Photo courtesy of Nicholas Nichols
“We need to see the ugly things to make the beautiful things matter, not more, but in their appropriate measure, which we truthfully underappreciate now . . .”
The moment that a poem comes into being is practically impossible to pinpoint. Of course, there is the act of recording language to the nude page, whether by way of a preferred writing utensil or a keyboard stroke, but come the moment you’re in the throes of that emotional and intellectual labor, you’ve already been living with the questions or the concerns of the poem—if not yet the words—for some length of time. Living with the essence of the thing, as one may live with an illness, or with grief, or with love, or faith. What the poem requires to come into the world is a catalyzing moment, a happening that compels us to reach into our darkest recesses for what has been awaiting our readiness, as though toddlers sounding out their first notes of external comprehension.
The poems I contributed to New England Review Vol. 44, No. 3, each opening with their title as the initial line (“It’s Important I Remember . . .”), are products of my preoccupation with the past, recent and far, as are the other poems sibling to them in what will, one day, be a collection. Since the early period of the most recent Republican presidency, when the present controversy was what monuments should stand tall and what monuments should be toppled, I’ve wrestled with our collective history, its needed revisions, its outright omissions, the battle we were fighting at the time (and are intensely fighting now) being: what is the story we are going to tell ourselves about ourselves?
To be sure, I have no great nostalgia for the America that came before my birth, namely because I stand an opponent to myth generally, but more importantly because that America of yesteryear, like the one today, in so many verifiable ways, was no good for me or my people. Please don’t misread me in sentiment: I do love my country, my home, but I love it the same way James Baldwin did, enough to critique it, to want and work to make it better—less violent, less greedy, more compassionate, more equitable. That cause is as just as it is grand, multi-faceted, and though I understand the role of political organizing in that, of collectivist spirit, of personal sacrifice and self-interrogation, I also understand that a certain type of awakening must occur simultaneously: not through the introduction of new ideas, but the retirement of bad ones. That requires revisiting our stories—capsules of big ideas, makers of meaning, inspirers of action and belief.
An American to my very core, I’m not unlike my troubled nation. People have sung my praises for aptitude and character for as long as I can recall anything; why would I, at any point, question my own goodness? How could my eyes, untrained in some ways and lazy in others, ever see my wrongdoings for what they were if there was never another person to say that’s not how it went down? I live in a country that not just believes in its inherent virtue, but depends on it like a drug, otherwise it does not have the faintest clue what it is at heart.
How we tell it, by and large, Abraham Lincoln, the most-esteemed scion of my home state, was the Great Emancipator, not a bigot or homestead colonizer. How we tell it, by and large, Frederick Douglass was a courageous abolitionist crusader and supporter of women’s rights, but not a man who subordinated a woman in his own marriage. We need to see the ugly things to make the beautiful things matter, not more, but in their appropriate measure, which we truthfully underappreciate now. America is so beautiful: those are fighting words—not to maintain anything as it exists currently, but to make this vast place of varied peoples truer to the songs it sings to itself about itself.
I can only pray these little writings of mine contribute anything to that difficult work. When people pause to read them who are unfamiliar with these versions of events and these variations on people, I hope it induces a struggle in them. A beautiful struggle.
Cortney Lamar Charleston is the author of Telepathologies (Saturnalia Books, 2017) and Doppelgangbanger (Haymarket Books, 2021). He was awarded a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and he has also received fellowships from Cave Canem and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Winner of a Pushcart Prize, he has published his poems in Poetry, the Nation, the Atlantic, American Poetry Review, Granta, and elsewhere. He serves as a poetry editor at the Rumpus and on the editorial board at Alice James Books.