[I discovered this post in my website’s drafts . . . which makes it seem a bit dated, if not for the fact that I returned to Pat Parker this morning while mired in editing. And so I am sharing the unfinished draft in the hopes that this very unfinishedness adds another dimension to the original drift . . .]

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As Israeli’s Right-wing regime shuts down Al Jazeera offices and uses its power to further limit free speech and reporting on the part of those bearing witness to war crimes, I keep trying to parse the utter absurdity of PEN America's refusal to demand a ceasefire in Gaza, a refusal that the board justifies on the basis of not wanting to "be political."

—As if defending the books of LGBTQ authors in Alabama against banning isn't political.

—As if the panel PEN America generously funded in Birmingham, Alabama on bodily autonomy and the criminalization of abortion in my home state wasn't flagrantly political, from the panelists, themselves, to the location of this event at Burdock Book Collective.

PEN International was formed to advocate for political dissidents in 1921—that was the immediate impetus, to protect writers from carceral states that sought to imprison them and limit their speech for political reasons. The PEN International Charter was approved at the 1948 Copenhagen Congress. The original language of the Charter has always been interpreted as a demand for activism, as PEN notes on its website: “We hold meetings with key decision makers to secure legislative and policy change. We work with national governments, regional human rights bodies and international organisations. We submit reports and recommendations, including submissions to the Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review.” Annual resolutions evidence the calling-out and naming of nation-states currently involved in gross crimes against human freedom and speech.

If literature weren’t political, PEN America would have no reason to exist.

The Vice President of PEN America, Dinaw Mengetsu, said as much. And so I return to poetry—between deadlines and failures—to remind myself, briefly, that the powerful (including the highly-educated staffers surrounding Joe Biden) fear justice and social change more than they fear catastrophe. Many of them would rather promote catastrophe through legislation, as with the mind-boggling “no red lines” support of Israel and the billions of dollars given to corporations fueling climate change, than imagine a world that refuses this.

The US government funds a genocide and arrests student protestors for refusing to go along with it. The problem is that the protestors can imagine a world without genocide, and this is unbearable to the national-security statists.

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Poetry also does this work of imagining the impossible. Poetry carries protest beneath its skirt, tucked into its back pocket, buried beneath the closed eyes of an elegy.

Poetry imagines the impossible because the world that we have been given remains intolerable.

Intolerable: this neoliberal air-conditioned nightmare run by the cynical billionaires whose dark money determines US electoral outcomes.

Intolerable: this pageant of cowards in business attire, engorged bylines dripping from their mouths, and resumes so rich that ones needs an antacid to even glance at them.

Intolerable: the paucity of thought in the lives of these ‘thought leaders,’ and the absence of self-consciousness, an awareness of their own thoughtlessness, and a conscience that makes getting things wrong more important than defending their over-published egos.

The intolerables stack and no think-piece can touch the mess in my head; no directive or slogan can settle the ghosts of Gaza’s children, whose lives have been torn from them as the Western superpowers watch and mumble platitudes about “well, if Hamas hadn’t done it what it did, then all these innocent children would haven’t to be dead. . .”

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Yesterday, I found myself returning to one of Pat Parker’s poems for guidance. A simple poem about love. A poem that does love rather than smother it with roses and ornaments.

Pat Parker knew that poetry was political. She knew what she knew as a Black lesbian-feminist poet and performer. She stood on those stages and spoke her body into those poems to deny the neutrality of white liberals. She did not exist to console or comfort the politically-powerful.

Child of Myself, Parker’s debut poetry collection, was published in 1972, and gave us a series of poems that refused to abandon the child in herself that had been abandoned by family. Like countless poets from Rainer Rilke Rilke to Diane Di Prima, Parker needed to change her life in order to be able to write. And she did so repeatedly, moving back and forth between poetry, activism, and family, attempting to unite these things rather than find herself continuously divided by them.

[When she died, Parker was survived by her partner of nine years, Martha (“Marty”) Dunham, and their daughter, Anastasia Dunham-Parker-Brady, as well as the daughter she co-parented, Cassidy Brown.]

Personal experience served as the basis for Parker’s knowledge. She married playwright Ed Bullins in 1962, and spent four years “scared to death,” in her own words. Then she married writer and publisher Robert F. Parker, with whom she had two children. The two agreed to a divorce, since Parker felt trapped by heterosexual marriage.

She had her first reading of her poetry in 1963. Her style is hopeful and tender, yet often marked by sharp social commentary grounded in spoken word tradition and radical politics. By the late 1960s, Parker identified as lesbian and played a prominent civil rights activist in the Bay Area. 

In 1976, Parker’s sister, Shirley Jones, was murdered by her husband and his gun. Parker’s autobiographical Womanslaughter (1978) spoke into the grief and fury.

The Black Panther Party radicalized Parker. Determined to live as herself, a Black lesbian woman and a poet who made no distinction between the lyric and the pamphlet in her struggles for gender, racial, and sexual equality. As Jeffrey Davies has written:

Among her most provocative and subversive poetry of the time period was a 1978 poem entitled “For Willyce,” which describes a session of lesbian lovemaking and famously ends with the lines, “here it is, some dude’s / getting credit for what / a woman / has done, / again.”

Throughout the 1970s, Parker strengthened her craft by continuing to write rebellious poetry and teaching creative writing workshops. She also began healing past trauma through her work, including the murder of her sister at the hands of her ex-husband by way of the poem “Woman Slaughter.” It was these personal instances of violence at the hands of men, which had occurred throughout her entire life, that fueled the poet to further the fight for women’s rights and equality.

On November 13, 1985, Pat Parker, who was working as an administrator at the Oakland Feminist Women’s Health Center, sat down and wrote the following in a letter to Audre Lorde, with whom she had shared a close (often epistolary) friendship since the two first met in 1969:

I informed the women at the Health Center that I am leaving effective January 1st. I am going to come home to my machine and do what I’ve always wanted. Write. I’ve talked this over and over with Marty and she is being absolutely wonderful and supportive. She’s helping me compile a mailing list to try and get readings to supplement my income and we’ve worked out a budget and looked at where we can cut back and cut out and off to make it, so that the pressure of earning money isn’t so great that I have to spend all my time hustling gigs and still not get the writing done.

Intolerable: the way white supremacy has evolved into the meritocracy of exemplarity groomed by neoliberal ideology.

Intolerable: the way those merits get listed on resumes and collected for value.

Intolerable: neoliberalism’s biopower-driven regulation of relationships between humans, and how the gatekeeping of gender is now part of that regulatory function.

“To have an African American body, a queer body, a female body, means that you live an interior life but also an exterior life, one that may be on guard constantly, even in crisis," Kazim Ali said once, in reference to political poetry and to Pat Parker's poetry, more specifically. "It is frightening to me that we live with a madness, that we continue to move through our lives as if these and more were normal occurrences," Pat Parker said in an interview. The normalization of this endless crisis and the pseudo-solutions offered by Wellness Industrialists is galling precisely because the personal and the political are not oppositional. The personal and political are not separate boxes. Love for others is not separate from love for the world.

Despite neoliberalism, amor mundi is relational, as a hope for loved ones that mingles with hope for the world.

"I come cloudy," Parker confesses in a shimmering poem titled "Love Isn't”.

The title prepares us for an inventory poem, a list of things that love is not, but Parker has different plans. She moves against this expectation into a visceral tenderness that could be addressed to a lover:

I wish I could be
the lover you want
come joyful
bear brightness
like summer sun

As a Black lesbian-feminist poet and performer, Parker lays the world she wishes for against the world she is given. The next stanza opens with a turn, an "Instead" that mentions the unsunny things she brings: "I bring pregnant women / with no money"; "bring angry comrades / with no shelter"; bring difficulty; bring those abandoned and harmed by the world. *

Structured in nine stanzas that move from expressing what the speaker wishes to what the speaker does, the poem is shaped to speak loosely to the ancient rhetorical form known as the apologia. The first seven stanzas create this gorgeously structured form of alternating anaphora:

I wish I could be
Instead
I wish I could take you
Instead
I wish I could take you
Instead
I wish I could be

Within these stanzas, Parker repeats the verbs "bring" and "come," adding a litany of possible disappointments: 

I come rage
bring city streets 
with wine and blood
bring cops and guns
with dead bodies and prison

"I come sad," the speaker admits. 

Then, the eighth stanza changes course. Here, in a simple couplet, the poem breaks free from the anaphora to make an intimate (and fairly abstracted) claim:

All I can give
is my love.

The final stanza winds this simple claim into a larger portrait of what it means to love, and what this commits the poet to doing and feeling, Parker uses a new verb, a verb associated with nurture and tending and tenderness. To love is to "care for":

I care for you
I care for our world
if I stop
caring about one
it would be only
a matter of time
before I stop
loving
the other.

Everything hinges on the sudden appearance of the conditional here—-if I stop—and this conditional injects the numinousness of counterfactual into the solid, the constructed, the heavy builtness of the made world.

"Poetry should allow others to wonder at explosions," Jenny Boully has written. Poetry should permit us to imagine the explosions of the buildings and shelters that cannot sustain us. The ‘Us’ is always there in the other. The poem’s other lures the poet from the I’s corset. Today, it helped me to listen to Pat Parker reading “My Lover Is a Woman” —