“Blurred Vision” (Mahogany L. Browne)
This week’s video comes to us from CUPSI 2015. Here is Mahogany Browne’s “Blurred Vision.”
Any poetry slam worth its weight in whiteboards will have a smattering of persona poems, wherein the poet tells a story in the first person as someone other than themselves. Done well: these are some of my favorite, but they are quite difficult to do well. There’s a…delicate balance between poem and dramatic monologue, and I tend to find that the current trend in performance poetry tends to fall on the side of the latter. But Mo Browne - in true Mo Browne fashion - delivers here a flawless narrative as an unnamed dark skinned girl that is among my favorite persona poems.
Let me say first what it does not do: It does not rely on an accent or visible change in posture to make itself work. It does not impose poetic device onto the speech of a character that would not speak in that way. It does not fall into easy tropes about our perceptions of who this character is. Which is to say that we are convinced in this moment that Mo is this young girl, in this moment, telling the story of LeeLee and Curtis as it is happening. We believe that everything Mo offers is in fact something that this girl would say or did think at one point, and the poet’s job in this moment was just to take those phrases and arrange them beautifully. We see her confidence and insecurity, her love for her friend and her heartbreak all at the same time. We see an entire person - not a caricature or stereotype - which should be one of the goals of any good persona poem.
Can I also get into how this poem is about colorism, microaggressions, self-image, and internalized hatred without once proclaiming itself to be about those things? Swoon. I do not even begin to suggest that poems that do declare themselves in that way are somehow less than, but there is something gorgeous here in just following this girl at a pool party, without Mo inserting her “poet-self” into the poem to explain to the audience the larger themes that the main character is struggling with. In that way, the entire audience is able to find their own connections to the character, instead of only relating to the more obvious group for which the poem might have been intended. You don’t have to be a dark-skinned brown girl to know what it’s like to have someone else affirm something about yourself that you find ugly. Or to have a LeeLee. Or to want to disappear sometimes.Everyone is able to find themselves here.
And finally….I lived for the vocal accompaniment to the poem.
Rule number one for poets who are also singers: Just because you can sing, doesn’t mean that you should sing. If you do choose to sing at the beginning or end (or…for whatever reason…the middle) of the poem, it should be because the song selection edifies the piece.
New rule number one: If the poem is not clearly better because you are singing, then please, don’t sing. The song delivered here sets the tone for the piece at the beginning, provides subtle rhythm and pacing cues for the poem as it continues, and then gives the audience time to breathe and reflect at the end. And, while the poem is capable of standing without the singer, it is clearly enhanced by the song’s addition, without being overpowered by it.
Ok - last rule number one: If the best thing about your poem is the song that you sing at the end of it…then….well…write a new poem.
Alright. Obviously one of my favorites from Ms. Browne, whom you can check in with here. For another of her dynamic pieces on Button, check out “This…This” here. For another piece on the nuances of colorism, try “Team Light Skinned” here. And, if after all that you still need more poems, here is a gorgeous poem from Rachel Wiley that I probs should have listed in the Thanksgiving Edition.
See you next week.
-Ashley
