I tell children that poetry should be fun, if it’s not fun you should be out on the playground playing soccer. But poetry that is fun does not have to be funny.
Poetry that’s fun can be every bit as entertaining if it’s serious. If it — I’m not saying instructs but perhaps tells a story in a way that prose does not succeed in doing. Coleridge said, Samuel Taylor Coleridge said, “Prose is words in the best order.”
But he said, “Poetry is the best words in the best order.” And I think that is exactly so.
This poem, I had written it originally for Emmett Till, and my editor said, she thought I should try to do, to do it again, but this time from the point of view of Emmett Till’s mother, and so I have. I don’t know if you can see that, it’s kind of dark but it’s called, there’s Emmett Till’s mother, and the poem is called The Innocent.
And it seemed to me that this poem would take the best form in the sense of a villanelle, a French verse form. The Innocent.
Dark on that Mississippi Delta day my baby Emmett fell so far from grace that justice, what would justice have to say? I taught him not to sass or disobey, they said he shamed a white girl to her face, dark on a Mississippi Delta day.
They beat him bloody, oh they made him pay, they kicked him, shot, then drowned him just in case, and justice could not find the words to say. The quitters — the killers were acquitted by the way. As Southern virtue gussied up in lace, dark on a Mississippi Delta day.
They closed Emmett’s casket to my dismay, seemed like to me it was a hiding place. So Emmett’s momma found the words to say, I laid my bloodied boy, my bloodied boy out on display, but fifty thousand mourners won’t erase dark from that Mississippi Delta day when justice did have one word to say.
So anyway. That’s a serious poem. Half the time when I get up in the morning I’m interested in writing more serious poems, half the time I want to write humorous poems, or nonsense verse. And it just depends upon my mood or it depends upon the collection I’m working on.
So I really can’t say ahead of time until I’m actually in my chair what I’m going to be working on at that particular moment.