A Poem Book a Week #1 Ridin' the Moon in Texas--Ntozake Shange

A new project to celebrate a year after finishing the dissertation and to go back and learn how to read deliciously again, like I used to, before.

First up is Ntozake Shange's Riding the Moon in Texas: Word Paintings (St. Martin's Press, 1987). It's a first edition. A Christmas gift from either my mum or my sister, probably my sister because it was bought at Unamable Books, the bookmark is still in there. I never even looked at the book... consider this also confessions of a former dissertator... so I had no idea that it was even related to my dissertation, which is about collaborations between writers and artists. Shange was living in Texas...also a locale of the dissertation (see Penz: It's Pronounced Pants on blogspot)...and how to survive but to get in contact with artists and have conversations with their work. The book is beautiful with the images of the art and the words of the poet-writer. So far, my favorite is "Conversation With the Ancestors" ir response to Arturo Lindsay's collage "Indigo's Emergency Care for Wound That Cannot Be Seen." It is a poem about New York and how the city forces us to be in certain ways, like how we can't move around easily with a goat. And then one poem about popular music romance and violence: "cowry shells/ sequin jackets / protect us momentarily / just before we beat the hell out of each other" (16). The lines remind me of a conversation I had with a friend-poet about healing after being hurt by a lover--and how that leaves the heart... I wish had the line from the poem...something about ripped out and smashed under boot.