Poet: Cortney Lamar Charleston
Poet Background:
Charleston, born in Harvey, IL, was raised on the South Side of Chicago and parts of the Southern and Western suburbs of Chicago before heading to the University of Pennsylvania for undergraduate studies. Originally interested in economics and urban studies, he started writing and performing poetry as a member of the Excelano Project. After getting a BS in economics from the Wharton School and a BA in Urban Studies from the College of Arts & Sciences at U-Penn, he started to branch out more into the poetry world, and he hasn’t looked back since then, looking to use his poetry as a way to combine art, activism, and social justice causes.
According to his website, Charleston’s work is heavily influenced by his youth in Chicago’s South Side and some of its suburbs, with his poems ‘grappling with race, masculinity, class, family, faith, and how identity is, functionally, a transition zone between all of these competing markers.’ He personally likes to call his poetry a ‘marriage between art and activism,’ saying it’s ‘a call for a more involved and empathetic understanding of the diversity of the human experience.’
His poetry has appeared in many publications, including POETRY, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, and Granta, amongst others, and he has received fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, Cave Canem, The Conversation Literary Festival, and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. He has won a Pushcart Prize, and his first collection of poetry, titled Telepathologies, was selected by D.A. Powell for the 2016 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize before being released in 2017. His second collection, titled Doppelgangbanger, was just released earlier this year by Haymarket Books.
Charleston currently serves as the poetry editor at The Rumpus and on the Alice James Books Editorial Board.
Poem: ‘It’s Important I Remember that the Moral Arc of the Universe Bends—‘
but it doesn’t break, and neither breaks toward justice nor away from it. It simply bends, as the bow does before propelling the arrow where it may, agnostic to everything but flight. I don’t mean to make morality a weapon in this way, but it already is one and has been for some time. The shackles, after all, were explained as saving us from ourselves, our naked savagery, though it was their whip that licked us and left a kind of tactile text on our bodies. The Bible will have a man beating on someone as easily as it will have another taking one, turning the other cheek, civilly disobedient even when the bombs blow up in their church, not to say saying no to violence isn’t commendable, just to say a strong case can be made for cracking a skull or two like an everyday egg in hopes whatever golden light resides inside shines through, throughs the crimson tide for the rest of time so the tide will, mercifully, recede.
Analysis:
I first stumbled onto Charleston’s work through the Academy of American Poet’s ‘Poem-A-Day’ feature. Charleston’s poem was featured earlier this week on Monday, May 3rd, and I read it and immediately realized I had found a new poet that I was interested in reading. The poem itself is one solid block of text, something that people might not think of as ‘poetry’ when the idea first comes to mind, but that’s one of the ideas that makes it so appealing—before we even dive into the message of the poem and what Charleston is trying to say with the words within the poem itself, it’s an example of a poem that doesn’t conform to the idea of what a ‘normal’ poem looks like (two or three lines per stanza; constant rhyming; shorter lines in general; etc.).
Charleston himself had this to say about the poem: ‘One of the cultural hallmarks of my country is a pervasive and pacifying narrative of progress which is buttressed by the belief that the United States is inherently good and virtuous despite whatever crimes it has committed and is committing presently. Of course, this erases the actual labor required to build a just and equitable society and it likewise erases the people who provide that labor, on the ground, in the proverbial trenches. In the absence of their efforts, the only thing guaranteed to occur is continued violence against marginalized people—justice will not be thrust forward by a myth. In this poem, I’ve allowed myself, however briefly, to contemplate a different choice for the marginalized, through the lens of the Black experience, that perhaps is the only that could force a confrontation with the truth my country has conveniently and consistently eluded. One can debate if it’s the wisest choice, but it is an understandable one, even Fair.’
To me, Charleston’s explanation about the poem, and the ideas evoked by both the work itself and his comments on it, brings to mind the hypocrisies of the United States government and its leaders over the past three centuries. Think about how many times America has said that it stands for justice and freedom throughout the world, that one of our main goals as a political philosophy is to rid the world of tyranny and hunger and fear itself, and then compare that to what we actually do to both our own citizens and other people around the world. The example of Black soldiers being sent over to Germany and Japan to fight the Axis Powers during WWII, only to return back to America and continue to be treated as second-class citizens, is the most glaring to me. There were numerous instances where Black vets were thrown off of buses on their way home to the South and beaten and sometimes killed, and there is more than one example of a Black man being lynched despite his service in the cause for our country. Then, think about all the coups, regime overthrows, and rebellions that the U.S. government has helped to support, including the Contras in Nicaragua, the Shah in Iran, the Taliban in the 1980s while they fought the Soviets, and numerous African and South American countries when the popular leaders appeared to be trending too close to communism for American comfort. We as a country espouse all these great political and social ideals, but how do we actually compare to the standard we set when we step back and study ourselves and our actions?
The title of the poem is also a reference to a very famous Martin Luther King, Jr. quote, one where he talks about the ‘moral arc of the universe bending towards justice,’ no matter how long it might take to get there or how hard it is to wait until it arrives, and Charleston’s poem takes a pessimistic note on that idea, noting that time after time after time, ever since the first African slaves were brought to American shores in 1619, and even before that with the decimation of Indigenous peoples through European violence, disease, and calculated genocidal tendencies, the United States as both a government and a philosophy has never been able to truly live up to the ideals that most Americans are taught in school and have in their hearts, including the hypocrisy of the Declaration of Independence, its values and rights espoused within it in complete paradox to the system of slavery that existed at the same time. Charleston notes this as he talks about the literal shackles that enslaved Black Americans had placed on them by powerful white men who ran the plantations and participated in America’s early ‘democratic government,’ and he notes that the moral arc simply bends, but it doesn’t bend either towards or away from justice—it simply just bends, and there’s nothing more to it. The unjustness of the world will continue unabated, and there’s nothing that can be done in most cases to influence that bend, with Charleston comparing the bending to the way an arrow simply flies through the air and only comes back down when gravity forces it to.
After that, the poem takes a more resigned tone, commenting on the irony of the country’s founding ideals being influenced by the Bible, with the horrific levels of violence found throughout it, and how the Bible was used to justify both slavery and the decimation of Native Americans. Charleston notes that there is death and destruction and the wanton killing of many people in the Bible, but that kind of information and events in the book itself are often swept under the rug, with the more ‘happy and cheery’ message of the New Testament what people often focus on instead. The country was founded by a group of white, Christian males who proclaimed equality and brotherhood for all, yet they used their religious text to justify the bondage of their fellow human beings. The paradox is plain for everyone to see, and Charleston hammers that point home in the second half of the poem.
He starts to end the poem by referring to the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, where a group of white nationalists bombed a church in Birmingham, AL, killing four young Black girls, and how White Christians were silent about the killing afterwards, more disposed to cling onto Jim Crow and its system of segregation rather than denounce the killings themselves, something that many Christians should’ve been moved to do so. But because the girls were Black, the white South was mostly silent on the killings, and life went on like normal for them. Charleston is stinging in his veiled criticism here of Southern white Christianity, noting how the dualities of the messages and their belief systems helped to preserve the Jim Crow system for so many years while preaching hypocritically at the same time. The tone of this half of the poem is dark but important, and Charleston uses an atmosphere of doom-and-gloom to show the utter ridiculousness of how Black people in America are treated different by their white brothers and sisters, even when they have the most basic commonalities found amongst them if they could get past skin color.
The poem itself references Alabama once more, talking about a ‘crimson tide,’ known as the University of Alabama’s sporting teams nickname, and the last line brings to mind the image of time as a liquid in a way, the tide crashing onto the shores of peoplehood and being stained crimson with the blood of innocents and those who weren’t born with the privileges of opportunity attached to them, and the hopefulness of one day the tide becoming clear instead of crimson, receding back into the ocean where it came from. The tide crashing on the shores of peoplehood is the idea of injustice swamping and drowning everyone caught within its waters, and, while the rest of the poem is rather dark, the very last line leaves a smidgen of hope within it, speaking of a day when the tide will recede and there will be no more crimson on the shores for the world to endure.
For Future Reading:
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