My Personal Favorite with Shonda Buchanan
A Poetry Blog
This poetry blog only asks the poet one question:
At this moment in time, which of your poems is your personal favorite, and why?
***
Becoming the River
When a child
comes from the dirt, from the earth.
From the cool-bodied rain
of poverty and layers of coal
laughter. From Indians and Africans
colliding on a damaged rock.
From music, so much music
that her head filled with the gospel’s holy ghost,
with whole notes and whale bones and parrots and Egyptian gold.
From deformed hearts of white slave masters and Black mamas’ last kisses.
From cornflower-blue skies slit by a cotton-field sun
and babies, all the Black babies sold away from their enslaved mothers
fall from that blinding hole in God’s sky. From playing the dozens
and emancipation dreams folded neatly into squares
at Lincoln’s memorialized feet.
Statues of confederate
soldiers she never saw but knew she had
to hide from.
When music and unsafe and chattel memories are your food,
you have no choice
but to become the river one day
and a tuning fork the next.
***
Shonda: My why? This poem tells the story of Nina Simone becoming the artist, the metamorphosis that had to happen from Eunice Waymon to Nina Simone as she left her childhood self behind and moved into Diva, Icon, and Civil Rights activist. Particularly when she experienced so much disappointment from people who said they would support her and that didn't always happen. This is what many of us do, yet not on the scale that she had to do. Her metamorphosis impacted our country in profound ways.
Bio: Pushcart Prize nominee, Oxfam Ambassador, USC Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities Fellow and City of Los Angeles (COLA) Department of Cultural Affairs Master Artist Fellow, Shonda Buchanan is the author of five books, including the award-winning memoir, Black Indian. Shonda is also a faculty member in Alma College’s MFA Program in Creative Writing.
An award-winning poet, fiction, nonfiction writer, and educator, Shonda is the recipient of the Brody Arts Fellowship from the California Community Foundation, a Big Read grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, several Virginia Foundation for the Humanities grants, the Denise L. Scott and Frank Sullivan Awards, and an Eloise Klein-Healy Scholarship. Consulting Curator Poet for The Broad Art Museum, Shonda is also a Sundance Institute Writing Arts fellow, a PEN Center Emerging Voices fellow and a Jentel Artist Residency fellow. Finalist for the 2021 Mississippi Review poetry contest, Shonda’s memoir, Black Indian, won the 2020 Indie New Generation Book Award and was chosen by PBS NewsHour as a “Top 20 books to read” to learn about institutional racism. About to enter a 3rd printing, Black Indian begins the saga of her family’s migration stories of Free People of Color communities exploring identity, ethnicity, landscape, and loss. Her first collection of poetry, Who’s Afraid of Black Indians?, was nominated for the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and the Library of Virginia Book Awards.
Purchase Shonda’s books here.
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