DORINE JENNETTE CONTINUES THE CONVERSATION:
ROXANE BETH JOHNSON
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“Dorine Jennette Continues the Conversation” is inspired by the format of Albert Goldbarth’s “Why All This Music?” (Winter 2009), in which the poet interviews himself with questions he draws from literary sources. Following Goldbarth’s lead, Jennette interviews a writer from each issue of The Georgia Review with questions drawn from that issue’s text. Pulling questions out of their literary contexts makes them nearly non sequiturs, and replies to such queries often generate a sort of verbal Rorschach test, revealing a mind at work. An issue of GR is a kind of conversation, a dinner party at which some of the guests are old friends, while others have never met. Jennette has found a unique way to extend that conversation, this time with Roxane Beth Johnson.
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“Who will be the recipient of this story?”1
I find myself applying this question to my poem “Emancipation,” and in that context my answer is: the recipient of the story is the subject of the poem herself, a slave named Clea. This poem is from my second collection, Black Crow Dress, which tells the story of a group of slaves around the time of emancipation and beyond. Clea—a particularly sensitive, crippled house slave—is one of the main voices. All the poems are for the slaves themselves, whom I see as my ancestors. I seek to embody their voices and give their stories back to them. We are our stories; we all love to tell them, and painful stories need the most telling. In “Emancipation,” Clea is celebrating her emotional freedom from the bloody, torturous life she loathed but had to bear. Now she has nothing materially and recognizes the terror of this, hence her desperate prayer that the fish multiply. She will need a miracle to survive physically, but at least she has the power to somehow survive for now emotionally. Black Crow Dress loosely follows Clea through the rest of her life and into the afterlife; she winds up doing all right for herself.
“How can a person make sense of such things?”2
Through storytelling, I think. Some tellers are more deft than others, and Clea’s voice is making sense of things through telling the story of the day she and the other slaves were freed, remembering the feeling of that spiritual and emotional and personal release, rather than the terror of the reality of emancipation. Slaves were thrown out without money or anywhere to go. Talk about homelessness.
As for storytelling, I do this a lot in my poetry—and it is a kind of “home” for me, a way of being more and more familiar with my own inner landscape. I use poems, rather than fiction, to tell stories because I am not very good at fiction, and I can make my way around a poem. I don’t intentionally use a poem to tell a story and make sense of something, but that is often the result. I usually have a group of images or a list of words that I find particularly rich, and I can always get a story out of those images and words by putting pen to paper and arranging them. The story is often one of my own—even if it’s something I overheard on the bus—and emerges from that cluster of images. It’s a personal process; I’ve tried to teach my students this method as a way to generate new work, but no one has really liked it so far. Writers have to find their own way into their stories.
“And how long has this fiction-making been going on?”3
Since I was a young child. Before I was a writer, I was a very deft liar. I made up all sorts of things as a kid, things that no one really believed—yet I was undaunted. For example, a long story cycle revolved around two doting cousins, David and Evelyn (named after the disco queen Evelyn Champagne King), who each lived with my middle class family at different times. We’d go to Journey and Pat Benatar concerts (or was it Eagles concerts?), shopping, or just for drives in their sports cars around town. Total lies, but they each “lived” with us for about four years, during which time I elaborated on our various antics and experiences. When I was very young, I claimed ownership of special dolls and toys. I kept on with my stories despite the subtle contempt of my schoolmates, who, unfortunately, refused to believe that my father was a firefighter, which was true!
I am not sure what was wrong with me or why I made up so many stories. I eventually grew out of it around the age of sixteen or seventeen. Again, don’t ask me what was wrong with me! In my defense, I also wrote lots of novels and stories, admitting to the world that they were, indeed, fiction. My earliest stories were little “novels”—cheap spiral notebooks that I would fill with extended narratives about little girls with wonderful wardrobes and largely absent—though fabulously wealthy—parents. I was very influenced by Louise Fitzhugh books and Shirley Temple movies. I think what this ridiculous behavior taught me, on a very deep level, was that I was good at making stuff up. Lots of kids didn’t believe me, but as I got older and kept on lying, many did.
I was also good at keeping all the various lies together. I never slipped up on a story. I could weave a tight narrative, however misguided my motivations. It’s no coincidence that when I finally stopped lying, I began to write with more and more urgency, and the stories and poems became much more interesting to me. Ironically, if I had told people what was really going on in my life, no one would have believed it. I had no words then for the experiences I wrote about in my first book, Jubilee. You cannot tell fellow six-year-olds, “Hey last night, I went to church and I saw some lady speak in tongues for so long that the devil started to come out of her mouth! And my father played the tambourine so fast and hard that the cymbals fell off. And my Grandmother, the preacher, got really mad at me and hit me in front of everyone. Plus, an old drunk man came in last week and sat on the last pew and died. My father held his hand while he died—at least I think it was my father who held his hand. It’s all kind of confusing.” You can only tell a “story” like that in a poem when you are about thirty-two years old.
“How is the rest of your writing coming?”4
The writing has come into the present with gospel-sermon-style passages spoken to me by a preacher who lived, probably, from right after emancipation until the 1940s. He speaks from the afterlife, all in prose poem blocks. He reminds me that the afterlife is long, this life rather short, and he says things like, “Observe the junkyard, child. Let ruins be your avatar. Hazard yourself. Be like a migrating bird—any one will do. Be miscellaneous, be the exhausted caboose. Soon, you’ll wonder—how much longer until my red horse is overtaken by my hound? At what hour will I lie down and bare my throat? Learn this: make of yourself a cheap kite, some summer to be tangled up and torn in a tree—your colorful scraps mistaken for cardinals.” The language is similar to that of preachers I heard as a child. The word child, for example, was a popular form of address a minister might use to speak to a congregation as a whole. He would say “child,” or “children,” or “Brothers and Sisters”—phrases like that were popular. He’s lodged someplace in my psyche, having gained the knowledge that this life should be carried on without fear or remorse because . . . well, what’s the point of those?
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1 Ellen Wilbur, “Listening and Speaking,” The Georgia Review (Fall 2010): 541.
2 Ellen Wilbur, “Listening and Speaking,” The Georgia Review (Fall 2010): 543.
3 Gary Gildner, To Raymond Andrews August 30, 1985, The Georgia Review (Fall 2010): 447.
4 Philip Lee Williams, “Becoming Writers Together,” The Georgia Review (Fall 2010): 507.
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Roxane Beth Johnson’s second book of poetry, Black Crow Dress, is forthcoming from Alice James Books. Her first book of poetry, Jubilee (Anhinga, 2006), was the winner of the 2005 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. Philip Levine was the judge. She has won an AWP Prize in Poetry and a Pushcart Prize. She has received scholarships/fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Cave Canem, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Vermont Studio Center. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Prairie Schooner, Image, Callaloo, Pushcart Prize Anthology, Beloit Poetry Journal, Chelsea, ZYZZYVA, Bitter Oleander, Sentence, and elsewhere.
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Dorine Jennette is the author of Urchin to Follow (The National Poetry Review Press, 2010), and her poetry and prose have appeared in such journals as Verse Daily, the Journal, Coconut, Court Green, Puerto del Sol, and New Orleans Review. She lives in Suisun City, California.
