Black Poetic Inquiry

Bryant Keith Alexander is Professor and Dean of College of Communication and Fine Arts at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles.Mary E. Weems is an independent scholar, imagination‑intellect theorist, poet, playwright, performer, and author of numerous books and journal articles, and five chapbooks.

• About the AuthorsSeries Editor Note IntroductionOrienting Your Engagement To the reader To teachers(What is it about January that invites reflection and contemplation?)January 1, 2024 Mary1. “A War by any other Name”2. “First day of another year”3. “Resolution, 1-1-2024”4. “Home”5. “Dea[R]th”January 1, 2024 Bryant1. “A War Name”2. “First day After (His Death)”3. “Resolution, #1”4. “Re-defining Home (The Day After)”5. “Death”*********January 2, 2024 Mary1. “Choice”2. “Second Day of Another Year”3. “Prayer of Peace”4. “Home must be, in me”5. “Life (just) Disappears?”January 2, 2024 Bryant1. “Choices”2. “Second Day After”3. “Prayer Wall”4. “Home is in me”5. “Life Disappears”*********January 3, 2024 Mary1. “Potty Training”2. “Third Day of Another Year”3. “Memory Mantle”4. “One more Hug”5. “Disappearing”January 3, 2024 Bryant1. “Training to Potty”2. “Third Day After”3. “Mantle of Memories”4. “One more Hug, Please”5. “Disappearances”**********January 4, 2024 Mary1. “Another Word for Dog/Cat Lover”2. “How Poetry Saves my Life”3. “Academy Office Memory”4. “Handshake vs. Hug”Take Two: “My last Touch”5. “Buried Breath”January 4, 2024 Bryant1. “Animal Lover”Take Two: “Black Cat with a Black Cat”2. “How Poetry Saved my Life”3. “The Smell of Academy Offices”4. “Hug vs. Handshake”5. “Breaths Buried”************January 5, 2024 Mary1. “Zoophilist”2. “Trash Talk”3. “Smells”4. “All are welcome”5. “Ashes”January 5, 2024 Bryant1. “Lover of Animals”2. “Talking Trash”3. “Smells”4. “All are Welcome Here”5. “Ashes”**********January 6, 2024 Mary1. “To instill Responsibility” 2. “Take out the Trash” 3. “Aromas”4. “Laugh”5. “The Living”January 6, 2024 Bryant1. “Stilling responsibility”2. “Taking away the Trash”3. “Aromas”4. “Laugh”5. “The Living”***********January 7, 2024 Mary 1. Old Habits2. “Recycling”3. “Mendacity”4. “Smile”5. “The Living Room”January 7, 2024 Bryant 1. “Old Habits”2. “Recycling”3. “Truth about mendacity”4. “Smile”5. “The Living Room”********January 8, 2024 Mary 1. “Slipping into Darkness”2. “Who’s your Daddy?”3. “Liar, Liar Pants on Fire”4. “The Frown”5. “The School’s Living Room”January 8, 2024 Bryant 1. “Slippin’ into Darkness”2. “Who’s your Daddy?”3. “Liar, Liar Pants on Fire”4. “The Frown”5. “The School’s Living Room”*********January 9, 2024 Mary 1. “Darkness”2. “Ham”3. “On the Low-Low”4. “Humming”5. “Campus Living Rooms”January 9, 2024 Bryant 1. “Darkness”2. “Ham”3. “On the Low-Low”4. “Humming or Whistling”5. “Campus Living Rooms”**********January 10, 2024 Mary 1. “The ability to only see Color”2. “How family can disregard family”3. “Choreography of Feelings”4. “Whistling Girls”5. “The shared company of Silence”January 10, 2024 Bryant 1. “Seeing Red”2. “Under-My-Hat”3. “Choreography of Feelings”4. “Whistling at Girls”5. “The shared company of silence”*********January 11, 2024 Mary1. “Red (Read)”2. “Hat Trick”3. “Unpopular”4. “To much time with Books?”5. “I am still in shock”January 11, 2024 Bryant1. “Red Purple Orange”2. “Hat Trick”3. “Unpopular”4. “Too much time with Books?”5. “I am still in shock”************January 12, 2024 Mary1. “The color purple”2. “It goes with everything”3. “Birds of a feather flock together?”4. “215 bodies found in unmarked graves in a [Jackson] Mississippi Jail”5. “Haiku”January 12, 2024 Bryant1. “The color purple 2?”2. “It goes with everything”3. “Birds of a feather flock together?”4. “215 bodies found in unmarked graves in a [Jackson] Mississippi Jail?”5. “Haiku”********January 13, 2024 Mary1. “I, too, am waiting”2. “Grandpa’s Dance”3. “The Birds”4. “Jackson, Mississippi”5. “Haiku”January 13, 2024 Bryant1. “I, too, am waiting”2. “Grandpa Dancing”3. “(For) The Birds”4. “College Station, Texas”5. “Responding to a Haiku”*************January 14, 2024 Mary1. “Elvis the King?”2. “Granny’s Kitchen”3. “Animal Rebellion”4. “Not a glass of Champagne”5. “Snow Storm”January 14, 2014 Bryant1. “Crowning Kings and Queens”2. “The Kitchen”3. “Rebellion”4. “Champagne or Thank You?”5. “Snowstorms are the Norm”**********January 15, 2024 Mary1. “The New King of England” 2. “The Kitchen” 3. “Not a Tea Party” 4. “Not the Norm”5. “Connections”January 15, 2024 Bryant1. “King Day”2. “The Kitchen Needs Cleaning” 3. “Not a Tea Party” 4. “Not Norm”5. “On ‘Connections’”**********January 16, 2024 Mary .1. “Mis-Understanding”2. “To Cut or Not to Cut?”3. “Our Supreme Court”4. “Standing in the Wake”5. “Jamaica”January 16, 2024 Bryant1. “Race (Still) Matters”2. “Cutting my Dreadlocks”3. “Wanted: Affirmative Actions (Dead or Alive)”4. “Tending to the Dead”5. “You saved the best for last.”***********January 17, 2024 Mary 1. “Talk a Walk”2. “Change of Mind” 3. “I wish this was a lie” 4. “Mama’s Hands” 5. “Seeing God in all Things”January 17, 2024 Bryant1. “tick a lock”2. “I can ‘not’ choose to mourn” 3. “I wish this was a lie.” 4. “Praying Hands” 5. “God in all things”*************January 18, 2024 Mary 1. “The Lock of Silence”2. “Professional Joy” 3. “Beloved?” 4. “Praying Hands” 5. “People I don’t Like”January 18, 2024 Bryant 1. “I carried that with me” 2. “Professional Joyfulness” 3. “Dearly Beloved” 4. “Praying for Peace” 5. “This is best for both of us”************January 19, 2024 Mary 1. “A Nation of Euphemisms” 2. “Self-Love and Purpose” 3. “Who is sitting at the Table?” 4. “Bended Knees” 5. “Grace”January 19, 2024 Bryant 1. “Euphemismistically Speaking” 2. “Purpose of Self-Love” 3. “Sitting at the Table” 4. “Knee” 5. “Grace, the girl”********January 20, 2024 Mary 1. “Regret Sex?” 2. “Love yourself into Being” 3. “Franklin, First Black Comic Character in “Peanuts” 4. “Amputation” 5. “When only a Cuss Word Works”January 20, 2024 Bryant 1. “Repentant” 2. “Loving into Being” 3. “Seeing the possibility of you” 4. “The Amputated Itch” 5. “The word, “Bitch” *********January 21, 2024 Mary1. “Religion as a Tool for Power”2. “The First Black Woman President of Harvard”3. “Seeing What’s Possible”4. “Breast Cancer”5. “The Sopranos”January 21, 2024 Bryant1. “Tools of Prayer”2. “The First”3. “My insides smile”4. “Magical Bosoms”5. “The N-Word”***********January 22, 2024 Mary 1. “God’s Will”2. “The Second, third, fourth, fifth” 3. “Inside Work” 4. “Small Breast-ed” 5. “The N-Word?” January 22, 2024 Bryant1. “Whose Will Be Done?”2. “Yes, I/we know how amazing she is” 3. “The Ubiquity of Me” 4. “A Breast-ed Experience” 5. “The N-Word, Nice?” *************January 23, 2024 Mary 1. “Will to be Free” 2. “How Long, How Long?” 3. “Note to Michelle Obama” 4. “Incontinence” 5. “The Nice Word”January 23, 2024 Bryant 1. “Realizing I Am, Somebody” 2. “Questioning possibility towards potentiality” 3. “A Black Girl in the White House” 4. “Incontinence in Men”5. “Nice words?”**********January 24, 2024 Mary 1. “I AM A MAN”2. “What if we had stayed Together?” 3. “That was Poetry” 4. “I would do that Commercial” 5. “People say the damnedest things” January 24, 2024 Bryant 1. “Black Lives Matter” 2. “Black Wall Street in Tulsa, OK Destroyed on 6/1/1921” 3. “Watching and Witnessing” 4. “no place for shame.” 5. “People DO the Darnedest Things” ********January 25, 2024 Mary 1. “Haiku” 2. “Sick and Tired” 3. On November 4th 2008 4. “The times of our Lives” 5. “Black Girl/No Magic”January 25, 2024 Bryant 1. “The Matter of Black Lives” 2. “Remaining Black and living in America” 3. “Dream List” 4. “Born Right on Time” 5. “Black Magic: But it Never Occurred to Me”**********January 26, 2024 Mary 1. “BIPOC?” 2. “An Activist Affect or Where the Rest a-ya’ll at?” 3. “Living Past 16” 4. “Taking Advantage of the Moment” 5. “Never Full”January 26, 2024 Bryant 1. “Opposite of White” 2. “Escape to Freedom” 3. “to the back of his head” 4. “Taking a Moment” 5. “red skin baloney”***********January 27, 2024 Mary 1. “The Opposite of White” 2. “Necessary Action” 3. “Meeting a friend at the Park”4. “Taking a Moment” 5. “Local Butcher Store”January 27, 2024 Bryant 1. “Shades of Desire”2. “Action Necessary” 3. “A desire to stay young?” 4. “a moment is” 5. “little burned off the center”***********January 28, 2024 Mary 1. “Haiku” 2. “The Golden Rule?” 3. “Dead by 30” 4. “Point of Reflection” 5. “The Beginning of a Poem I wrote at 17”January 28, 2024 Bryant 1. “Black Don’t Crack” 2. “Changing the world.” 3. “Imagined-Purpose” 4. “The Reflection Point” 5. “the King is dead”************January 29, 2024 Mary 1. “A single Crack” 2. “Hold on to Love?”3. “Give Life a Chance” 4. “I’m not what I look like” 5. “They kille[ed] King to Stop a Movement”January 29, 2024 Bryant 1. “Like a Black Panther Suit” 2. “Those are the times . . .” 3. “Then what is the point?” 4. “I’m not what I look like--either” 5. “Bodies on the line”***********January 30, 2024 Mary 1. “Chadwick Boseman” 2. “I pause to Learn” 3. “Words help me” 4. “The White Imagination” 5. “Bod[ies] on the Line”January 30, 2024 Bryant 1. “Chance or Choice” 2. “Never Enough” 3. “First Response” 4. “Little to no time” 5. “Carrying it around”************January 31, 2024 Mary1. “The Future”2. “The old people know our Hearts”3. “Soul and Spirit?”4. “The presumption of their self-value” 5. “Different Countr(ies)”January 31, 2024 Bryant1. “Tomorrow is the Future”2. “Talking to grandma” 3. “Somethin’ in my Spirit?” 4. “Tripping Poetically”5. “The Last Day” Closing Reflections: “What is it about January?” Alexander and Weems Study Questions, Prompts, and Probes for Students Alexander Questions, Prompts, and Probes for the Researcher Alexander How to Use this Book to Readers: Embodied Engagement Weems How to Use this Book to Teachers: Embodied Engagement WeemsEndnotes Further Readings Alexander and Weems

“This book is nourishment. It shows us with grace, courage and beauty how to live life through deep paying attention and spiritual connections. I could not get enough of the book. I want more books like this: accessible, transformational, and deeply joyful. It made me feel and think about the wonder and depth of what we consider ordinary things, about how language is our saving grace and how writing poetry makes language an archive for sensibility and compassion. The reader sits in appreciation for the ‘call and response’ of these two poets as a felt-sensing experience and for social justice as an internal and material. There is so much life in these pages: I found myself aligned with the mother who loves animals more than people; childhood memories of Aunt Jemma and Uncle Ben; the consequences of potty training; learned that ‘tick-a-lock’ is culturally more graceful than ‘shut-up’ and so, so much more. From Amiri Baraka to Billy Porter, from James Baldwin to Michael Jackson, we witness “templates of sociality,” poetry as “critical praxis,” and ‘spirit writing. What is more, we lean anew the value of the month of January through new dimensions of experience and memory. The book is an affirmation to think like a poet each day in deep friendship and loving care.” D. Soyini Madison, PhD, Professor Emeritus, School of Communication, Department of Performance Studies, Northwestern University, author of Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance and editor of The Woman That I am: The Literatures of Contemporary Women of Color“This evocative book employs what the co-authors call “collaborative spirit-writing.”’ It is an approach the authors have now refined over 5 collaborative book projects together. Their collaborative spirit-writing method “involves writing quickly and effortlessly from a spiritual space that includes the collaboration between spirits, our own and the spirits of our ancestors known and unknown.” How fortunate we are to be able to engage with these two collaborators in such a love-driven endeavour, bearing witness to the inheritance of their own wisdom as well as the deep knowledge their ancestors. This is collaborative autoethnography, relational qualitative enquiry, and intimate and performance co-poetic inquiry at it best. It is all these things and more. Formally, we learn that the poems were written in a 24-hour period, as a ‘call and response’ exchange, engaging a form of collaboration that the authors do so well. Theirs is a sustained call and response practice that traverses a rich body of performance and scholarly work. They situate this work within the growing fields of poetic inquiry and critical autoethnography. Importantly, as this work is avowedly most directly about Black lived experience, they identify it as Black poetic inquiry, and recognise it as part of the legacy of not only Black scholars, but of Black poets and writers across multiple literary and scholarly forms. The authors’ engage ‘activist affect’ and the work that performance/poetic autoethnography can (and must) do in times of social crisis. This book is a companion to their contemporaneous publication, Epistolary Autoethnographies on Loss, Memory and Resolution: Reflections on Black Motherhood (Routledge, 2025). While that book is ostensibly concerned with loss, and this one with love, they are – as readers will undoubtedly understand – inextricably linked experiences, and it is together that these two friends, colleagues and collaborators seek to understand them. It is deeply moving and rare to read this work on Blackness by two friends who not only share so much but also are so different. Solidarity across different sexual orientations, class backgrounds, gender identifications, and life journeys is the counterpoint to a shared experience of being Black in America at a time when the authors can both celebrate the positive changes since their parents’ generation, while also mourning together about the miles left to go toward ensuring equity, access and respect. This book contributes profoundly to that project.” Stacy Holman Jones, Professor of Theatre and Performance,Monash University and Daniel Harris, Professor and Associate Dean, RMIT"This book is an absolute must read that you will return to over and over. Alexander and Weems made me fall in love with poetry all over again as they show how collaborative spirit writing can sustain work, relationships, and our souls. I intend to share this beautiful book with my students and poetry colleagues as a method we can all adopt to help write out the points of meaning in the seemingly mundane moments of life."Sandra L. Faulkner PhD, Professor of Media and Communication, Bowling Green State University