In time, she says, her work became more urgent, more honest. “I don’t think necessarily my practice changed, but my purpose did.” Similar to the erasure texts, which are a reflection of two merged interiors, the shape poems take the form of the subject matter - a whale, a vessel, a face mask, a planet.Īlthough her words may have come in their own time, Gorman showed up, no matter what. Gorman uses form as prism - both as mirror and as window. I found that approach fascinating, and so when I came across Corporal Plummer’s diaries, digitized by the National Museum of African American History and Culture, I thought it would be an interesting way to have a conversation back and forth with time.” “I remember reading “DMZ Colony” by Don Mee Choi, in which she kind of imagined what diary entries would look like for Korean children who’d grown up during the War. “It just took me a little bit of time to figure out what text worked and for what moment.” “When I first started writing this, I knew that I wanted in some way, shape or form to engage with historical text,” she says. Gorman leans into Plummer’s “clear-cut” prose, documenting war and the dawning edges of the 1918 influenza outbreak. Gorman explains that Plummer served in France in Company C of the 506th Engineer Battalion, which built roads and fortifications and conducted other manual labor. Army corporal named Roy Underwood Plummer. In this fashion, what’s revealed “is not necessarily solely by me.” An exquisite example is Gorman’s interaction with the century-old journal of a Black U.S. Interacting with older texts and rubbing away to unearth new themes was a way to have conversations over time. It is, she writes, an accounting - “the poet’s diagnosis” - of what we bear. “It’s what eventually became the poem that starts the book, called ‘Ship’s Manifest.’” “When I first started writing it, I tried to lay out a manifesto of what I wanted to at least attempt to do,” Gorman says, “which is to try to poeticize the experience of the last two and a half years - the pandemic and everything else in the world that manifests.”Ĭorralling stray thoughts, she opened her iPhone and tapped fragments, images and questions into the Notes app. She responded to the uncertainties of the pandemic, churning political unrest and a painful racial reckoning by reaching for varying forms of verse - erasure poems, shape poems and interrogations of captivating archival finds - that open up the page and the mind. “ Call Us What We Carry,” the April selection of the Los Angeles Times Book Club, is an elegy to that lost time and the fragility of language, when emotions had not quite caught up with thought or action.
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