B. Brooklyn, United States
Hello! My friend recently passed away after after a battle with cancer. He was a good egg and a close friend. I’d like to read a poem that celebrates our friendship at his memorial service. Thank you
M.N:
First off, Brian, I am so very sorry to hear about your friend. The phrase “my condolences” always feels so hollow, and we all want a vocabulary that will sound more full of care at moments like these. Suggesting a poem to read doesn’t feel quite right to me, as that’s such a deeply personal choice at moments like this. But there are some online compendiums of poems for just this purpose, and this one includes what might be my first choice, Audre Lorde’s “Holy Sonnets: Death be not proud,” especially with that powerful closing couplet.
But as I don’t know you or your dear friend, I hope you don’t mind a non-direct answer to your question. I’d like to suggest a book and a recording that have always seemed to me, when I’ve been faced with one of those horrendous moments that life dishes out, to buoy my emotions, open space for sadness and joy, hold understanding with the unable to be understood, give weight and lightness to the emotional landscape such life events create inside and around us.
For the book, I’ll pull Kamau Brathwaite’s Zea Mexican Diary off my shelf, a book in which the author chronicles the death of his wife, Doris, in Brathwaite’s signature Sycorax video-style font. Since the Sycorax style is hard to recreate with standard fonts, here’s a screenshot of just one passage, from section “XI: The Tulip Tree,” about a ceremonial tree planting in honor of Doris Brathwaite’s life, to give you a sense of Kamau’s use of white space and his ever-shifting fonts:
Zea Mexican Diary rushes across its pages like a tidal wave of grief, one person’s trying, impossibly, to cope with the loss of their nearest and dearest; the pages swim, drown, struggle to stay afloat, stay readable to a reader who cannot yet is maybe just barely beginning to imagine so much grief, so much loss, so much uncertainty, so much missing where a life had just a few days or weeks ago been lived, lived together, and now all that exists is emptiness, reverberation, space. What remains of Doris, to Brathwaite’s most resonant ear, is this: “Her stem… singing.”Playlist for this Question: When I try to imagine an album that chronicles every imaginable emotion, that range of rage and sorrow and joy and love and (lost & rediscovered) hope we feel at moments like these, I’m hard pressed to name one that’s better than Art Ensemble of Chicago’s Bap-Tizum which is, for me, one of the essential albums of the breadth and depths of the human condition in all its torrid variations. A live album recorded at Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival in 1972 (and released the following year as the ensemble’s first major label release on Atlantic Records), Bap-Tizum is the record I had on infinite loop as I was writing “SPRING,” a long abecedarian prose poem on white nationalism and the mass killing at Tops Friendly Market in my hometown of Buffalo, NY on May 14, 2022. Bap-Tizum just encompassed the multitudes that coursed within me as I watched video footage, read back issues of The Buffalo News from the weeks after this horrific moment, drove down the cul-de-sac where the racist shooter lived and drove by the gun shops where he bought his weapons and ammo, visited the memorial for the families and community on Buffalo’s East Side. I felt like, on each repeated play, I discovered something new on the album about the internal workings of the human soul. That’s a big ask for music which more frequently fits a particular mood/moment, and it might be a very different album for you and for readers of this letter. But for me, that moment of musical birth and rebirth created by Lester Bowie (trumpet, percussion instruments), Malachi Favors Maghostut (bass, percussion instruments, vocals), Joseph Jarman (saxophones, clarinets, percussion instruments), Roscoe Mitchell (saxophones, clarinets, flute, percussion instruments), and Don Moye (drums, percussion), performed live on stage at the Otis Spann Memorial Field in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1972, was the album that most deeply spoke to me when I needed it. I hope this or another album will be your necessary music for right now and for tomorrow and for the days after tomorrow, too.
