Rob Casper Presents a Poem by Lenard D. Moore

Last week I featured Matthew Zapruder's poem "Mind the Gap" from the first issue of jubilat -- for this week's post I've picked a poem from our forthcoming issue, due out next month. When asked about their magazine's aesthetic, many editors talk of featuring the best in established and emerging poets, regardless of school, reputation, region, etc. etc. Some just simply say they publish the best-quality work they receive. Such responses do a disservice to the job of the editor, which is to edit! And the only thing magazines add to our literary culture is the way in which its selections (of poets published in other magazines) present a unique vision of poetry. But not a static one -- to me, each issue of jubilat is as an argument about the art as impassioned and dynamic as it is surprising and sometimes even contradictory.

It is with that last point in mind that I come to Lenard D. Moore's "Black Poet Writes His Wife." Simply put, it's not the kind of poem that fits neatly into our magazine. The poems we publish tend to push syntax and/or structure much further than it does, and also tend to exist in a more imaginary space/world. By contrast, Moore employs the epistolary form in the most direct way possible -- salutation and signature included. The subject of the poem, a brief, sweet note from husband to wife, is seemingly ordinary, and its first two lines, "I arrived almost lunchtime / at the Hartford/Springfield Airport" couldn't be more pedestrian. And yet, what follows is as lively, and at the same time subtle, as anything in jubilat. This same contrast is true, too, of the way the poem celebrates Blackness -- "Black" is, after all, the first word we read, and it defines the speaker. And yet, I find the way the poem touches upon race truly beautiful, and beautifully true. "Black Poet Writes His Wife" is firmly grounded in the "real" world (and, in making reference to its writing, seeks to undermine its own artifice), but in a refreshing way: the speaker infuses all he observes and remembers with a lyric charge that makes the poem all the more sincere. It feels to me, therefore, more intimate, more compelling than other poems than begin in a place so known. 

Does this mean that it's a "jubilat" poem? No -- if I had one poem to serve as an example of what we look for, this would not be it. Still, there's something about "Black Poet Writes His Wife" that would strongly connect to such an example -- maybe its spirit, its deftness, its discoveries. But I'm still mystified by it. And as proud as possible to have it in our pages.

-- Rob Casper

BLACK POET WRITES HIS WIFE,

Dear Elizabeth,

I arrived almost lunchtime
at the Hartford/Springfield Airport.
When I stepped outside
the temperature felt half
what your fever was.
It was the first time
this traveling year
that chill cut clean
to my black man bones.
It wasn’t too long
before random rain started
messing with my head
as if I were a canvas
out in the drizzled weather.
The sun hasn’t seen me
nor have I seen it—
just a simple sky all day.
This fall foliage is jumping
like the juke joints
I used to tell you about,
the ones where my sister and I
won chicken sandwiches dancing
against anybody who dared
while bass bossed the walls, 
I wish you could see this town,
all red, yellow, orange.
Please don’t worry.
I am taking myself back
to Raleigh, in four days—
your birthday, our anniversary.
Well, I got to write a poem now.
Keep that sugar all bottled up
like that molasses
I told you I grew up on.
I know I’ll dream you here
as sure as your skin is brown.

Your husband,
George

-- Lenard D. Moore