We should have done research beforehand, about where to park my beat-up Mitsubishi or what’s in the neighborhood, dinner and coffee-wise. Work has been crazy, it’s always too crazy to do any planning ahead. Frankly it’s a miracle we’re both off on the same night. We’ll roll with it. My sister and I travel well together, and tonight I convinced her to come to Philly with me to catch Helen Oyeyemi and Álvaro Enrigue at Central Library.

But we’re both low on data and don’t want to kill our remaining gigs with Google Maps. Also, we don’t know Philadelphia well. We grew up 40 miles away, safely tucked into suburban New Jersey. As girls, we heard nothing kind about Philly. It was dirty, unsafe. In our 20s we’ve been exploring Philadelphia, neighborhood by neighborhood, discovering new delights every visit. Why did they hide this city from us? We need to make up for lost time.

First stop: a hip diner for meatloaf and cheesesteak. Being alive makes us hungry, we wake up hungry every morning, 16-hour workdays in middle management make us hungry. We power through with coffee coffee coffee cream sugar and Diet Coke. But now, we feast.

Sated, we walk in circles without a map. Did YOU know the Benjamin Franklin Parkway cuts diagonally through the neat city blocks in this area? We keep crossing over 676, why is there a highway in the middle of a city, by all of these museums? Wait, you can just WALK through Logan Square?

We duck into a Whole Foods—a Whole Foods! In a city center! We’re used to seeing them in strip malls that are so out of our way we never bother to make the trip. But now, we can just breeze through the Bakery, find a snack for later.

Cutting through the cupcakes is the most gorgeous human man we have ever seen. We’re both a little awe-struck—can he be real? We should find him again, peek in his shopping cart. Could this dark-haired Adonis in a tailored suit actually eat human food? Instead we find a box of soft, chocolate-dipped cookies and stumble back into the street.

We should have made it to the reading on time. Early, even. But we are mixed up, heading in the wrong direction. We cross intersections at the STOP signal, running, running, always running.

We make it to the basement of the Free Library of Philadelphia halfway through the event, just as it’s being opened up for audience Q&A. Sensual commentary on history, imagery, and the mechanics of a novel pour out of Álvaro Enrigue while we search for seats in the back of the room. And while my sister gets up to the find the restroom. And the entire time she’s gone. And when she ges back.

When she gets the chance, Oyeyemi is soft-spoken and deep-thinking. Maybe a little uncomfortable to be on stage. Maybe a little more than uncomfortable at the questions she’s asked by the crowd. They want to compare her to other authors, and hear her compare her own work to Zadie Smith or Angela Carter. They want her to give an academic lecture on race as a construct in British literature, then compare it with race as a construct in American literature.

Oyeyemi passes on the question. Says she cannot understand what is being asked of her.

Enrigue effuses some more. His cup runneth over. His mouth runs, and runs and runs. It’s not unpleasant! He talks about the mastery of Oyeyemi’s plot work. Stories interconnected by symbols like skeleton keys; one door opens to another door, another door.

I feel like Borges is reading me a bedtime story. (No one in the audience asks Enrigue to compare his work to Borges.)

Oyeyemi wants to talk about fairy tales. Her favorite, she tells us, is Sleeping Beauty. She wants to explore the notion of a power inside one girl to suspend time for the whole world.

I want to hear more about the power inside one girl—I don’t know, how about the power to write a novel that blows me away, and doesn’t have to justify its existence with an impromptu PhD defense of racial constructs in all of English-language literature?

The mic is passed throughout the audience. Oyeyemi is asked, again, about racial constructs in her work. And racial constructs in all of post-colonial literature. She again falters, doesn’t know how to answer.

The event ends and we don’t really know what to think. It’s a lot to process. We also have no idea how to get back to the parking deck where we left the car. But we maybe know how to get to that artisanal cookie shop.

In line behind us, a woman of our grandparents’ generation asks us if we understand the menu. Do we have to get a half dozen cookies? She just wants one. We admit: We don’t know, this is our first time here. The lady says if she can only buy a dozen, she will steal one and run away. My sister and I agree to cause a distraction. (Turns out you can buy them individually.)

Every time my sister and I go into Philadelphia together, we get comments from women our parents’ age, or a little older. These women tell us we’re lucky we get along so well. They advise us to enjoy each other’s company. And we do, we do.

The night is over and I can say: I saw Helen Oyeyemi speak for 28 minutes and it was worth it, because it made me see once again how radical it is for many people to believe that there is power enough in one woman or girl to change, or even make their own path through, the world.

My sister and I make it through the world. Without turning on Google navigation even though we must be close to that Wawa by now and goddammit the cigarettes are all gone, a 7-11 would work, too.

Laura Eppinger graduated from Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA in 2008 with a degree in Journalism, and she’s been writing creatively ever since. She the blog editor here at Newfound Journal.

The post Two Jersey Girls Try to See Helen Oyeyemi Speak in Philadelphia appeared first on Newfound.

“What Cement is Made of” chronicles the inner city racial violence and poverty-stricken neighborhoods Donaghy grew up around. Donaghy has received awards such as the Paterson Prize for Literary Excellence for his most recent book “Start with the Trouble.” He was also awarded the Board of Regents Teaching Award from Eastern Connecticut State University where he currently teaches poetry and creative writing.

Donaghy was encouraged by his poetry professor at Kuztown University to share his work and believe in his voice, and now he encourages his students to do the same.

Taeler Kallmerten: When did you start writing poetry? Why did you choose to write poetry?

Daniel Donaghy: I didn’t start to write poetry seriously until I took Harry Humes’s poetry writing course at Kutztown.

The first poem I wrote for that class was about the tension in my father’s life, which often manifested itself as violence toward my mom. I was a struggling physics major at the time, not sure what was going to happen to me. I honestly cannot tell you why I signed up for the class. It didn’t fill any requirements or electives. I just wanted to take it, I guess.

The class after I’d turned the poem in, Harry asked me to stay after class. I thought, “Oh great. I can’t do physics. Now I can’t do poetry. Where am I headed?” After class, though, he said that he liked what was at the heart of the poem and named four or five poets (including Len Roberts, whom I think should be far more widely known) to check out if I wanted to learn how to write poems about family. I hogged Harry’s office hours for the rest of my time at Kutztown. I cannot overstate his influence on my professional and writing life.

“Why poetry?” is a good question. Over the years, I’ve come to understand that I’m addicted to the compression of a poem. I love the potency of poetry, the energy that the best poems capture and transfer in such a short space.

The poems I like most come alive when you read them aloud. You can feel the force of life behind the poet’s words. They believe what they’re saying is important and they’ve organized their words in such a way so that I feel that way, too. And when I connect with their ideas, emotions, and energy on that level, I feel less alone in the world. I feel more alive. Just like when I hear a great song. The artist taps into a vein he/she shares with me and gives me something I didn’t know I needed. I always go back to Rainer Maria Rilke, who says in his “Letters to a Young Poet” that if you don’t have to write, don’t.

I am rarely if ever compelled to remember poems that feel as though they were composed entirely in the poet’s head, that have no emotional urgency driving them. I’ve always been someone who has a lot of energy, so writing, for me, is a physical exercise. So is reading. And that physical engagement is often most intense for me when I’m reading and writing poetry.

Kallmerten: You are a professor and your past students describe you as being knowledgeable, patient, engaging, and even “awesome” in one of your reviews on Rate My Professor. One review left on the site claims to be someone who never wrote poetry before your class but now they describes themselves as a true poet. You inspire your students to create. Can you say the same for your students?

Donaghy: I can certainly say the same for my students, many of whom are far more articulate, poised, and mature than I was at their age.

Teaching poetry writing at a state school is a job that I always wanted to have. There is not one day, not half of one day, when I am not fully aware of how fortunate I am to have a position that allows me to help students, many of whom have overcome great odds to become the first person in their family to go to college, to believe in the value of their own stories and their own voices.

When I started college, I had no idea what I wanted to be, what was going to happen to me. I was this kid with a lot of energy, looking for someplace to put it. I tell my students on the first day that they may have signed up for a poetry writing or a creative writing class, but they really signed up for a voice class. We spend a lot of time talking about what that means, about understanding the difference between the language that the world imposes on us and that language each of us owns, which only we own, which no other person who ever lives will have access to. I don’t want my students to sound like me or any other writer when they write. I try to help them to sound like themselves.

Throughout the course, I keep reinforcing the mantra that that I may be their professor, but books (the books we talk about, the books they find on their own) are their teachers. We read writers with widely varying styles, and we talk all the time about reading like mechanics, like thieves, so that we can learn from great writers how to move people with our own work, how to use language and images and memories they’ve mined from their own minds and hearts.

Next, hear silence falling flat
as awning shadows

over Osage, where in every
boarded window a nail gun

still rings rifle-loud
-Daniel Donaghy

Kallmerten: Your poems reference life in Philadelphia while you were growing up, the racial conflicts, the bombing of Osage Avenue, and the eleven people who lost their lives that day. Do you feel like you are a voice for those whose city turned their backs on them?

Donaghy: I wouldn’t ever claim to be a voice for anyone but myself. I think we can get into trouble pretty quickly if we ever try to speak for anyone else.

That said, I think that I have a responsibility in my writing to bear witness to what I’ve seen and to argue in whatever way I can for social justice. Without, I hope, going on too much of a tangent (or a rant), what the city of Philadelphia did on Osage Avenue on May 13, 1985, and what it has done to the residents of that block and the surrounding neighborhood over the subsequent decades is unconscionable.

I recap the story in the poem about the day the city tried to “mobilize,” if not kill, members of an African American liberation group named MOVE (it’s not an acronym; the name is in all caps to emphasize the organization’s sense of urgency), with whom police had had many conflicts over the years, by dropping explosives on a row home that was linked to blocks of other row homes owned by residents who were completely uninvolved with MOVE. All of the houses burned down. The city, as the evidence has revealed, rebuilt those houses cheaply and shabbily then denied for years that it did so.

I was living on the other side of the city when that happened, in a mostly white, Irish-Catholic neighborhood. The fathers in my neighborhood were pretty unsympathetic to the plight of the mostly African American neighborhood that had been bombed. There was no outrage that I recall. In fact, I don’t remember much talk about it. It was around that time that I began to realize that I was being taught to be a racist by men I otherwise admired in many other respects. For a lot of reasons, I turned from their examples.

As an adult, now, I feel a strong sense of purpose to write about those experiences, to bear witness to that racism, that anger, the scary smallness of that life view, and to speak my truth about some very complicated and frightening times I have lived through.

“T-shirts, ball caps. They wait for each other
to pull on clean socks, lace their boots, then rise
together, laughing, toward their evenings.

– Daniel Donaghy

Kallmerten: What inspired you to write “What Cement is made of”?

Donaghy: I wrote that poem shortly after visiting the workplace of brother-in-law, Shawn. At the time, he was a truck dispatcher for a cement company. While I was visiting one time, he’d forgotten something at work and asked me if I wanted to come along. We had to walk through the locker room and shower area to get to where he worked. All of the details in the poem come directly from that experience.

The heart of the poem comes from what I saw growing up as men in my neighborhood, including my father, worked long, hard hours of physical labor. With Shawn’s workplace in my head, I finally had a place to situate these men collectively and individually. They came home from work five, six days a week exhausted, smelly, spent. They’d fall into the couch or out onto the front stoop or onto a stool at a corner bar for a while before did it all again the next day.

It’s an incredibly hard way to make a living. It’s no way to make a life, really, but it’s the life I was headed toward, like most of the people I grew up around. I remember my father sitting me down at the kitchen when I was 8 or 9, telling me about what it was like to be an electrician at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, how he’d wire boats for ten, twelve hours a day in any weather.

I remember that he told me, “Work with your mind. Your hands will fail you someday.” It’s like he had seen his own future; that’s what happened to him ten years later. I think about that talk with my dad a lot. It’s another moment, maybe the first moment, that put me on a path to be a teacher.

Kallmerten: Readers of ‘What Cement is Made of’ encounter racial injustices in Philadelphia, the poverty you grew up around, and about life in the Kensington neighborhood. What about these places inspired you to write about them?

Donaghy: It’s the story I have to tell. Simple as that. Each of us carries inside the story of where we come from and how we got where we are.

As we get to know new friends, we spend so much time talking what it was like where we grew up. And we’re always reminded in our present lives of someone or something from that earlier place. You grew up around some colorful people, I bet, Taeler––people who gave you, through their actions and their words, great examples of the kind of person you should grow up to be and the kind of person you should work your whole life trying not to become.

You could drive a friend up and down the streets of your hometown, I bet, and talk about what’s happened there over the years, how things have changed, what the local secrets are that no one likes to talk about. The longer we think about the houses we grew up in, about our hometowns, questions about “what was it like?” gets more and more complicated. At least they have for me. I love to be in the middle of writing a new piece in which I’m speaking to something that I thought I’d forgotten, that raises some part of my past from the dead so that I can wrestle with it again, maybe make some sense of it, some art out of it, maybe bring people back to life and let them have their say.

Kallmerten: What are you working on next?

Donaghy: I’m finishing up the third of a trilogy of book-length poetry collections about life in the inner city. Many of the poems from the chapbook manuscript I entered in to the Anzaldúa Poetry Prize is from that collection. This project has led me to do more research that I’d done previously. It includes poems triggered by memories as well by current events, which, where I’m from, have been pretty harrowing. This project also has led me to work in a variety of forms that I hadn’t tried before. I also have a short story manuscript that I keep coming back to––sometimes I start writing a poem and it turns into a story. When that happens, I just go with it. And I’d really like to publish a novel.
 

Taeler Kallmerten, Staff Writer

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