Pinot Poetry
The importance of musicality is a must in poetry, but so is the use of “stuff.” The “stuff” I’m referring to is the real substances and details about places and people a poem brings. The proper and common nouns the authors use to evoke their position in poetry are the manuscript of the poem. Furthermore, it is not just the “stuff” that matters; it’s how the “stuff” works. How it moves a poem, and what tone or mood it creates for its readers. Three poets who do this effectively are Aime Cesaire, Nikki Wallschlaeger, and Nate Marshall, using syntax and diction to create a real world where the reader is sucked into and sees through the poet’s eyes.
In “Notebook of a Return to a Native Land” by Aimé Césaire, she uses a lot of nouns within each poem. The use of nouns within the poem creates a dark and angry tone for the reader and invites the reader to mimic the poem’s emotion. Nouns like “Evil grigri” and “arrogant houses” set the tone for readers’ perception of their surroundings and the people within them. Other nouns such as “savanna clover,” “depths high-deep,” and “twentieth floor” all help to describe the perspective she wants of cops and help paint the illustration of how they should be viewed.
The dark, ominous tone in this poem is undeniable. She wants you to see the evils within the cops and how they aren’t who they say they are. She creates this angry tone with nouns and creates a beautiful contrast between who cops are supposed to be and who they actually are. The contrast between the nouns and the cops’ actions is in perfect war because cops are supposed to be a form of authority, unity, and help for the community. However, they are exposed to the power-hungry monsters they are. She uses nouns like “daybreak,” “lousy pig,” and “petty monk” to showcase cops in a disgusting, vile opposite light of how they are depicted.
In “Sonnet 24” by Nikki Wallschlaeger, she creates a wave of emotions in her poem. Her poems give vast tones such as survival, salvation, and pro-black. She effectively gets her point across in her poetry by using specific descriptive nouns while managing not to cloud the poem with background emotion. She gives the personification of a neighborhood for a black person using words like “umbrella apartments,” “everyone,” and “individual strategies.” She speaks the life of a black person working in a grocery store shorts, observing what’s around him/her while thinking about the others (whites) that have it better off. Words like “humoring,” “peak hours,” and “food buckets” depict a picture of how others see us as “animals.” However, she writes in such a calm and gentle way that she creates the atmosphere for the reader to step in without telling them how to feel and think; she allows them to do that for themselves.
Unlike Cesaire, who creates an angry tone, Nikki simultaneously gives the reader a survival tone and a pro-black tone. She writes of how blacks are viewed within their own community and how they are viewed when they work jobs to feed their families in other communities, and explains it’s a way of survival, just as animals need to survive in the wild. However, she explains that the people struggling to survive are the blacks, in-explicitly saying so. She states, “I recently read in a national newspaper that youth & adulthood are for ego structure & old age is saved for cherishing reflection. People do walk a certain way when their needs are being met.” This was my favorite line in the poem because it shows the epitome of white privilege. When you have no worries in the world and nothing to struggle for, you have no care in the world, and I think she efficiently portrayed that with her use of nouns.
Nate Marshall’s poem “On Caskets” evokes a specific tone. From the title “casket" throughout the whole poem, the style is very consistent. He manipulates words like “Earth,” “maker,” “home,” “niggas”, “pyramids,” “Egyptians,” “flowers,” and “Neanderthals” to create an aura of culture. Specially Black Culture and its death through society. He doesn’t speak about it directly, as one hopes; he subtly begins the poem with a history and biology lesson. Marshall skillfully contrasts the lesson of our ancestors' biology studies and casts this cloud of “death.” Elaborating on this, he states that it is “basic human instincts” to decorate the dead to “return the borrowed body and acknowledge Earth as a maker and home.” This line is beautiful because it shows that throughout history, our culture has had many deaths and has been buried; however, it still rises from the ashes.
In addition to these already profound words, we move on to more complexities such as “caskets,” “Chicago,” “bones,” and my personal favorite, “Chief Keef.” The applications of these words are powerful because whenever we think of Chicago, not only do we think about Chief Keef, which is a hip-hop reference, but we also think of gun violence and the death toll of young black kids. Using a hip-hop figure and the place brings to light how violence is glorified in today’s society. “Caskets” and “bones” refer to picking out a casket for his grandmother’s body. He explains that the soul isn’t dead; the soul is set free and has gone on to eternal life, he states, “they seen funerals, not homegoings,” which is true. At funerals, we, as black people, don’t mourn the dead; we celebrate them.
In conclusion, “stuff” is significant, though it is often overlooked. Thinking of a wine glass, though the wine, a poem, is important, the experience would be lost without the glass, “stuff.” You may not realize it, but it is a necessary part of the experience because no one ever appreciates the glass for the experience of drinking wine, and without the glass, would you be able to taste the poem? I think not.
