Toi Derricotte selected my second book, Notes for a Praise Book, for Jacar Press’s yearly book contest, and when I got that news, I simply couldn’t believe it. Imagine being a singer and someone like Loretta Lynn or Aretha Franklin plucking you out of an audience to come up onto the same stage. That’s how I felt. Toi Derricotte, I kept repeating to myself, a name both familiar and sacred.
I knew her poems from my earliest readings as a student of poetry. A poem like “Blackbottom” (from her 1990 collection Captivity) caught my attention. I was headed off to graduate school in 1990, navigating college with all the uncertainties and missteps that might be expected of a first-generation college student unsure if I belonged in this “new” world far removed from my childhood. In her poem, she writes of being “[f]reshly escaped, black middle class” and of driving with visiting relatives back through the kind of place, presumably, her family had escaped, a place with the smell of barbeque and with “dented washtubs” and “a man sitting on a curb with a bottle in his hand.” All of these images were the images of my own childhood, and I, too, was trying to escape. I, too, had an ambivalence about everything and everyone I was leaving behind.
My book appeared in 2013, and in February 2014, Toi Derricotte and I gave a joint reading at my undergraduate college, Austin Peay State University. Barry Kitterman, who directed the creative writing program, floated the idea to me months earlier. I was excited, of course, but at the same time I kept dealing with imposter syndrome hang-ups so difficult to shake. Preparing for that reading made me want to throw away every poem I’d written, none of them good enough to read to a crowd, much less in the presence of Toi Derricotte. She put me at ease, though, with the first words she spoke to me in what I now think of as a forceful compassion.
Earlier in the afternoon, when I saw her entering the building where I stood with others, she walked through the door, approached me straight-away, and said, “I love your book.” I’m flushed with emotion just remembering that moment. I had spent more than a decade trying to get that book published, vacillating between belief and doubt, between hope and dejection. Our evening event together, though, would stun me even more.
In my mind, a “joint reading” with Toi Derricotte would proceed as follows: Barry Kitterman would say a few words about us both, then I would read my work for 15-20 minutes, then I would weep my way through trying to express my gratitude for Toi and her work, then she would read her poems for 30-40 minutes, and I and everyone else would sit enraptured. That's how I had envisioned the evening.
That’s not what happened.
Toi read first. In what world could this order make sense? Shouldn’t I be her opening act? There she stood, though, reading her poems. I was rattled, humbled, in disbelief. If that wasn’t enough, when she finished her poems, she had prepared an introduction discussing my book, my poems. To my profound regret, sitting there trying to hold myself together, I don’t remember anything she said about my poems except that she hoped I would read the title poem, which I had not planned to do because of its length (3 pages). I had cobbled that poem together from several days’ worth of fragments found in a journal and had often wondered if the poem was worth all the effort I had put into shaping it. Suddenly, reading it aloud for the first time, I suddenly “heard” the poem. Or maybe I heard it through her approval of it, her generosity toward me, the magnanimous embracing that I felt inside her own poems. I’ll always be grateful that she asked me to read that poem that evening.
Afterwards, I didn’t even think to ask her for a copy of her introduction of my poems. Sometimes I feel so paralyzed, unsure of the next move to make.
The next morning I agreed to drop her off at the Nashville airport on my way back home to Columbia, TN. First, she, Barry, and I met for coffee and muffins. Some people are just so radiant that you feel as though you’ve always known them and always now wish to be in their presence. In a moment of lightheartedness, I asked her if she might permit me to be the first white person to attend the Cave Canem workshops. I like to joke that I almost had her talked into it. So many of my favorite poets—so many of the best poets of my generation—have attended that workshop, which she and Cornelius Eady founded in 1996 as a safe space for African-American poets to work within the company of their peers. The family of poetry is so much larger now thanks to their cultivation of voices. Many of those voices have influenced and come alongside my own, and I can't imagine my life without them.
Obviously, I didn’t expect her to say yes to my request. I only meant to express (awkwardly) my appreciation for what has emerged from her influence on American poetry. Who wouldn’t want to be near such radiance?
“We wanted our sufferings to be offered up as tender meat, / and our triumphs to be belted out in raucous song,” she says near the conclusion of “Blackbottom.”
Suffering, triumph, song. An ever-widening, enlarging, in-gathering of voices sure makes this praise book of American poetry worth where we’ve all come from and where—together—we may still yet find our singular and entwining ways toward belonging.