Poet: Derrick Austin
Poet Background:
Today we have a poet with a Wisconsin connection!
Derrick Austin is an award-winning poet hailing originally from Homestead, Florida—he earned his bachelors in English and Creative Writing from the University of Tampa before getting his MFA in Poetry at the University of Michigan. While there, he was awarded a Hopwood Award in Graduate Poetry and the Helen S. and John Wagner Prize, which rewarded distinction in the writing of poetry at the graduate level.
Since graduating from Michigan, he has published one collection of poetry, titled Trouble the Water, in 2016, and it was highly praised—it not only won the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize, but it was also a finalist for the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the 2017 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, the 2017 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and the 2017 Norma Faber First Book Award. His second collection, titled Tenderness, will be published this fall by BOA Editions, and it has already won the 2020 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award.
He has published numerous poems, essays, and reviews in many different publications, with some of the most distinguished being printed in The Best American Poetry 2015, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, The Nation, New England Review, Image: A Journal of Arts and Religion, Gulf Coast, Tin House, Tupelo Quarterly, and Black Nerd Problems.
Besides for publishing many different poems and prose pieces, Austin has served as the 2016-2017 Ron Wallace Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing at UW-Madison, where he also taught creative writing and composition classes to undergrads. He’s led creative writing workshops across the country, including at the University of Michigan, and he is currently a 2019-2021 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He calls Oakland, CA home for the time being.
Poem: ‘The Lost Woods as Elegy for Black Childhood’
There used to be no one here, where cypresses and oaks play shadow puppets on sawgrass.
You heard the music before I did: tambourines, pan pipes. Remember how I woke clean
to meet you each morning? The dew and the dust? Remember how you’d catch me
as I fell from trees? Someone heard and hurt us. I’m Black-Eyed Pea. You’re just Skull Kid.
We wanted our genius to last. We never wanted chalkboards or snow. We never came home
before the streetlights buzzed. All we do is dance in leaves. Cackle and Dreaming, we call it.
Our mothers call it grief.
Analysis:
I first stumbled upon Austin’s work after seeing a separate poem of his through the Poem-A-Day feature, and it caused me to look for more poems by him. It so happened that he had previously had other poems featured in Poem-A-Day, and the one that spoke to me the most was this one, which originally ran on September 27, 2016.
Austin has spoken about the poem before: ‘In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, a video game I loved as a child, the Lost Woods is a maze-like level full of music that transformed children who wandered in into monsters known as Skull Kids. Though they were trapped forever, they always looked like they were having fun playing flutes and being tricksters. I wrote this poem thinking about Korryn Gaines’s son, thinking about the nightmare of racial violence and about what space allows black children to dream and play without fear.’
There are a few different things to unpack from his description about the poem. First and foremost, it’s the influence of The Legend of Zelda. I also personally played the heck out of Ocarina of Time, and I have read numerous critiques and analyses over the years about the Lost Woods section of the game specifically. Putting aside the fact that the game was a cultural phenomenon that was rarely seen prior to its launch, the game was also noted for being a kind of twisted escape from reality in terms of the Lost Woods section. In the Lost Woods, the character that players control, called Link, often interacts with the Skull Kids that Austin mentions. They are always nice to him, teaching him how to make certain moves and allowing him to level up his skills, but then there’s the dark side to it all—you, as a player, are learning how to do all these moves from kids who are trapped forever in the forest, transformed into these Skull Kids and forced to live in the Lost Woods for all eternity. There is no way out for them, and through some unknown magic or other forces, they’re trapped in the Lost Woods without any hope of escape or redemption. While they look happy on the surface, and they are always pleasant with Link, there’s that darker, underlining context to the entire experience, and that’s what some articles commenting on the game have explored—how are we as players supposed to feel about learning skills from these Skull Kids, these perpetually trapped souls who have no chance at leaving the Lost Woods like Link does? Doesn’t the name ‘Lost Woods’ also have enormous significance, implying that the physical space of the woods themselves are lost to either time or other people, and there are only certain kinds of characters or other people who can access them? What does it say about the fact that we as players benefit directly from exploiting the labor of these lost souls, these kids that are trapped in a perpetual cycle of helping whomever they encounter and getting nothing in return?
The Korryn Gaines influence on the poem is also a haunting and chilling one, along with being utterly tragic. Korryn Gaines was the victim of police brutality, being murdered in her home in 2016 in Randallstown, Maryland (a little bit outside Baltimore) by police offers who were trying to serve her with a bench warrant, stemming from issues during a prior traffic stop. Fearing for her and her children’s safety, Gaines refused to answer the door when police arrived at her place of residence, telling them to go away and leave her alone. Instead, police officers broke down the door and shot at her, killing her while catching her 5-year-old son in the crossfire. While the child, Kodi, survived, the sheer trauma of witnessing the murder of his mother at the hands of a police officer has to be devastating (and unfathomable for people who haven’t been in that situation), and it is this event that Austin is referencing when he talks about his influences for the poem. In an almost haunting bit of premonition (this was written back in 2016), Austin said the poem seeks to ‘[explore the idea of which] space allows black children to dream and play without fear.’ So much of the police brutality narrative prior to 2020 was about how black people were often killed by cops because they didn’t comply, or they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, showing the bigotry behind explanations for why black people are shot at in enormously higher rates than white people by police officers. With the murders of Breonna Taylor (shot while sleeping in her bed), George Floyd (suffocated to death in broad daylight while handcuffed and rendered immobile), and Ahmaud Arbery (shot to death by two former white cops and their neighbor while out on a jog, unarmed, after being stalked by them prior to the confrontation), Americans en masse have been shown the reality that many Black Americans have known since birth—as a black man, woman, or child, you are not safe wherever you go, no matter what you are doing. You can literally be asleep in your own bed and murdered. You can be murdered while out on a jog in a nice neighborhood, profiled simply because of your skin color. You can be murdered while trying to pick up some cigarettes at a convenience store, the victim of a brutal display of ‘police power.’ The woods, like many other spaces, are looked at by many people as a place of refuge, especially for children, but are they safe for black kids? Can black children truly be free and frolic in the woods like their white friends, safe from any kind of violence and danger that people looking to commit harm could visit on them?
Looking at the poem itself, there are several layers of messaging, thematic phrasing, and historical references found throughout the short poem. Let’s start with the first stanza—the lines ‘there used to be no one here / where cypresses and oaks play’ speak to me of the absence of European civilization on the continent before Columbus came and triggered hundreds of years of genocide and decimation of both Native Americans and Africans, who were forced over to the New World because of rich European white men. The system of slavery known to the modern world was specifically kickstarted by the desire to harvest and destroy the land of the New World for capitalistic gains, and the ruling European class used Native American and African bodies to reap the benefits of this ‘new land,’ forcing many Native Americans off of their land through disease, war, or enslavement, and forcing Africans to work the land through the system of slavery set up by European traders in Africa and their accomplices on the other side of the Atlantic. Before America was full of anguish and corruption and strife, the woods were known as a peaceful, spiritual, holy place by both people of Native American and African roots. If you look at the cultural history of Native Americans and Africans, the natural world is huge in terms of religious meaning, cultural meaning, and the relation between it and familial ties. Nature was sacred to these two groups of people, and the Europeans came and exploited what had been meaningful on a spiritual level, corrupting the former spaces where freedom and peace and religious/personal experiences had flourished. The idea of ‘cypresses and oaks play[ing] shadow puppets on sawgrass’ is a powerful image—there are remnants of those who walked here before Europeans came, and they lived both in and with nature. Native Americans walked and hunted and lived among the natural world, and now the only thing that is left is the remnants of their history and culture for the most part, shadows on the modern world. The same could be argued for African Americans—they were forced here to do the work that would enrich white Europeans and their colonizers, clearing land that had never before been used for farming or the exploitation of the nearby natural resources, and their appearance changed the landscape forever, their labor building the America that we know today.
The idea of honoring the Native American and African lives who toiled and died in this ‘new America’ are referenced again in the next stanza, with the inclusion of tambourines and pan pipes, instruments found commonly amongst the two groups’ cultures. Music also has a much bigger religious/cultural meaning to these two groups compared to Europeans, and both groups of people often tied their stories and beliefs with music as they were passed down orally from generation to generation, intertwining the importance of music and history.
The rest of the poem deals with the freedom that can come from spending time in the woods in the modern day, with Austin referencing the freedom that little kids can feel in this space. The line ‘Remember how I woke clean’ is a reference to the idea/concept that nature can solve all spiritual/mental problems, that in order to ‘reset,’ one just needs to spend time in the natural world, and the woods is supposed to be this place of rebirth and renewal, cleansing our spirits and minds at the same time. Later in the poem, Austin writes about not wanting ‘chalkboards or snow,’ and ‘never [coming] home before the streetlights buzzed.’ This is a dwelling on the innocence of children and their adventures in the woods, free from the concerns of parents and teachers and other adults, able to live in a separate world while playing in the woods. Children don’t want to be stuck inside classrooms, or deal with the coldness and claustrophobia that winter brings—they want to play until they can’t anymore, until the streetlights come on in the summer dusk and they know they have to get home before their parents get mad at them. The woods represent freedom from the ills of the adult world that surrounds them indoors, and it’s the only place they can go to truly be free and themselves.
The last line of the poem ends it on a dark note: ‘Our mothers call it grief.’ This comes right after a few lines that describe children dancing in leaves while ‘cackling and dreaming,’ images that conjure pure joy in someone’s mind. By juxtaposing that idyllic image with the idea of a mother crying, Austin is trying to show that even in circumstances where children can escape into supposedly free and safe areas, their mothers and fathers and anyone who is a parent figure in their lives will always be worried about them, always ready for them to not return and for the accompanying grief to overwhelm them. Black children are in danger almost everywhere and anywhere they go in America today, and a black parent is just waiting for the shoe to drop sometimes, praying and hoping that their children come home at the end of their day, but knowing the reality after what’s happened in the world so often.
For Future Reading:
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