I always have problems answering the question of what poet or poets most influence me. In what way? In what period of my life? Living or ancestor? Yet when one of them passes I am deeply aware of how profound their influence was and is. Mari Evans is one such poet. A leading poet of the Black Arts Movement, an activist, a teacher, a writer of theater and creative essays, a performance artist, Mari Evans with a constant steady hand left her mark on many of us. She lived 93 years passing this weekend with a headline and worthy story noting her as an Indianapolis poet with a legacy of social justice.True, but she was far more than a poet from or for Indianapolis. Her good words and good works crossed oceans and climbed mountains and circled the planet.
Her work is deep and wide, precise and compelling with music and rhythms, history and spirit, resistance and affirmation throughout. I taught her poems for years and have returned to them over the years to keep myself honest, to make sure I remember that balance between imagery and clarity, layered meanings and accessibility, history and the timeless.
“One hears silence screaming in clarion tones.”
The Poetry Foundation has a nice write up on her. In it they quote at length from her essay which spoke to the poet’s greatest responsibility, perhaps the largest responsibility of all of us, the need to learn to listen well. In “How We Speak,” published in Clarity as Concept she wrote, “Listening is a special art. It is a fine art developed by practice. One hears the unexpressed as clearly as if it had been verbalized. One hears silence screaming in clarion tones.”
The first poem of hers I discovered, while in college, was I Am a Black Woman written at a time when we were building broader definitions of what it meant to be woman and Black. History and spirit abounded in this praise poem which begins:
I am a black woman
the music of my song
some sweet arpeggio of tears
is written in a minor key
and I
can be heard humming in the night
Can be heard
humming
in the night
Where Have You Gone took away the idea that love poems need be sappy and showed me how to center on the other, the good, the bad, the real. No bubblegum pop tunes in this poem which ends:
where have you gone
with your confident
walk your
crooked smile the
rent money
in one pocket and
my heart
in another . . .
And I think we can trust that she lived what she wrote in If There Be Sorrow avoiding these causes of sorrow
If there be sorrow
let it be
for things undone . . .
undreamed
unrealized
unattained…
As Mari Evans passes on, passes over I celebrate her life and work and am thankful that she has always been a part of the poetry bridge that helped me cross rivers and gorges and has kept me stretching upwards working harder to listen well and remember, speak with care, and write with heart.