Honorée Fanonne Jeffers Featured Poet

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Dec 01, 2014

Honorée Jeffers is a major figure in American letters. I met her when she was appointed “Witter Bynner Fellow” at the Library of Congress by US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey. It was love at first sight. She is a true southern lady with reverence to the South’s most elegant traditions. At the same time she is a powerful transformer and reformer of its present and past. She changes sorrow into compassion with a huge story at the center of every poem. She is as free as the wind, and cannot be caught by any net. This refreshes our language, making it new. - Grace Cavalieri

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers has won fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Witter Bynner Foundation through the Library of Congress. She is the author of three books of poetry, The Gospel of Barbecue, Outlandish Blues, and Red Clay Suite. Most recently, her poems have appeared in Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. She lives on the prairie, where she teaches at the University of Oklahoma.

Draft of an Ex-Colored Letter Sent Home

From the Post-Race War Front

A soldier in Baldwin’s Country & I can’t even dance

I say you can’t beat me Each day I get up to face fear

I made money & fixed my credit I escaped you dear my shame

Yet how to escape white space It’s impossible

to return to your embrace to rough-trading sweet vowels

to brothers on corners visiting my dreams I hear your whistles

smell collard greens on suburban wind I love you with deception

I’ll be back I’ll lift as I climb My remorse goes deep

to the whiteness in me my bones Forgive me You don’t know

the trouble I see I can’t tell these folks the truth

They don’t understand me & they don’t try Or try too hard

I want my birthright a mutual sight my own ancient rime

In the bright trenches of the office I open my mouth but choke

on bottled water Last week I returned for your wake

but left before the Home-Going I miss our surviving dark ones

The familiar is trivial & profound The strange a charge

in my blood I clutch & shriek at these strangers I left drums for

I sing B.B.’s mean old song

The Glory Gets

for my replacement

The glory gets dingy quick.

Faking won’t be as cute

as when he praised

your vast understanding,

but there’s time before he hands

you cold cream

and whispers the truth.

Now, here’s the key.

That window right there?

It sticks.

You have to pull real hard.

When you put away your shame

and reach outside to stroke

a shrinking globe, your hand

might shake, but give

thanks for small savoring.

You might consider that hunger

is prayer, and vice versa,

as our man should

before he quiets his mind

and rears back on his knees.

Claims the renewed place

he always assumed

he owned.

I didn’t say he would.

I said he should,

but you’ll find should can be

love if you sing

it just right.

Apologia for Something

Fall in love with someone’s poetry and thus, fall in love

with that someone. How many times can I explain this?

I’m running out of water. I’m not a child anymore.

I’m talking to you.

I’m talking to myself, repeating a harpy’s creation,

the chatter of disappointed women.

Child, get yourself together.

I’m closing a book as my father’s door was closed, as he locked

himself in a small room. This is not a metaphor. It was nearly a cell.

How did I know? Daily, I sneaked in there.

He was gone.

The times he was present, maybe he was locked inside. I can’t say

for sure. I can say what he forbade me: his presence.

A knock at his black man’s hour.

He had a soul. I know that. It was lined with the approximation

of tears. It was a hunger for scabs and scars. For life

to finally be over. He couldn’t take his children and wife with him.

He wrote so many poems.

I believe I’ve read them all. I read so many others. I’ve tapped the covers,

lifted a weight to my ear, hoping it would grow light in my hand.

Congratulated the catharsis,

but catharsis isn’t healing and my love isn’t love. It’s something else—

I’ll get it together and I’ll reopen the book. You’ll reread this poem and fall

in love with me. Drive someplace I’m not. Cry one, two, three tears.

Memory of a Vision of Marie Laveau, the Voodoo

Queen of New Orleans (1996)

A painting

of the Renaissance:

girl backed against a wall,

done over by the Holy Ghost.

Before those levees cracked open

I was supposed to drive

to the Crescent. Instead,

I built an altar topped by a china cup

and cheap bric-a-brac

in shades of blue.

Katrina’s waters came and rose—

they’re finally gone

and so are the graves.

What remains—

the lake and river innocent now—

never was blue,

and in that painting, Marie,

Queen of Salt-Tears,

the girl should be fat and brown.

No one can see the sound

of the drum

or understand she is unfaithful.

Memory of an Ancestral Vision (2006)

first i’m little then i’m big then the medicine come my way

then i’m red and black and a little dot of white i try to find

the white till i stop trying then i grow two new feet to match

my four feet kin my name is deer nothing else just deer

call me that i run till i reach the clearing i shed my outside skin

i rear back on my legs then the medicine come again the medicine

take me over and i talk all out my head and my belly turn round

like water and the boat float in my blood and the people oh the people

they keep crying out to me then the medicine take me over

and the boat women dance with me then i put back on my skin

my four feet kin run away then i cut off two feet but i don’t bleed

and the medicine leave me cold and i’m little and i’m little

and i’m lonely and i’m screaming

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