Poet: Camonghne Felix
Poet Background:
Felix was born in 1992 and raised in the Bronx in New York City. She is a writer, poet, and communications strategist, having worked for both Andrew Cuomo and Elizabeth Warren over the past few years, and she was the first black woman and youngest person to serve as Governor Cuomo’s speechwriter when appointed in 2015. She received an M.A. in Arts Politics from NYU, an MFA from Bard College, & has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, and Poets House.
She has participated in the national slam poetry festival ‘Brave New Voices,’ and she was featured in the festival’s 2010 documentary produced by HBO. Her first chapbook, Yolk, was published in 2015, and her poetry was included in the 2018 anthology The Breakbeat Poets Volume 2: Black Girl Magic. Her first collection, Build Yourself a Boat, was published in April 2019, and it was longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award and was also a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award and the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry. Felix’s work has also been published in Buzzfeed, Poetry Magazine, Apogee, the Offing, and the Academy of American Poets website, and she has been featured in New York Women’s Foundation Magazine, Brooklyn Poets, Politico, Teen Vogue, Huffington Post, and others.
Outside of poetry, she has worked as the head of racial justice initiatives at Do Something, the communications director for the campaign of Chicago mayoral candidate Amara Enyia, and the director of surrogates and strategic communications for Warren’s 2020 presidential campaign. Recently, she has become the vice president of strategic communications at Blue State, a digital strategy firm, while still writing poetry. A collection of poems, Dyscalculia, and a collection of essays, Let the Poets Govern, are forthcoming from One World Publishing.
Poem: ‘Born. Living. Will. Die.’
Sometimes I think I’m never going to write a poem
again and then there’s a full moon.
I miss being in love but I miss myself most when I’m gone.
In the salty wet air of my ancestry my auntie peels a mango with her teeth
and I’m no longer writing political poems; because there are
mangoes and my favorite memory is still alive. I’m digging for meaning but haunted by purpose
and it’s an insufficient approach. What’s the margin of loss on words not spent today?
I’m getting older. I’m buying smaller images to travel light. I wake up, I light up, I tidy, and it’s all over now.
Analysis:
Like many other poems I’ve featured over the past few weeks, I first stumbled onto Felix’s work through poets.org’s Poem-A-Day feature. This poem, featured first on July 7th, captured my attention both for the simplicity of it and the imagery created by the words, with nothing better on a summer afternoon than thinking of the tropics. It also is drenched in a sort of muted nostalgic melancholia, but we’ll get to that in a bit.
Felix herself had this to say about the poem: “This poem is an ode to my auntie, who is the freest person I know. In her garden in Antigua, she grows mangoes, which represent the sweetness of life and the serenity of self-sufficiency.” It was a good perspective to read about the poem, as I originally wouldn’t have taken it as an ode to her aunt at all. To me, it is a poem about getting older and growing up—the tiredness of adulthood and the sense of exhaustion that comes from it is stretched over the entire thing like a heavy net, but there is lightness dwelling underneath that net, the same way that your parents or grandparents may complain about how the world is today and how much older they’re getting and how their bodies hurt, but then sigh and slowly shake their head and smile and say that it still feels good to at least be alive.
The first three lines strike me as both hopeful and melancholic—Felix writes of the sentiment that you feel exhausted and worn-out and ready to move onto the next thing in your life until you see something beautiful or amazing again that reignites that spark inside you that made you interested in said thing prior to that moment. In this poem specifically, it spoke to me from a writing perspective, mostly because I think all people who also call themselves writers, to any extent, have that feeling of burnout. Sometimes you just sit down at your keyboard and you know you need to get the writing done that day, but there’s no inspiratation or drive—you feel tired, your brainwaves are nonexistent in the creative arena, and writing feels more like work than anything else. Instead of those early mornings or late evenings where you sit down at the computer and just let the words pour out of you, you stare at the computer screen or the piece of notebook paper in front of you and see nothing other than trouble, the same kind of trouble you felt in the sixth grade when you realized you had to write a one-thousand word essay on why Rome eventually fell to the other civilizations that overran it in the fifth century—in other words, boring, uninspired work.
And yet—the third line picks all that up and throws it out the window, or at least that feeling of being mired in a kind of word-based molasses. All we need sometimes, both simply as just humans and specifically as writers, is that one spark of inspiration, whatever that may be, and we feel better again, lifted up by some invisible force the refuses to leave us alone and allows us to regain that creative mindset that had vanished without us realizing it. Whether it’s writing or playing sports or creating a presentation for work, anything creative for that matter, there is oftentimes that one moment that many people can pinpoint when they feel that surge of inspiration and drive again, and in this poem it’s made possible by the poet simply glimpsing a full moon, something so simple yet majestic that the imagery is simultaneously beautiful and simple while being readily accessible to every reader who encounters the poem.
The next two lines have that feeling of positivity-through-melancholia again, this time touching on the subject of love. So many times throughout our lives, we find ourselves simultaneously loving our significant others while also lamenting the people we become to fit the mold that we think they want us to fit into in order to love us and keep us around. I know I personally have felt that feeling many times—I loved (or, at least thought I did, at the time) the person I’m in a relationship with, but then my friends or coworkers or family stared to mention how different I’d become. Maybe it’s pulling me aside while out on the town for a night with a group of friends, or over breakfast at the parents’ home for a Sunday morning, but they try to point out that maybe I’ve changed too much. People in that situation usually brush the comments off, saying that we haven’t changed that much, and then move onto the next subject. Oftentimes, we don’t realize how right our friends or family are until the relationship has ended, and there’s this weird sense of loss where we lament both the end of the relationship and the way that we had become while we were in it. Relationships that don’t end ultimately in marriage or long-term commitment change everyone that takes part in them, and oftentimes when it ends, you take a step back and realize that there were lots of things that you did that normally you wouldn’t be okay doing, or watching your friends do for that matter. In a sense, you’re happy that you can become yourself again and not worry about how to fit the mold of someone else, but you also miss that companionship. Human beings are social animals, as the last year has drastically exemplified, and sometimes we are willing to compromise everything—our personalities, our morals, what we’re okay with in terms of how we’re treated by another person—just to make sure that we stay with another person, and the second two lines of the poem is a meditation on that idea, that you oftentimes can’t have both at the same time and love/your own sense of self-identity oftentimes will make you chooses between one or the other.
The next five lines of the poem create more of an image for me, and it seems to shift from dwelling on humanity-wide sentiments to something much more personal. Mentioning both ‘salty wet air’ and mangoes instantly puts me in the Caribbean, and I picture a woman standing under the shade of a palm tree perhaps, eating the mango with her teeth and smiling at being alive. The first few lines of this five-line section have a sort of airiness to them, a sense of disconnecting from the melancholia of the first five lines, and just being present and in the moment. It speaks also to the sentiment from the first three lines of the poem—something simple can cause so much joy, and, in the case of the speaker of the poem, it’s something as small as picturing her auntie peeling a mango with her teeth. The third and fourth line return some of that melancholia--politics in general to most people bring negative connotations to mind, I would argue--but the poem doesn’t dwell on that idea. It’s a little nod to Felix’s background, I think, as a lot of her other poems are in the political sphere, calling out to the inequities in the world of America and at large in the twenty-first century, and a way to self-acknowledge that there are other things to write about, whether that’s family or simple memories that makes one feel better inside. You can only be angry at the injustice of the world for so long before it eats away at you inside, and, no matter how good the work you’re doing might be to better the world, sometimes you need to take a step back and let yourself breathe, your mind telling you to dwell on other subjects, ones that make you much happier and allow you to inhabit another form of yourself even.
The next three lines return to that melancholia from before, and I would argue it’s an allusion to how poetry, and even writing at large, can be so difficult, even for the best poets and writers. A lot of times, when poets sit down to write, they have an overarching feeling or theme that they want their work to inhabit or comment on. That feeling generally comes first, and the words to describe or elicit that emotion via the poem often come second. These three lines comment on that idea, that a lot of time there is an image or an idea that the poet/writer wants to get across, but he/she is struggling to actually find the meaning through the purpose. Writers know why they want to write about a certain feeling or theme, but sometimes they struggle for the meaning within that purpose, the underlying emotion of the idea they want to portray though their words, and then also struggle to find the words and construct to get said meaning across. The purpose of what they’re doing is clear, but how does one arrive at the meaning of that purpose without flailing about wildly for hours on end?
The third of these three lines also dwells on that idea of being unproductive--Felix asks about the fear that most writers/poets have when they don’t work on writing any given day, that feeling of emptiness and loss and feeling like they’re wasting time on other things that aren’t as important. You read all the time about the most successful writers and how often they write--they oftentimes go out of their way in interviews to talk about how often they write time-wise, with many of them saying they can’t even miss a single day of writing, whether that’s for a birthday or Christmas or anything else. For the rest of us, the writers who don’t make millions like King or Steel or Patterson, we feel inadequate when we don’t write any given day, even if the inspiration isn’t there, and we start to wonder if we will fail overall as a writer if we miss a day here or there. What happens when we don’t write on a day where we're busy otherwise, and will that lead to the ultimate destruction of our writing goals? How does one get over that feeling and set the sense of loss aside and move on with his/her/their life without letting it eat them alive?
While Felix doesn’t answer that question definitively, she hints at what she thinks it might be with the final three lines of the poem, and it has to do with aging and learning to let go of the past, stressors, and things that we can’t control. The first two sentences of the last three lines exemplify that almost verbatim: ‘I’m getting older. I’m buying smaller images to travel light.’ There’s a general sense among humans that the older we get, the smarter we become, and she’s implying here that same idea, that as she ages, she learns through experience to let things go that she can’t control, whether that’s not getting writing done that day or worrying about something that happened long ago in the past. It often takes time and age, and the experiences writ large through the experience of both, to understand that you ‘can’t sweat the small stuff,’ as cliché as that line is, but it’s true, and there’s a reason it’s persisted through the years.
And, with the very last line of the poem, that sense of being able to let go of the past, whether personal trauma or grief or worry or anxiety, is crucial to understanding how to survive in the world that we live in. Where we have cell phones in our pockets that keep us connected to everyone twenty-four-seven, and where it is very hard to get away from others and the stressors that keep us up at night, we need to learn to let go and live in the moment. The line simply implies that the speaker of the poem rises with the beginning of the day, goes through a morning routine, and then gets on with her day, focusing only on what’s directly ahead of her and not what might be waiting around the corner in the future. It’s a message that should resonate with a lot of people, and one that ends the poem on an overall positive note.