Forefather
for David Drake,enslaved potter-poetfrom Edgefield, SC
When the landscape does not bear black bloomsI reach my arms back for onewho flares with instruction.Read what he wrote on Edgefield pots:"This is a noble churn /fill it up it will never turn."From my childhood homea mere seventy-three miles' ragged stretchfrom Piedmont to Edgefield separates us,I make him out through one hundred and fifty-five yearsthrough the muck and the fog of pale deceit.I let my fingers touch his clay brilliance.See him, a solid figure, a South Carolina son,a Literary Father with no daguerreotype.I conjure his visagein both verse and vessel.Through the whorls of his fingerprintsI walk along the loops and ridges,Sit between the lines of his etched couplets.Press ear to the hum of hardened clay.Hear him say, "Empty yourself.Pry these tight spaces open.Listen to the mountains and valleysI withstood."
Feature Date
- June 29, 2023
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Subjective Units of Distress from The Listening Skin (c) 2022 by Glenis Redmond.
Appears with permission of Four Way Books.
All rights reserved.
Poem previously appeared in Praise Songs for Dave the Potter, Art by Jonathan Green, and Poetry by Glenis Redmond (University of Georgia Press)
Glenis Redmond is the First Poet Laureate of Greenville, South Carolina. She is a Kennedy Center Teaching Artist, and a Cave Canem alumni. She has authored six books of poetry: Backbone (Underground Epics, 2000), Under the Sun (Main Street Rag, 2002), and What My Hand Say (Press 53, 2016), Listening Skin (Four Way Books), Three Harriets & Others (Finishing Line Press), and Praise Songs for Dave the Potter, Art by Jonathan Green, and Poetry by Glenis Redmond (University of Georgia Press). Glenis received the highest arts award in South Carolina, the Governor’s Award and was inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors. She is a “Charlie Award” recipient awarded by the Carolina Mountains Literary Festival and was recently a recipient of the Peacemaker Award by the Upstate Mediation Center in 2022. Her latest book, The Listening Skin has been long listed for the Julie Suk Award and the Pen America Open Book Award.
"When a voice ripens into full measure it is a moment to celebrate, and it was a feeling I couldn’t shake as I read Glenis Redmond’s superb and powerful new book The Listening Skin. Her poems are finely rendered daguerreotypes of histories entwined, of silences ended. Redmond often uses the image of flight here, and I couldn’t agree more; The Listening Skin has that certainty of lift, of knowing of how and when to turn once wing touches wind. The fuse that tells the bud now tells us that we are in the presence of a poet who has unfurled her finest moment."
—Cornelius Eady
"Its first language was scratched from the land. A powerful, generous, and wise collection. The Listening Skin is an archeological tool that excavated my history, my longing, and my joy. Now I know I can read the sky. These poems will forever walk with me into the next life and the next and the next… Lifegiving, Joyous, Essential!"
—Cheryl Boyce-Taylor
"In The Listening Skin, Glenis Redmond returns to the ancestors and the deep knowing that comes from being ever ready to receive the wisdom they give us. She plants us again in the South Carolinian soil and reaches across decades and continents back to the motherland for historical context, for truth, and for healing. She does not flinch from racism nor the complexities of what it means to carry trauma inside the Black body. These poems are beautifully rendered but don't shrink. I am grateful for the depth and breadth of the music and the keen use of the line in this collection but mostly I'm taken by the way Glenis holds us up to the light. In her sure hands we shine!"
—Crystal Wilkinson
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