by Pat Parker
The Complete Works
of Pat Parker
Edited by Julie R. Enszer
The Complete Works of Pat Parker, edited by Julie R. Enszer
Poems copyright © 2016 by Anastasia Dunham-Parker-Brady.
All rights reserved.
A Midsummer Night’s Press
3 Norden Drive
Brookville NY 11545
[email protected]
www.amidsummernightspress.com
Sinister Wisdom, Inc.
2333 Mcintosh Road
Dover, FL 33527
[email protected]
www.sinisterwisdom.org
Designed by Nieves Guerra.
Cover photo © 2016 JEB (Joan E. Biren). Used with permission.
Title page drawing first appeared in Child of Myself.
First edition, October 2016
ISBN-13: 978-1-938334-22-1
Simultaneously published as Sinister Wisdom 102, ISSN: 0196-1853.
Printed in the U.S. on recycled paper.
Contents
Coming On Strong: A Legacy of Pat Parker by Judy Grahn
Movement in Black
Foreword by Audre Lorde
MARRIED
Goat Child
For Donna
[Sometimes my husband]
Fuller Brush Day
[To see a man cry]
You can’t be sure of anything these days
Exodus
A Moment Left Behind
From Deep Within
LIBERATION FRONTS
[My hands are big]
[from cavities of bones]
[Brother]
[Have you ever tried to hid?]
[In English Lit.,]
[My heart is fresh cement,]
Dialogue
[With the sun]
For Michael on His Third Birthday
A Family Tree
Sunday
Pied Piper
[i wonder]
Where do you go to become a non-citizen?
[I am a child of America]
To My Vegetarian Friend
For the white person who wants to know how to be my friend .... 76
[Tour America!]
[I’m so tired]
The What Liberation Front?
Snatches of a Day
[Boots are being polished]
Questions
[i have a dream]
MOVEMENT IN BLACK
Movement in Black
BEING GAY
[Move in darkness]
[My lover is a woman]
Cop-out
For Willyce
Best Friends
Pit Stop
[When i drink]
For the Straight Folks (Who Don’t Mind Gays But Wish They Weren’t So BLATANT
My Lady Ain’t No Lady
Non-monogamy Is A Pain in the Butt
LOVE POEMS
[love]
[Let me come to you naked]
[I have a solitary lover]
I Kumquat You
A Small Contradiction
[i wish that i could hate you]
[Bitch!]
[Sitting here,]
[If it were possible]
I Have
On Jealousy
[As you entered]
Metamorphosis
Para Maria Sandra
gente
Group
The Law
Womanslaughter
Autumn Morning
[when i was a child]
[there is a woman in this town]
NEW WORK
Great God
Between the Light
Sublimation
Massage
Reputation
Progeny
It’s Not So Bad
For Audre
Funny
Jonestown & Other Madness
foreword
love isn’t
bar conversation
my brother
georgia, georgia georgia on my mind
one thanksgiving day
aftermath
breaking up
maybe i should have been a teacher
child’s play
jonestown
legacy
Prose
The Demonstrator
Autobiography Chapter One
Shoes
Mama and the Hogs
Revolution: It’s Not Neat or Pretty or Quick
Poetry at Women’s Music Festivals: Oil and Water
Gay Parenting, Or, Look out, Anita
The 1987 March on Washington: The Morning Rally
Two Plays
Hard Time
Pinochle
Restored Poems
From Child of Myself
Assassination
Ice Cream Blues
From Pit Stop
To an Unlabelled
Uncollected Poems: 1960s
The Mirror
Of Life
[I have seen death]
To a Friend
City Song
Not a Good Night
To a Poet, dead
Please you all
Two Faces of Black
Gold Stars & Hollow Bags
[A sea hawk soars above my head.]
CONFRONTATION
Berkeley ‘66
A Voice from Watts
Poem to my Mother
Costume Party
Soldier’s boots are
With Love to Lyndon
white folks
Summer
From the Wars
To a Deaf Poet
[Two people walk]
[Why burn a candle in daylight?]
Going to the bridge now
[all]
[the streets]
[There are so many bags to fall in]
Uncollected Poems: 1970s
Speech by a Black Nationalist to a white Audience.
Growing Up
Fleshy Soft Sea
[i will not always be with you]
[not by chance]
Transit Lady
A Woman’s Love
“Good morning, Mrs. Parker. Are you interested in working?”
[i have seen]
To Lynda
[from my bedroom window]
Sunday Morning
To Tamara (Tami) Kallen
Gente
Cop took my hand
Anatomy of a Pig
[Limericks]
Agua Riseuño
Poem #4 for Ann
Poem for Ann #5
[i must learn]
[Lady,]
well, i got the menstrual blues
my baby’s a bass player
[I fell in love some time ago]
A Walk
[She comes to me—tentative]
Sister
[Every once in a while]
Does This Make Sense
[At first, I]
Just Exactly What Is It That You Want
Uncollected Poems: 1980s
[I have a lover]
[Once it was said—]
I’m Still Waiting To Be Pinched
For Wayne
I hear a train a coming
Reflections on a March
Sweet Sweet Jimmy
Sweet Sweet Prince Jimmy
The Long Lost Ones
To My Straight Sister
Words
Oprah Winfrey
[I remember—]
Timothy Lee
[little Billy Tipton]
[We’re the Dunham-Parker’s from Pleasant Hill]
[It’s not so bad]
[There are those]
Trying to do how mama did can un Do you
Note from the Editor
End Notes
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Appendix: Tables of Contents
Coming On Strong:
A Legacy of Pat Parker
By Judy Grahn
In her writing Pat Parker developed a fully authentic and revolutionary voice grounded in her experiences growing up Black and female in south Texas of the 1940s, and coming out as a lesbian/dyke in California of the late 1960s. The power of her poetry was profoundly fueled by three murders that directly impacted her life. Of course, all the usual harassments, injuries, insults, deprivations, husband abuses, exotifications and objectifications, heaped on Black women especially, came her way. The terror of being publically Gay, of losing community support as a person of color, of being misunderstood by her parents, also came her way. But I would say the murders pushed her over some edge of motivation to either withdraw completely or go to the front of the line with a big bad sword in hand and lead a revolution. This latter is what she did.
Parker and I were intensely collaborative poet comrades for ten years, from 1970-1980, then went separate ways for a while, and reunited in the late 1980s. We were reading to women-only audiences together by 1970; we traveled to venues, shared beds and adventures, and had many discussions about writing and politics, the overlaps and differences of our lives and the movements for which we had become public voices. I edited, typeset, helped design, printed, and assembled two of her books for the Women’s Press Collective, which I co-founded in 1970 with the artist Wendy Cadden; I also edited Pat’s collection Movement in Black, for Diana Press. Pat spoke in behalf of the Women’s Press but never participated in its workings, saying that as the daughter of a father whose business was retreading tires, she had had enough of dirty jobs. She wanted something very different for herself.
Living in Houston during the 1940s, and despite cramped living quarters and scarce resources (see the story “Mama and the Hogs” in this volume) or “soul-searing poverty,” as she said, Parker’s family, the Cooks, had an optimistic spirit, belief in the power of education, and high expectations for the success of their children. The Texas they lived in, “Texas Hell,” she called it, was a combination of oppressive conditions produced by white supremacy, and also pride in accomplishments of African-Americans--a combination of old dangers and new hopes that would require enormous courage and engagement with social movements for change to hold still long enough to include her.
Before she left home, two devastating killings had occurred, one of them her Uncle Dave; her mother insisted his death in jail was no suicide, no matter what the police said.
She spoke about the second murder in an interview with Anita Cornwell in 1975, first published in Hera:
As a child in Texas, our newspaper boy was a faggot and he was killed by other kids in the community. They beat him up one night and threw him in front of a car. And everybody shook their heads and said how sad it was, but before then everybody had talked about how strange he was. So those kids were able to get away with killing him because the community just felt that it was sad, but he was a faggot, right? (from Part IV, interview with Anita Cornwell in 1975.)
When she was fresh out of high school at seventeen, Pat’s family told her to get out of Houston, that she too could be killed. At the same time, Parker’s teachers encouraged her to continue in school, and thought that she should become a lawyer in behalf of civil rights for Black people. According to one of her woman lovers, Parker’s family, while living in reduced circumstances, nevertheless gave her a classical sense of education; for example they “loved all things ancient Greek.”
Around 1973 Pat gave me her much-worn copy of John Ciardi’s book on poetry techniques, How Does a Poem Mean?, as she said she would not need it any more. Both of us had studied his book in our early development as poets—she gave me her much-used copy not only because I had lost mine, but also as a statement that she did not need to work in formal English poetic styles any more: she had found her voice in the free verse, direct personal diction of Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti) who had decided that using metaphors enabled readers to avoid the real subject (of oppression, for example). Rhythm, irony, questions, repetition for emphasis, dramatic endings, humor, and story would become the architectural elements of Pat’s poetry. She would open out that architecture for both ease of access and as a drum-call for activism.
Pat’s quest for knowledge included a respect for forms, precise diction, emphatic idea of content. The voice she chose for her poetry held an unwavering moral compass that would lead members of her community audience to call her “Preacher.” She was also a teacher dedicated to instructing her audience in what she had learned about life, oppression, justice, and intersectionality. I need to say here that four, at least, of us feminist poets—Parker, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and me—who were broadly and intensively formative of ideas in the 1970s and beyond, wrote of the intersections of our lives in ways that would later inform what continues to evolve in the academy and within social movements as “intersectionality.”
Parker’s teaching voice, while righteous and fired by outrage, was also meticulous and patient. In “For the White Person Who Wants to Be My Friend,” she offers advice, basically: don’t put me in a box called “black people are such and such” while at the same time, don’t ever forget my vulnerability in a racist society.
For the younger women who in the 1980s began engaging in S/M practices she scolds with astonished questions: “Is this why we did it? / Did we grapple with our own who hated us/so women could use whips and chains?” And for her masterpiece, “Jonestown,” she used the voice of a careful yet passionate lawyer, emphasizing her argument step by step about the enervating affects of American racism that can, did, and do still lead to mass murder with the apparent complicity of the victims.
Though she increasingly turned to rhythmic structures to frame her thoughts, her metaphors are also interesting. To explore a couple of them, for instance “chains” turns in her hands from heavy metal loops dragging on prisoners to bureaucratic paperwork to plastic credit cards to alienation among allies.
Another metaphor, addressed in “Poem to My Mother” in a very personal and ongoing argument of how religion has separated them, because of Pat’s gayness:
You lied-
or made mistakes,
the difference - none
to the heart that raced
like a vehicle of my generation.
This was part of an extended plea for understanding between the generations: “Can you hear my tears? / each weighted by innards.” Innards. Now there is an image to catch the breath.
I’m aware we now live in a society that has become very precious and finicky about its chicken, serving almost entirely white meat as “nuggets,” “breast filets,” or “tenders,” all without bones, let alone feet or organs. So I certainly do want to speak to Pat’s use of the image “innards” and its implication of steamy, variegated, throbbingly alive and extremely vulnerable inner self.
Innards. This reminds me of Parker’s special meal, eaten occasionally and usually by herself, consisting of chicken hearts and gizzards, which she cooked up into a rubbery grey mass and doused with bright red Louisiana hot sauce; a sentimental if not ritual meal from her childhood. I believe she told me this was a favorite dish of her father’s.
What do innards do, and hold? This seems important to unraveling Parker’s deeper meanings. The gizzard processes whatever life offers, and the heart retains feeling and expresses. The guts—as in the chitterlings (hog intestines) she ate as soul food that “connects me to my ancestors” as she said in one poem—hold intuition as well as will and courage.
The metaphor of innards in Pat’s poetry recurs with more than one meaning: “my innards…are twisted/ & torn & sectioned” in “My Hands are Big.” She’s explaining that her ideas and passion come from her family and its history, not from so
me easier-to-come-by political polemic that she has learned later in life. She is writing from her own direct experience, and also her family’s, therefore from “innards,” and understanding that these tightly held feelings, like her experiences, are “sectioned.”
She used the image again twice in “Womanslaughter,” her account of the third murder that impacted her life, the shooting death of her sister Shirley at the jealous hands of her ex-brother-in-law. Black on black crime of any sort was not taken seriously in the courts at that time, nor was what we would now call femicide.
It doesn’t hurt as much now
the thought of you dead
doesn’t rip at my innards,
leaves no holes to suck rage.
Holes in the innards, holes in the heart “suck rage.” She turns that rage into a promise to become strong, to gather other strong women in solidarity:
I will come with my many sisters
and decorate the streets
with the innards of those
brothers in womenslaughter.
This threat, while emboldening to those working to end femicide in all its forms, and who are aware that strong female community works best for this, nevertheless has also not yet been addressed. To “decorate the streets” meaning not only the obvious but also to turn the perpetrators inside out, to read entrails (or innards) for motive and other truths. We know stories of countless victims, but the inner workings of the murderers and how to recognize and interrupt the patterns of male on female violence is far less known, far from understood and acted upon. The institutional support for their crimes has not yet been successfully challenged, and men are only beginning to answer the question “why?”
The three murders, then, as I see this, substantiate three oppressions that Pat took on to battle directly with her warrior voice: the first a product of white supremacy, and the continual murder of Black men especially, at the hands of the police. The second murder was from her own community (though it could have been nearly anyone’s community—see the films Brokeback Mountain or Boys Don’t Cry or Two Spirits,) almost casually getting rid of the strange—the Gay or Transgender or Two Spirit person. The third murder was femicide, directly experienced as the death of one of her beloved sisters.
