Folks Like Me

Recently I was honored by election to the board of the New England Poetry Club, a century-old institution founded by the likes of Amy Lowell and Robert Frost which clearly lowered its standards markedly based on my elevation to directorship. The Club is full of people far more accomplished than I, and thus I am widening my understanding of more modern poetry (my poetry history revolves around 19th century rhymed verse loved by my mother, with Walt Whitman stirred in).

When the Club recently decided to name an award after a poet of whom I was ignorant, Sam Cornish, I hid my embarrassment and went to Amazon and secretly ordered one of his books. Cornish, it turns out, was a black, communist professor of literature at Emerson College in Boston and a very different and wonderful poet. His book Folks Like Me is a sparse poetic journey though the American black experience; there are few verbs, not a single punctuation in the whole book, and the pain of that history thus is thrown down on paper like a pile of raw, still-bleeding carrion.

To hopefully attract you to giving this poet a try, I set forth below in its entirety a piece from Folks Like Me, entitled simply “Meat”:

Willie Peterson’s / mother believed / he would be president / Willie Peterson / ribs cooking / in the electric chair / Willie Peterson / Negro

And when your volume arrives, do not miss the poem: Picket Lines and Rubber Hose Wherever I Go. Incredible. ‘nuf said.