In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 257.
For much of my childhood I spent nights with my grandparents while my parents worked. The archive of my memory is filled with my grandparents’ voices as they played dominoes with friends—gravelly throated women with purple rinses over gray hair and men who pronounced coach like “coarch” or “roard” instead of road.
I’m deeply inspired by writers such as James Edwin Campbell and Zora Neale Hurston and scholar Geneva Smitherman for establishing a legacy of reverence for Black dialect and voice in their work. While the use of dialect is often described as folksy or charmingly informal, this description always feels a bit demeaning. I particularly appreciate the way Jericho Brown incorporates dialect as more than a splash of quaint cultural flavor, as an ethos of remembrance. I admire how his poem “The Legend of Big and Fine” describes the two words together as a measurement of worth: “You lucky. You got you/ A big, fine _________.” The line evokes not only a recognition of the phrase and its implied grammatical rules—when it may have been said, what it would or wouldn’t apply to—but also the memory of the elders I recall using the phrase. Similarly, Brown’s poem “’N’em” immediately establishes a kinship with those familiar with the term, (my mama n’em included). These works inspire me to reconstruct voice with the same comfort and intimacy of two people speaking when no one else is around—a language of love and recognition.
Part of the altar work of elegy in my poems is tuning into the artifact of voice. I’m always striving to preserve what I believe to be vanishing: the grammars, idioms, and pronunciations of those around me growing up. Poetry has become both a site of reverence and a kind of cultural linguistic archive.
Sometimes the process involves mining a word from memory phonetically. Inspired by a tweet by @damienxpat which comments on Black elders pronouncing the letter r like the word “aura,” my poem “i dreamed my name in your mouth with pink flowers” attempts to capture how my maternal grandmother used to spell my name: bee-aura-eye-tea-tea-in-why.
The “aura” of that outstretched letter r continues to reverberate throughout the poem and my memory.
Other times an entire phrase might be an object of reverence in a poem. In her essay “Soul n’ Style,” Geneva Smitherman describes Black idioms and colloquialisms as “the dialect of [her] nurture.” Like “’N’em,” Nate Marshall’s “Fiddy’leven” instantly establishes an homage to a particular presence and voice before we even reach the litany of subjects the text honors—“those who wore / the chains who tilled / the land who nursed / the babes.” We understand the significance of each example listed because we’re familiar with the colloquial magnitude of the term. Even if an expression holds a negative connotation, the phrase may still initiate a kind of reverence because of the voices it evokes. Though the line “salt been done ate you up” in Ashley Warner’s poem “Barq’s Root Beer” refers to the damaging effects of the ingredient on the body, each time I read it, I can’t help but think of the care of my aunts and grandmother, even in their scolding, in reference to the mosquitos sure to eat my legs up as I played in wet grass in summer. Language becomes a source to honor and exhume otherwise intangible voices.
For years, whenever someone would get upset, I would hear my aunt say the same peculiar phrase which sounded something like “your neighbor card’s well.” I later found out she was actually saying “your navel cord’s well,” which left me no less confused. She explained the phrase was a reference to not allowing babies to cry too much while their navels were healing for fear they’d develop a hernia. Yet, once you were strong and old enough, you could be left to cry or get as angry as you wanted, belly button be damned. This colloquialism became the title of the first poem I wrote after her passing. A way to snatch a bit of her language before it escaped like a balloon. The term even dictates certain images and diction within the poem as the speaker begins to feel the phantom effects of being disconnected from the loved one’s voice:
today is another distance—
your voice plaits
through my core
your ash settles in some vessel
on a dusty shelf
this hurt is a bulge—
my belly bursts a bull’s eye
open from sealed husk again
The first poems in Cord Swell set the tone for much of the multivocality in the book. The speaker promises to catch every word the subject ever spoke and release them back into the air like a chorus of moths. I encourage you to write a poem with the same task in mind, one that either attempts to transcribe an accent or pronunciation, or a poem that allows a particular word or phrase to act as a guiding theme within the work. Whose voice do you want to honor or excavate from 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: bady abbas
