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Toi's Story: Acclaimed poet Toi Derricotte looks back with "i"

Toi's Story: Acclaimed poet Toi Derricotte looks back with "i"

An acclaimed poet looks back in wonder and honesty.

“ ‘i’ : NEW AND SELECTED POEMS”

By Toi Derricotte

University of Pittsburgh Press ($29.95)

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In Toi Derricotte’s poem, “Invisible Dream,” she presents a speaker who so inhabits her work that she finds herself, “awake when I’m sleeping & I’m/ sleeping when I’m awake,… // I hear a pen scratch// a paper. There is some idea/ I think is clever: I want to// capture myself in a book.” In fact, she’s been doing it for decades, with the hybrid-memoir “The Undertaker’s Daughter” and four highly regarded poetry collections under her belt. In her latest, “ ‘i’: New and Selected Poems,” Ms. Derricotte unfailingly displays a steady poetic voice, unafraid to approach matters of race, sex and child abuse in powerful modes.

“i” is an immersion into a gripping, sometimes playful first-person point-of-view that retains its power through well-crafted lines and taut prose. Ms. Derricotte, cofounder of Cave Canem, professor emerita at the University of Pittsburgh, and a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, has long been nurturing young poets, myself included. Her workshops at Pitt allowed writers to find their center through her knowing and approachable ways. The writing in “i” is no different as the book allows a generous 294 pages to give necessary scope to a writer who moves dynamically.

With more than 30 new poems, “i” isn’t just a greatest hits collection. Newer works such as “The intimates” and “Among school children” highlight the unswaying vision Ms. Derricotte brings to the page. In “I give in to an old desire,” she writes, “I lost so much/ of the world’s beauty, as if I were watching// every shining gift / on its branch with one eye. because// I was hungry. Because I was waiting// to eat, a self// crawling about the/ world in search// of small things…” The rest of the poem, employing interesting line-breaks, drills down into the memory of her mother’s cocktail hat, winningly described as “something of an exaltation// and wonder exploding/ from the inside like// a woman in orgasm. One artificial flower// I have desired/ to write about for years.” A poet of the body, Ms. Derricotte also lingers vividly on the inflicted pain of her speaker’s life.

In an excerpt from 1983’s “Natural Birth,” she ruminates on her teen pregnancy while in a hospital for unwed girls. As it should be, much of it is viscerally insightful, foreshadowed in “maternity” where she writes of “another world, ordered and white. the night moved/ by on wheels,” before offering up “the clock on the wall in red and black and the nurse’s back as/ she moved out of the room without speaking, everything/ conspired to make me feel afraid.// how long, how much will I suffer?” The poems that follow, “10:29,” “transition,” and “delivery” will leave readers squirming in their physicality of description, giving us much to consider this Mother’s Day.

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The twin rails electrifying Ms. Derricotte’s work emphasizes race and the physical abuse suffered at the hands of her father. In, “What are you?” she addresses racial questions that, as the child of light-skinned African-Americans, she’s learned to anticipate. At a cocktail party, she quotes her racial makeup: “to curious whites: 72 percent European, 28 African…//Their faces// Waited for the punchline, until the black woman I was with cracked/ The silence: You’ve been black all your life, she answered everyone.// To our various shades, another friend made it perfectly/ Clear fifty years ago: If you black, you black.” Her discussions here and elsewhere point to the complexities of identity, throwing the notion of solving “this color thing” in America to the wind.

Ms. Derricotte pivots easily into selections from 2011’s hybrid-memoir of growing up with a violent father, “The Undertaker’s Daughter.” The writing here is gripping and stunningly reflective, letting cramped family-dwellings parallel the helplessness of a girl unable to make it stop, even as her mother looks on. Here she writes “you would think that the one treated so cruelly would ‘kill’ the abuser, throw him out of the brain forever. What a horrific irony that the abuser is the one most taken in, most remembered; the imprint of those who were loving and kind is secondary, like a passing cloud. Sometimes, I thought that’s why my father beat me. Because he was afraid he would be forgotten. And he achieved what he wanted.” Perhaps the greatest feat is Toi Derricotte’s ability to render beauty from such difficult times. And lucky, we are, getting to sample so much of it between the covers of “i.”

Toi Derricotte will have a book launch for “i” at City of Asylum at 40 W. North Ave. on the Northside on Sunday, April 7 at 5 p.m. After the reading and book signing, there will be a screening of “Strong Words: The Art of Toi Derricotte,” a documentary chronicling her growing up in Detroit, her family and her books. The events are free and open to the public.

Fred Shaw teaches writing at Point Park University and Carlow University. His collection, “Scraping Away,” is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press.

First Published: March 30, 2019, 4:00 p.m.

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Toi Derricotte, author of "i". HO
"i" by Toi Derricotte.
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