Mining Black history
On two docu-poetry collections

Black Bell
Alison C. Rollins
Copper Canyon Press 2024, 136 pages, $22.00, ISBN 9781556597008
Every Hard Sweetness
Sheila Carter-Jones
BOA Editions 2024, 134 pages, $19.00, ISBN 9781960145123
“Documentary poetics is often lauded for its ability to articulate social injustices and advocate for civil rights,” writes award-winning poet Craig Santos Perez.[1] Two poetry collections published last year harness this ability and mine the African American archive to shine a light on evidence of past injustices in the hopes of a better future. While docu-poetry isn’t new, these women’s work exposes the sinister — and sometimes bizarre — tools of America’s white supremacy in a powerful way.
Alison C. Rollins’ Black Bell and Sheila Carter-Jones’ Every Hard Sweetness, both published in April 2024, do the hard work of bringing historical wrongs to the surface, and they do it with style. It’s hard not to read them with a sense of sadness, but also some hope that the arc of history will bend toward justice.
Black Bell (Copper Canyon Press, 2024)
Rollins pays tribute in Black Bell — published by Copper Canyon Press — to a range of African American figures from former slaves like Phillis Wheatley and Henry “Box” Brown to Malcolm X and a poem series inspired by the Wu-Tang Clan. She employs historical drawings, clippings, and pictures, including the cover photo of an elaborate device of a bell-tree affixed to the head to prevent slaves from running away, to verify and reinforce her verse.
The first three poems set the tone for Black Bell with a concrete poem in the shape of a bell, a poem consisting of two archival images from the antebellum South, and the first of four title poems, one in each section, inspired by a picture of a Black woman capped with the iron bell-tree. The first poem, “A Bell is a Messenger of Time,” begins a pattern of instructions before some poems in lieu of an epigraph: “*To be performed with bells on. All ‘reading’ is performance, some performance is ‘reading.’” Rollins makes clear that her work is meant to be experienced as much as read.
“The Art of Dancing Explained by Reading Female Figures” is the first of numerous titled pictures; this one is from the autobiography of escaped slave Moses Roper, published in 1838. In the picture, a black woman uses a long tool while wearing a bell-tree, which seems to sprout from her head like ridiculous horns. The accompanying caption hardly needs to explain that the woman’s horns serve “to keep her from running away.” The poem’s title plays on the title of a juxtaposed image, on the following page, that shows a line of musical notes over a white woman — encumbered by no bells, only by a large, beautiful dress — entitled, “The Art of Dancing Explained by Reading and Figures.”
Rollins notes that the series of four “Black Bell” poems serve as a “tribute to the woman” in the “Woman with Iron Horns and Bells On.” She goes on: “This series is designed to send messages, as one makes their way through the book, from the earth out into the universe.” In this spirit, these and other poems contain epigraphs, such as, “A bell’s dome represents the whole universe, the flat bottom represents the earth, and the hollow inside represents the space between the rest of the universe and the earth. When you strike a bell it sends a message from Earth out into the universe.” This is followed by the instruction to “strike a bell tuned to F, the note connected to the heart chakra” before reading that poem.
“Music figures prominently in the collection,” Rollins told Poets & Writers Magazine, explaining allusions and appropriations from the music world, “and I knew that I would have one section regarding the seasons open with a Stevie Wonder quote and another section with a Sun Ra quote.”[2]
The care Rollins put into this collection can be seen in six full pages of endnotes. Mixing the contemporary with the historical, Rollins provides detailed citations of photos and clippings used, poems written after admired poets like Monica Youn and Robert Hayden, and borrowed lines from sources as varied as Thomas Jefferson and Spike Lee’s movie, Malcolm X.
“Phillis Wheatley Takes Turing Test” invokes artificial intelligence, taking the form of questions and answers over six pages. The questions, an epigraph notes, are intended to be read by an AI voice with a human responding aloud with the answer. Rollins notes that the concept owes a poetic debt to Franny Choi and the answers were adapted from poetry by Antonio Porchia and Margaret Atwood and a 2003 New Yorker article on Wheatley by Henry Louis Gates Jr., among other sources.
Some of the more interesting responses come from loaded questions such as, “Are you white?” The response comes,
Whatever supremacy
governs this moment
is the tool by which
we color our threat.
The response to “What does a normal day look like for you?” consists of five lines using only the words “stressed” and “unstressed,” in a way corresponding to dactylic, spondaic, trochaic, iambic, and anapestic metrical feet. To the existential question “Are you real?” faux Phillis responds with an ambiguous answer:
As real as time, as the border
of one country from another,
as the poison in Socrates’s cup,
as every toy’s right to break.
The poem’s last question brings the story into focus. “Have you only told the truth?” the prompt asks. To which Phillis responds enigmatically, “I know what I have said. / I do not know what you have heard.”
While Rollins references a number of freed slaves who wrote their stories — including Wheatley, who wrote poetry and was freed after she published her first remarkable book, an elegy for Dred Scott, and an epigraph from Moses Roper’s Narrative written after escaping slavery — she gives a special place to Henry “Box” Brown. After earning his nickname by having himself shipped in a 3 x 2.5 foot wooden crate from his master’s plantation in Virginia to the leader of the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society, James Miller McKim, Brown went on to tell his story.[3]
The only known picture of Henry Brown — a contemporary political cartoon — is featured under the title of “The Body Face Up” showing a (partially fictional) tableau of the newly freed slave emerging from his crate to sing a prepared hymn. Rollins uses a historical broadside from 1849 detailing Brown’s exploits — found in the John Hay Library at Brown University where she earned her graduate degree — for the poem titled “Hymn of Thanksgiving.”
Rollins goes further than mining the historical archive — including scouring her own email account from her time at Brown — in a poem called “For Henry “Box” Brown, from Alison “Inbox” @ Brown.” The poem begins with four lines recounting how in 1849, Brown “shipped himself from Richmond to Philadelphia / in a crate lined with a coarse woolen cloth.” It goes on, over five pages of brief stanzas, to compare Brown’s escape to “[172 years later]” when “Alison “Inbox” @ Brown was activated via email,” prompting her to move by car “from Colorado Springs / to Providence by way of Chicago by way of St. Louis.” In other interspersed stanzas, Rollins contrasts the journey of the artist RaMell Ross who — inspired by Brown’s escape — “freight shipped himself from north to south: / Rhode Island to Hale County, Alabama.”
After mentioning that Wheatley’s book was published in 1773, the following stanza tells of how 250 years later, Rollins earned her graduate degree in poetry. She displays her rhetorical skills when, after noting that Thomas Jefferson declared Wheatley’s poems “below the dignity of criticism,” the speaker hopes that she is worthy of criticism, “however, she prays / that as a Black author she is not placed in a box.” The collection also engages with seven printed notices about runaway slaves in the poems “Queer Lear” and “Got ’til It’s Gone,” printing the pictures alongside the words. The poet notes that the latter is indebted to “Freedom on the Move, a database of fugitives from North American slavery.”
Rollins guides readers in an immersive reading of the book, not only in suggesting when to strike a bell, but in an entry titled “Performance Directions” before the “Inbox” poem, including separate preparatory instructions, audience instructions, and instructions for the reader. Detailed instructions also precede the first of three poems titled “Hymn of Inscape.” The poet notes that these take inspiration not only from historical sources like Henry Brown, but also from poetry by Monica Youn and Dawn Lundy Martin, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s concept of “inscape,” and an essay by Langston Hughes. These instructions include cutting the poem into its sections and writing sixty listed emotions on sixty stamped envelopes. (While I appreciated the artistry, I’ll admit to skipping this.) Rollins uses the poem to ruminate on boxes, alongside diagrams of actual boxes facetiously labeled.
Every Hard Sweetness (BOA Editions, 2024)
Contrasting with the documents and narratives of long-dead slaves, Sheila Carter-Jones tells a much more recent tale of African American injustice in Every Hard Sweetness, published by BOA Editions. She relies on research from the Philadelphia Inquirer, the book Cold Storage, as well as her own family keepsakes, to tell the story of her father: a victim of wrongful psychiatric commitment in response to 1960s political organizing. Rather than choosing stories that inspired her from the historical archive, Carter-Jones uses her father’s own story as well as the experience from her side of it as a child. Carter-Jones’ poems bring the situation — and its effect on her family — fully into the light in a historically accurate way.
The early poems “Dear ___________” and “Gone-Dead” set the tone and terms for the book’s first two sections, which focus on her father’s ordeal. The first begins as a prose erasure poem, with gaps between words like the starting “This letter” followed by “context” suggesting the story is being told, but that some of it resides in the margins, where her father was placed. Though disjointed from erased words, the poem’s early sections seem to allude to the Civil Rights Era, the third stanza beginning, “1960’s black body fought back resistance based on joy.” The speaker starts to bring the details into focus in the fifth stanza with, “Fact 1 August 6 1965 Voting Rights Act” followed by “Fact 2 June that same father hunted. captured in road-trap two hired detectives two small town cops”. The speaker notes a “mock hearing” after which “his body stolen,” she lost her father to the “State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.”
The final stanza of “Dear ___________” seems less like erasure than ramblings, beginning with anaphora that sounds like song lyrics — “Put away Put away Put away Put mountains away from home” — and ending with a paraphrase of Yeats’ classic poem “The Second Coming” to instill gravity, referring to a “[r]ough beast slouching / to be born,” adding after two blank lines and aligned right, the words, “In Starlight.” As in Yeats’ poem referring to a world order upended by events (WWI and the Irish Revolution), the lines convey a sense of dislocation; from recognized time when the little girl’s activist father fought with “resistance based on joy” to the loss of that father to racist oppression.
Some of the poems are also forthrightly titled in a way that recalls Yeats. In “I Imagine the Gate to the State Hospital for the Criminally Insane,” the speaker recalls thinking about this gate during a long bus ride, presumably to visit. What stands out, though, is how she links the hospital with her school where the “rich kids” live. The imagined gate seems more totem than metal, with the speaker asserting,
There’s no escaping wealth. It’s in the muscle and fat of
the institution. The gate’s hinges for the unhinged keep
what’s wanted in. What’s not, out. Bars like ribs surround
the heart of the establishment. Protect it by law.
The third poem, “Gone-Dead,” defines the titular term, starting with its adjective form, noting that it usually applies to a Black or brown “man forcibly incarcerated, / not insane not convicted” but rather labeled a “troublemaker.” The second stanza defines the noun form as a place where such troublemakers are held: a limbo “space between / the living and the dead,” where the body is “a site of brutal, inhumane / treatment.” The third stanza drives the point home with a “see also” list that includes other historical places of human bondage, including “slave ship,” “plantation,” “chain gang,” “internment camp,” and “extermination camp.”
Carter-Jones uses the hyphenated term as shorthand throughout the first two sections of the book about her father and paints a visceral portrait of the space in a later villanelle titled without the hyphen. The lament of the opening line states bluntly, “Good men are gone-dead before the rising sun.” This and other lines of powerful simplicity end with a strong quatrain of end-stopped lines,
Silences buried shallow is black dirt on everyone.
Skeletons tell truths when black bones are exhumed.
Good men are gone-dead-black before the rising sun.
Shine light, shine black on inhumane deeds done.
The poet links her father’s plight with African American slavery and the Middle Passage through a Freudian slip in the poem “His Body Holds Silence.” The “patient” tells his mother that he is scared for his life and that the guards will “k-k-kill” him; he adds, “I don’t have long / Zong to live.” Readers may recognize the capitalized word as the title of M. NourbeSe Philip’s 2008 book-length poem, Zong! It was the name of a British ship made famous in the late 18th century when its crew massacred 130 sick African slaves in order to commit insurance fraud.
Carter-Jones includes a number of poems accompanied by a picture for reference. “Cigarette Currency” is accompanied by a picture of something that looks like an arts and crafts project made from empty cigarette packages woven in a pattern: the work of the bored and gone-dead. The five line poem following it brings the picture and its meaning to life succinctly,
Designed to show how a man was forced
to live. He sent three handmade woven-paper
wallets home. One survived. Holds no dollar
bills. Only memories of how he and his family
got by tucked between tightly folded creases.
In a later poem, the speaker addresses how her father’s incarceration damaged their relationship, even after he was released. “Atropa Belladonna” relates, in long couplets, how afraid she was when her father first slept in the house again; her innocent search for socks while he was sleeping triggers his post-traumatic stress. When he reflexively shouts at her, she writes “my stomach shook like clumps and crumbled.” Addressing him directly through the poem, the speaker explains that she thought he might actually kill her; “[k]ill me dead” like the titular deadly nightshade.
While the book’s first two sections focus mainly on her father’s experience, the collection takes its name from a series of seven poems scattered among the first five sections. In this “Hard Sweetness” series, the speaker’s mother plays a prominent role as dispenser of hard truths to her vulnerable daughter. In the first, mother tells her daughter to never forget that to an unnamed “they,” she’ll always be “still nothin’ but a n—--r” to them once her back is turned. The placement feels apt among poems about her father’s tragedy and foreshadows later sections where the speaker shares her experience as the Black girl in a high school full of rich, Caucasian peers.
After some more sage advice and a poem about the speaker being born with closed fists, three later iterations cleverly play with the phrase “from scratch,” meaning self-made, the second taking the form of a recipe. My favorite, however, is the last in the series, which takes a cue about brevity from Hamlet’s Polonius; only a simple couplet: “My mother killed my sweet eyes. / She said, See.”
While the first half of the collection focuses on her father’s story while he was “gone-dead,” Carter-Jones uses later sections to recall more normal life on her side of the bars, and after her father was released. These include poems about how out of place she felt at her school.
The first two of a triptych of poems titled “American Beauty,” each with a different subtitle, appear in section three and take the form of erasure poetry. They use three paragraphs from the book Black Rage, first published in 1968 by two African American psychiatrists explaining causes of rage fueled by racism. The passages from chapter three of that book, “Achieving Womanhood,” link “feminine narcissism” with emotional well-being and explain that one cause of Black female rage is constantly being told that “[i]n this country the standard is blond, blue-eyed, white-skinned girl with regular features.”
A few sentences jump out among blacked out lines in the first poem, subtitled “101,” including, “[t]he girl who is black has no option in the matter,” followed in the next non-redacted portion with, “[s]he is, in fact, the antithesis of American beauty.” The second iteration, subtitled “All the Rage Darkly,” blacks out different portions of the same paragraph to read, “The girl who is black | Her blackness is | creamy | her lips are thick, her hair is kinky and short. She, is in fact, the | thesis of American beauty.”
The climax comes in the book’s fifth section with the poem subtitled, “The Redress.” The speaker riffs, mainly in tercets, on how beautiful but sharp diamonds were in a “time before I taught, I was announced township queen. An aluminum tiara was fixed on my head.” The poet indicates that the poem is based on true events when, on the next page, a picture under the title “The Tiara” shows a group of girls in white dresses. In the middle, holding flowers and wearing a sash, is the group’s only non-white member; presumably the author.
I found some of Carter-Jones’ poems extraneous, and, though “gone-dead” is effectively hyphenated, the compound “eyes-that-see-in-the-dark” used in the later poems “i.e.” and “etc.” seems lacking in imagination. Still, Every Hard Sweetness stands out along with Black Bell as being among the most meaningful poetry collections of 2024. Though neither book is exclusively documentary poems, they both show how docu-poetry is not only having an impact in the postcolonial thought that concerns Santos Perez, but also in response to the history of African American internal colonization. A couple of poetry books aren’t likely to fix things for Black America on their own, but they could boost much-needed conversations on how a country repairs its past mistakes.
Notes
[1] Craig Perez Santos and Donovan Kūhiō Colleps, “Two Pacific Decolonial Docu-Poets Walk into a Tiki Bar” in Tracking/Teaching: On Documentary Poetics, ed. Joseph Harrington (Buffalo, NY: Essay Press, 2015), 7.
[2] “Ten Questions for Alison C. Rollins,” 4/23/24 https://www.pw.org/content/ten_questions_for_alison_c_rollins_0
[3] Source: “Britannica.com: Henry Box Brown,” Encyclopaedia Britannica (Last updated: May 10, 2024)