10TH ANNUAL (AND FINAL) POETRY MONTH SERIES :: SPECIAL PREVIEW & REN WILSON on JUNE JORDAN
“Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.” — June Jordan
A Message from the Founder / Creative Director
Dear Friends: The OS’s Poetry Month series has long exemplified our core principles of open access and joyful, permission-granting engagement with craft, celebrating and amplifying our influences and processes as *invitation.* There is no one you “should have” heard of, no right way to be a creative person influenced by or working with poetry, no one path through or into engagement with language. It began actually as a project on my own old blog and evolved here through years of my curation then guest curation, all of which are archived and freely accessible here.
This year, the series’ 10th (!), felt right to be its last: as the OS and our relationship to publishing and language evolves, this chapter was ready to close. It also feels right to have four brilliant community members as curators this year, bringing their own networks in to amplify and celebrate poetry in this time of profound change: Caits Meissner, Ellen Samuels, JP Howard, and Kate Hedeen, highlighting social justice and prison writing, poets with disabilities, and translation.
Assisting with the series coordination for this year is our intern / systems sorceress from the City Colleges of Chicago, Ren Wilson. We asked Ren to write up their own piece, as a preview to this year’s final series, and so here you’ll find their reflections on the series and on June Jordan.
Thank you for joining us on this journey of celebration and inspiration. ONWARD
In Solidarity and Possibility
Elæ Moss
March 2021
REN WILSON ON JUNE JORDAN : A SERIES PREVIEW
Lucky for all of us, The Operating System has doused the internet with 10 years worth of truth via Poetry Month, and here are two that resonated with me:
NATASHA HERRING on NTOZAKE SHANGE (9th Annual NaPoMo)
JESSICA FISCHOFF on LEONARD COHEN (8th Annual NaPoMo)
These two NaPoMo entries struck me mainly because both of them detail how a series of unintentional and innocent events (I would say divine intervention) led both of these authors to discovering each of the poets they chose to write about.
Stories and dissections like these never cease to make me smile: smile because I have my own versions of them, smile because I know everyone does, smile because there are people everyday experiencing new and unique yet universal contrivances.
Not toting a higher educational background in poetry, Elæ came up with the idea to start a digitally perennial expression of those intimate moments wherein we share our new, old, or otherwise universal contrivances of the poetic variety, and VOILA! Poetry Month was born. And how apropos that we get to engorge ourselves in the creative soup of so many amazing curators and strangers from the comfort of our own homes and devices, much like we do with our friends and loved ones after dinner or after midnight.
This year’s digital kiki begins much like the last few years: with four curators assigned one week in April to pass the mic to contributors gathered from their own networks, each of whom then highlights a specific poet who has inspired them in ways we won’t know until April. It’s bittersweet to be closing such an electrifying and long-running chapter of The Operating System, but all good things must come to an end! For this years curators, I’m sure it’s a hot and heavy torch to carry being the ones to close out this stage, but this final year of Poetry Month lands at a time when I think we need it most; nestled in at the tail-end of a tumultuous, and honestly terrifying, year. Now more than ever, the collective unconscious has been faced with the stunning reality of what we want, what we need, what we deserve, and for most of us, radical healing (in whatever form) tops that list. That first step towards acknowledging the healing that needs to be done is a form of healing in itself! And here at The Operating System, along with everyone who has ever graced Poetry Month, I would garner to say that a lot of us have connected some of the dots of our own deliverance through the words and vulnerability of our poetic predecessors.
As a yoga teacher and trumpet player, the breath is cardinal to my every decision; the rhythm of it, the fierceness, the decline. As one of those, “Everything’s connected, man” people, I vehemently strive to connect the dots of all of my modalities- sometimes to a fault- and for me that means vehemently checking for life’s pulse. In Hindu it’s called Prana; in Chinese philosophy it’s called Qi and it is the vital energetic life force, the heartbeat found in every corner of the universe. It flows within you and without you. It may influence you, but it doesn’t control you. Once the first quarantine started, I promised myself that I would read at least 3 poems a day, everyday. Some days I waxed and waned, but over the course of the last 339 days I have discovered an immeasurable amount of poetry that moves and has moved me, but one particular poem has buzzed in my eardrums every single day since reading it almost a year ago.
And if I
if I ever let love go
because the hatred and the whisperings
become a phantom dictate I o-
bey in lieu of impulse and realities
(the blossoming flamingos of my
wild mimosa trees)
then let love freeze me
out.
The inimitable June Jordan and her poem “I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies,” tops my list as one of the grooviest and most electric poems I read last year and have ever read in all my 24 years of life. The poem, still fresh and preheating in my mind, soon became fully baked and adequately topical to the start of last summer’s protests in honor of Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, George Floyd, and Ahmaud Arbery.
I plan to blossom bloody on an afternoon
surrounded by my comrades singing
terrible revenge in merciless
accelerating
rhythms
June’s words rattled inside my head during the Grant Park Insurrection here in Chicago as I was maced and battered by cops, and while I was nursed and nourished by my own comrades in the midst of our own bloody afternoon. These words inspired my devotion to mutual aid and community care in ways that were still incubating prior to the pandemic. I remember looking at myself in the mirror last summer after reading about Elijah McClain and thinking, as a disobedient black femme with Aspergers, when am I next? It was that moment I decided that whatever codeswitching, whatever masking I think I’ve mastered won’t be enough to save me, only mollify my quality of life before it’s taken from me for forgetting to camouflage one day. It was that moment I decided to no longer “lightly walk behind
a one of you who fear me.”
This poem was the defibrillator of my 2020.
