Vox Populi
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Toi Derricotte: My great teacher, Galway Kinnell, taught me: “Speak the unspeakable.”
Forty years ago, I didn’t know how innocent
He was, how little he knew of the damage
The truth was meant to do. My father taught me:
You have to break the bones
To get to the heart,
Practice the art of self-
Killing, and bloody your hands
With the blood of your teachers.
In fourth grade, like a saint, I whipped
My back with a hair-
Brush. O biblical Jehovah,
You made the hands of the fathers
Suspect. The Holy Innocents.
Wholly slaughtered.
The price for freedom
Is not caring the cost, guided
By—report the few who make it—a star.
Copyright © 2019 by Toi Derricotte. Reprinted by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.
Toi Derricotte is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently, I: New & Selected Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). Derricotte is the recipient of the Academy of American Poets’ 2021 Wallace Stevens Award, given to recognize outstanding artistic achievement in the art of poetry over a poet’s career. The Poetry Society of America awarded her the 2020 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry, citing, “There are few poets who are as brave as Toi Derricotte; brave in her subject matter and brave in how she insists that even the deepest hurts must sing on the page.”
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Searing, subtle, truth teller .
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Yes
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Toi is a force of Nature and her poems are Natural phenomena!
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Indeed they are!
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How well she speaks the unspeakable, but also how she trusts us to read between those lines!
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Well-said, Laure-Anne. Toi’s poems are very clear on the surface, but they plumb depths of experience that few of us dare to explore.
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Wow! What a stellar poem and that title slants it in such a brilliant way!
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It really does…
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Great mysteries at the heart of this courageous poem– Is Galway Kinnell the star of the last line? Or is it archetypal? So many questions left for the reader to ponder– A poem to re-read many times– With that solitary line at the very middle. Thanks to Toi Derricotte for giving us this wonder.
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Toi really is a wonder…
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Yes! I agree that the intentional ambiguity here is everything!
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Powerful stuff.
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