”? What unacknowledged artifacts continue to serve us in silence, even for the short time we are here? What attachments do they hold to the people who were once in our lives? Jari Bradley embarks on a similar project in “An Ode to My Grandmother’s Teeth,” which situates the subject’s teeth as more than gilded accessories; they are emblems of origin and protection to “help…soothe the welts risen at the rouse of memory.”
In my debut collection, Cord Swell, some of the reverence for everyday objects is evoked through elegy. Loss turns everything—a brush, even a pillow—into a sacred object. Yet, like in Bennett’s work, acknowledging the small things that carried me through (and the people they’re connected to) becomes a way to push past lament into joy and celebration. I give thanks for fishbones, sugar water, and chicken wing tips. I place my father’s battered and glued tennis shoes up on the altar next to a Crown Royal bag and my aunt’s flowerpot we used to place on the porch when it rained. The poems become reliquaries for clotheslines, yellow activator bottles, poke sallet, and so many other familiar objects quietly held in the ledger of my memory.
I invite you to read Bennett and Bradley’s poems and then generate a list of ordinary, personal artifacts from your own archive. What humble relics have sustained you? In what ways can you elevate the items to pay homage to a particular person, time, or location you hold sacred within your memory?
brittny ray crowell (she/her/hers) is an assistant professor of English at Clark Atlanta University. A recipient of a Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry and the Lucy Terry Prince Prize, her poems have appeared in Split Lip, Copper Nickel, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Her work as a librettist has been featured at the Ohio State University and the Cartography Project.
image credit: Dhilip Antony