Before reading Kiki Petrosino’s Hymn for the Black Terrific, the only poetry book I was really familiar with was Shel Silverstein’s Light in the Attic. Obviously, I wasn’t so experienced with poetry before this course. I chose Petrosino’s book because the name sounds particularly unique; like its title, the content of the book is unique as well. Petrosino divided her book into 3 sections: Oiseau Rebelle, Mulattress, and Turn Back Your Head & There Is The Shore. Since I’m unfamiliar with the format of poetry books, I always thought each poem was supposed to be read as a separate entity rather than relating to each other. In the first section of Hymn for the Black Terrific, the poems are separate from each other, but in the next two sections, they are organized into a series of poems relating to one another. The first lesson of the book was that poems can be established as either separate or a series, or both.
In the first section Oiseau Rebelle, which means rebellious bird in French, the poems seem to be separate from each other. Though the author explores different types of poetic forms in this section, the poems I found to be the most distinct were the prose poems. I really enjoyed how the speaker was able to tell a story in this format while still managing to maintain poetic language throughout the poem. For example, in This Woman’s Face is Your Future, the speaker uses alliterations such as “dumb as dommett”(Petrosino 6) or “Dulsome as Dallas ditchwater”(Petrosino 6). These alliterations are made up of some words I’ve never even heard before, yet they are still so musically pleasing to the ear. In another prose poem- The Terrible Test of Love- the repetition of the words “knife”, “loop”, and “scrim” add a strong poetic element that make it clear that the poem is not just any story. I have yet to produce a successful prose poem in my poetry for the class, and the prose poems in the first section definitely gave me a few pointers on how to make a prose poem still sound like an actual poem. I hope to emulate her prose voice in my own poetry. Though I feel like I have come a long way in producing vivid imagery since the beginning of the class, I was even more inspired by Petrosino’s extraordinary descriptions in her poetry. In her poem Alverta, “smell of coins & salt”(Petrosino 15), “light hair twisting through a comb like speech”(Petrosino 15) and “stars drowned in her skin”(Petrosino 15) are only a few examples of her incredible descriptions. Alliterations, repetition, and powerful descriptions all come together to create model prose poems. Of course, prose poems were not the only poems in Oiseau Rebelle even though I feel that I learned the most from them. Hymn for the Black Terrific- the poem the booked was named after- has a particularly interesting controlling metaphor that is carried out through most of the stanzas in the poem. In the first stanza, “kayak” symbolizes a balanced grin, in the second it carries blood, in the third it’s in the ocean, and so on. I’ve never seen a poem in which the controlling metaphor is constantly changing its abstract meaning. This is definitely something I would want to experiment with in one of my poems, since I’ve only established controlling metaphors in which the meanings remain constant. Petrosino’s style made me really have to constantly question the meaning of the kayak, and I think the sense of mystery she builds in her poetry is what makes it especially unique.
The second section of the book is Mulattress, which is defined as a woman with one black and one white parent and also derives from French. Mulattress is made up of ten fifteen-line single stanza poems. The poems cover multiracial identity and its relationship to beauty. This is the first time I was introduced to “series poems.” This is also the first time I’ve seen a cut-up poem in action, used by a professional poet. At first, I thought that the phrases that were italicized at the end of each line throughout the series were meant to stress the words, but in the notes at the end of the book, the author reveals that the italicized phrases were taken from a line in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 14: “They secrete less by the kidneys, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odor”(Petrosino 55). This line is a statement that is generalizing the whole black population in a negative way, yet Petrosino cuts up the line in her poem and redefines it as positive through her poetry. The cut-up poem was one of my favorite exercises this semester, so I appreciated getting to see such a clever one in an actual poetry book. This series exemplified how to insert cut-up phrases into poems in a way that seems unforced. Although the end-words were repeated in the same order, the form of the poems still reminded me of the form of a sestina. The author demonstrates that brilliant poetry can emerge from non-traditional forms of poetry as well as fixed forms, such as the sestina.
Unlike Mulattress,the Turn Back Your Head and There Is The Shore series of poems are all in prose form. The series contain a narrative of a character named “the eater”, as her desires push her to continuously turn to eating. For example, in one prose poem of the series- Eating House- desires to have a baby causes “the eater” to eat; in another poem- Destiny Comes Together As A Cold Plate- loneliness is the drive behind her constant eating and in the next poem- Top Of A Dumpling, Top of A Temple- the eater’s mind is dark, so she eats. Apparently, Petrosino chose the names of the poems in the series based on dishes served to her on her trips to mainland China. We have established in class that titles play important roles in the poems, and I think this was an extremely creative way to decide on titles for the poem. The titles are especially fitting, as they have to do with food and the main character of the poems is “the eater.” This particular section taught me that anything can be significant in relation to poetry, even the names of dishes on a menu.
Hymn for the Black Terrific definitely broadened my horizons on different ways in which poets can experiment in their writing. I personally think Petrosino is an extremely brave, creative poet as she experiments with different poetic forms and unusual imagery to establish a very unique voice. I definitely plan on emulating her style in my own way in future poems. The next poetry book I plan on reading is Fort Red Border, Kiki Petrosino’s first poetry book, to compare how her poetic style has changed since her first book.
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