Words, spoken, had another kind of magic. I noticed how the written play was but a ghost of the performance. This is how someone you thought you knew becomes a monster, and what it’s like to witness “beasts” taking over your town or country, the play explained. Standing in for one of the director’s kids written into the script, I loved how words no longer floated on a page but came alive. I recall watching rehearsals of Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros and running onto the stage with two other children when cued, playing the role of incredulous innocents. How I savored her tired, sweet, Southern voice in the dark. I loved hearing a woman tell stories-so often the voices on the TV and radio were men’s. My most pleasurable experiences of reading were in a bathtub stuffed with pillows in a corner of a classroom, or listening to my teacher read Charlotte’s Web or Island of the Blue Dolphins (written by white male authors, like most books I’d read).Īt my grandmother’s, at bedtime, she told any story I requested until I fell asleep. “He opened the rock, and the waters gushed out they ran in the dry places like a river.” I loved the way a sentence could also be a poem. I searched my King James Bible bound in a red cover, often reading only Jesus’ words, sensing everything else was a secondary source. Stevens taught me how to teach myself any word I desired.Īt 8, I read my mother’s books and collected favorite lines such as, “ Your children are not your children …You may give them your love but not / your thoughts” (“The Prophet” by Kahlil Gibran) or “ Look with your understanding, find out what you already know, and you’ll see the way to fly” (“Jonathan Livingston Seagull” by Richard Bach). She walked me over to the heaviest book I’d ever seen-a standard dictionary on a table of its own. Stevens, thanks to integrated busing in the south, was one of the first Black women I’d had the luck of calling my teacher. One day at school, I asked my teacher, yet again, what a word meant. I scratched out poems about clouds and took snapshots of my striped kitten and beautiful mother. And so, I began to gather words and to frame images. When I was 5, my mother gave me a spiral notebook and a roll of film to take my first photographs. I tell you this because I want to answer a question I often ask poets: What childhood experiences with language informed your relationship with poetry? For myself, I’m reminded how all that informs your relationship to poetry also informs who you are and how you relate to the world. Writing anonymously for strangers, as Marion had done, became my own kind of guerilla art and helped me get through heartbreaking years now in the past. Sometimes, young women who identified with my daughter wrote to me about the raw truth of their younger selves. Struggling parents wrote to me and I wrote back. Remembering her spray-painted messages on Houston overpasses decades later, I started writing an anonymous blog of lyric prose, “The Notebooks of Mother X,” chronicling a parenting crisis with my teenage daughter. Here was a woman showing me how I might survive. I was still reeling, but learning to create. My father had died suddenly the year before. The intimate connection between loss and making art had already begun to save me. She had found a way to speak directly to people in one of the largest cities in the United States. I could only imagine how she suffered, but what I saw was a woman quietly writing all over Houston. Marion gave me a place to stay when I needed one. A beautiful boy I knew in high school, Alex died at 21 in a house fire. Marion McEvilley is a painter, poet and guerilla artist-but I knew her as a friend, mentor and as Alex’s mom. Muse is a discovery place for riotous, righteous and resonant feminist poetry that nourishes and gives voice to a rising tide of resistance-brought to you by Ms. digital columnist Chivas Sandage.ĭressed in black, she drove through Houston late at night with spray paint cans and large stencils she’d made, painting overpasses with Zen-like graffiti such as “Watch Your Breath” and “Breathe” or lyric phrases like “City of Glass.”
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