Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: There Are More Beautiful Things than Beyonce
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.morgan-parker.com/
CITY: Los Angeles
STATE: CA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.morgan-parker.com/about/ * https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/07/22/you-are-on-display-an-interview-with-morgan-parker/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Columbia University, B.A.; New York University, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author.
AWARDS:Cave Canem fellow; Gatewood Prize, 2013, for Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night; Pushcart Prize, 2016; National Endowment for the Arts Literature fellow, 2017.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including The Nation, New York Times, Paris Review. Also contributor to books, including Best American Poetry and The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop.
SIDELIGHTS
Morgan Parker works primarily as a writer of essays and poems. She also takes part in several writing-related projects with other authors, including The Other Black Girl Collective and Poets With Attitude. She has released two collections of poetry.
Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night
Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night possesses an overarching theme of what it is like to have to sacrifice one’s own sense of contentment as a minority in America. The book addresses several disenfranchised statuses within American society, crossing gender, socioeconomic, and racial divides in each poem. She explores the perceptions of blackness and how it is more commonly associated with masculinity, and how feminine black bodies are perceived by white audiences. She also touches upon the ways white people view black artistic expression, caring more for painting their own picture of the artist than trying to decipher the art’s meaning. In some of the featured poems, the confines of these outside points of view come to affect how the speaker views themselves. Other poems touch upon pop culture as well as how performative it is.
In an issue of Publishers Weekly, one reviewer commented: “Readers will do themselves a favor by paying attention to this powerful debut.” A writer on the Fanzine website remarked: “Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night is a powerful debut collection from a promising new and necessary voice.” Chrissy Martin, a contributor to the Columbia Poetry Review website, wrote: “Parker’s book is powerfully unapologetic, giving way to a refreshing and necessary voice.” A Scout reviewer said: “Morgan Parker’s debut collection Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night embodies the discomfort of otherness via social narratives of race, class, and gender.” Jason Weisberger, a contributor to the Boing Boing website, expressed that “Parker is an accomplished poet, publisher and creative writing instructor.” He added: “She builds vivid pictures, and transmits such strong feelings, in so few words, I am thrilled!”
There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce
There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce is Parker’s second book of poetry. It is much more focused on popular culture, as Parker adopts the voices of several notable black figures. Beyonce appears within several poems, as do other celebrities and political figures we know of today. Parker explores the reality of each of these women’s positions, as well as the emotions and insecurities brewing under the surface, far away from curious and excited eyes. Parker attempts to parse how being an admired figure comes to affect the life of the admired, and how this impacts them on a deeper level. Ultimately, Parker plays around with the idea of the performer being separate from the person, and the person wanting to break free from the mask they are forced to present to the public but ultimately cannot pry off.
In an issue of The New Yorker, Melvin Backman remarked: “These exquisite poems defy categorization.” BookPage contributor Julie Hale stated that the book “is both an of-the-moment book and a collection for the ages.” Barbara Hoffert, a contributor to Library Journal, commented: “This work has the occasional stretched phrase but is highly recommended.” Booklist contributor Briana Shemroske wrote: “[Parker] encapsulates vulnerability, feminism, and utter fearlessness in rhythmic, glittering verse.” On the Los Angeles Review website, Ryan Boyd concluded: “There are many things more beautiful than Beyoncé, or as beautiful, and a whole lot of them ended up in these pages.” Christopher Soto, writing on the Nation website, said: “Parker’s brilliance is found in her ability to complicate the gaze on black womanhood.” He added: “By depicting the varieties of experience, from Hottentot Venus to Michelle Obama, Parker is able reclaim black womanhood as beautiful in its entirety.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, February 1, 2017, Briana Shemroske, review of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce, p. 17.
BookPage, April, 2017, Julie Hale, review of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce, p. 20.
Library Journal, February 15, 2017, Barbara Hoffert, review of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce, p. 93.
The New Yorker, June 5, 2017, Melvin Backman, review of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce, p. 97.
Publishers Weekly, May 18, 2015, review of Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night, p. 63.
ONLINE
Boing Boing, https://boingboing.net/ (January 6, 2016), Jason Weisberger, review of Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night.
Columbia Poetry Review, http://columbiapoetryreviews.colum.edu/ (March 26, 2016), Chrissy Martin, “Prodding the Line,” review of Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night.
Fanzine, http://thefanzine.com/ (August 13, 2015), Gina Myers, review of Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night.
Los Angeles Review, http://losangelesreview.org (October 17, 2017), Ryan Boyd, review of There Are More Beautiful Things than Beyonce.
Morgan Parker Website, http://www.morgan-parker.com (October 17, 2017), author profile.
Nation, https://www.thenation.com/ (March 17, 2017), Christopher Soto, “Flaws and All,” review of There Are More Beautiful Things than Beyonce.
Paris Review, https://www.theparisreview.org/ (July 22, 2016), Alex Dueben, “You Are on Display: An Interview with Morgan Parker.”
Scout, http://scoutpoetry.com/ (October 17, 2017), review of Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night.
Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ (February 21, 2017), Elizabeth Lund, review of There Are More Beautiful Things than Beyonce.*
You Are on Display: An Interview with Morgan Parker
By Alex Dueben July 22, 2016
AT WORK
Photo by Kwesi Abbensetts.
PHOTO BY KWESI ABBENSETTS.
Morgan Parker has a long résumé—she teaches and edits—that somehow hasn’t precluded a prolific career as a poet. Her first collection, Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night, came last year; her second, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, is due out in 2017.
A few months ago, Parker’s poem “Hottentot Venus” appeared in the Spring issue of The Paris Review. Her use of famous names and long, playful titles (“Ryan Gosling Wearing a T-shirt of Macaulay Culkin Wearing a T-Shirt of Ryan Gosling Wearing a T-Shirt of Macaulay Culkin”) suggests that she’s light of heart—but she is, as one reviewer put it,“as set on understanding the world as on changing it.” Race and femininism are central to her work, which explores ways to look at the present through the past, to examine ordinary life through pop culture, and to consider the events of her own life. We spoke recently about the joys of lengthy titles, how her many jobs intersect, and the process of crafting a personal mythology.
INTERVIEWER
You’re an editor at Amazon’s Little A imprint, an adjunct at Columbia, a cocurator of the poets with attitude reading series, and you are one half of the Other Black Girl collective. That sounds like a lot.
PARKER
I know. Just hearing my bio out loud makes me exhausted.
INTERVIEWER
I was really taken with “Hottentot Venus,” which I know will be in There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé. When did you decide that you wanted to use her as a way of talking about certain things?
PARKER
I’ve been writing the poems in There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé for a long time. I’m finally at the point where people have stopped e-mailing me every time something happens with Beyoncé. I was living in this Beyoncé space for maybe four years of my life, writing these poems and experiencing everything through the lens of—not necessarily her, but symbols of black womanhood, celebrity, and the idea of performance. I heard a rumor a while back that Beyoncé was going to be producing a movie about Hottentot Venus, and it suddenly clicked that I had never written about Hottentot Venus in relation to Beyoncé—which was shocking, because there are so many obvious connections. One thing that interests me about Beyoncé is who her predecessors are, and how she’s a kind of symbol for all the different ways that black women are revered but also surveilled in a really intense way, put on display. That happens to me just walking down the street. It happens in another way for black women who are celebrities. The whole legacy of Hottentot Venus is one of dehumanization and display. I was interested in that line between awe or reverence—and also exploitation. Where is that line? What does it mean to be at once upheld and at the same time continually made to feel less than? All these questions belonged in the manuscript, which I think of as kind of a tome of black womanhood.
INTERVIEWER
Having read some of your other work, like the “Magical Negro” series, when I saw the title of your next book, I had this conception of what the book is and how it uses celebrity as a way to talk about identity and experience and perception.
PARKER
Absolutely. Not all the poems in the book are about Beyoncé or even reference her. Maybe less than ten? I’m interested in how that lens shifts readers’ understanding of the confessional poems in the book and their understanding of the poems that reference visual art or jazz. One thing I’m getting at is historical connection. I’m aiming to use my subjectivity to reflect a more widely held experience.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think when you’re using a Beyoncé reference or just a pop culture reference, people respond to it differently than if you reference jazz or classical art?
PARKER
Yes, which I’ve never understood. My first book has a lot of pop-culture references as well—Jay-Z, the Real Housewives, all kinds of media and celebrities. I write out of trying to archive and record my particular experience. It would feel false if I didn’t include all those things that really shape contemporary life. I’m not the first person to do that. O’Hara did that, Eliot did that. I don’t really see what is so difficult for folks to grasp about it, but I think it’s a debate wrapped up in class and race, and what constitutes high and low art. I’m using pop references, but not in a light or gimmicky way. The poems are exploring and troubling something. My references may look different from someone else’s, but in my life I experience the Real Housewives more than I experience Greek myth. These are my contemporary myths and symbols.
INTERVIEWER
Some of the opposition is about dating the poem—imagining having to explain the references in the future.
PARKER
That’s true. Some writers want to write something that doesn’t exist within a time, but I’m not interested in that. I want to capture particular moments in time. In college, I double majored in anthropology and creative writing, and I’ve always found the two practices very connected. I’ve always seen my writing as an attempt to document and be specific in that documentation.
INTERVIEWER
In your poem “A Brief History of the Present,” you start out referencing the movie In the Heat of the Night and then segue into talking about contemporary events that echo between the past and the present, which is key.
PARKER
parker-bookThat’s one thing I’m obsessed with, especially in talking about black womanhood. I was talking to a friend earlier about how I really experience all time periods—the past, the present, the future—on the same plane in some way. I think “echo” is a good way to describe it. There are so many experiences we have that someone has had before and someone will have again. I am hyperaware of patterns and repetition in society. The way that history repeats and rewrites. It’s a way of connecting with other people who are here, and also with people who are no longer here.
Being a black American, it’s easy to explain in terms of trauma. You’re aware that you’re not the first person feeling and experiencing the thing that’s happening, whether it’s violence or discrimination or exploitation. I think there’s a lot to explore there and I think that there’s a lot to talk about being connected to that history. Our conception of history and its relation to the present is always shifting.
INTERVIEWER
In your description of the Other Black Girl Collective, you wrote, “With energy, brutal honesty, dark humor, anger and pride, we aim to create a new Black Girl mythology—one centered around possibility and freedom.” That use of the word mythology is very intentional.
PARKER
I think personal narrative is really important for the individual and for a collective and for a people. I think it’s important to have agency in that narrative. There’s so much about contemporary life where one story is written upon the person by the outside world, by circumstance. It feels necessary for me as an artist, and for my collaborator, Angel Nafis, to seek our own understanding of ourselves. It’s in the name, The Other Black Girl, that we’re responding to a held perception. To the tendency of people to confuse us for one another. What is a black girl? Or rather, what is your preconceived idea of a black girl? A lot of those ideas are cliché and a lot of them are dangerous. I think it’s important for us to really explore multiplicity and idiosyncrasy and that’s where the mythology comes in, to create touch points that feel relevant to us and not received.
I think of it as a sort of curation of the things that make up my life. Some of them might be obvious, but others will be surprising. I think it’s important to call those things out and say, This is what’s important to me, this is what has shaped me. The same goes for the way we’re thinking about history. It’s about context. We all are contextualized within something and that gives us meaning and it gives our identities something to hang onto. I exist in the context of these women who came before me or I exist in the context of these television shows that are airing the same time that I’m alive.
INTERVIEWER
And that perception of you that others have exists within the same cultural context.
PARKER
I try to make my poems fight against—but also acknowledge—that perception. It feels like a very important practice to say, I know what preconceived notions the reader might have, so how can I manipulate that? Even when the reader is me. What are the preconceived notions I have about myself and how can I challenge them?
INTERVIEWER
One of the first things people will notice about your work is that you like long, complicated titles, which I love.
PARKER
I think that titles are very, very important, and I have so much fun with titles. I think they should be fun. It’s important for me as I’m writing, and for readers, that the title not just be “Today” or “Leaves.” It’s giving you a preview of what you’re getting into, sets up a situation or asks a question. It doesn’t stand on its own, it’s part of the conversation and it’s a declaration. My poems are really different in aesthetic, and different in content and very different in tone. The titles really help to orient and reorient the reader. I notice it especially when I give readings. I’ll read a title and people will settle into their seats in a particular way, then when I move to a new poem, I’ll see them poised in another way, adjusting to the new tone.
INTERVIEWER
You jump around aesthetically a lot from poem to poem.
PARKER
I get bored easy. The number one thing for me in writing is to entertain myself and challenge myself and scare myself and push myself. Plus, people are complex. I think it’s important to show that a kind of showy, glittery poem about Beyoncé can exist alongside a much quieter poem about depression.
INTERVIEWER
Do you feel pressure to balance your more personal poems against the poems where you’re writing about culture and celebrity?
PARKER
I don’t think much about it. It happens very naturally for me. Again, I think about myself and my interior, personal poems within a cultural context. Maybe I’m watching an episode of Top Chef and I hear a line and that makes me think about something I said in therapy. It’s not a matter of reaching into one bowl and then reaching into the other. And in that way, all of the poems are deeply personal. I’m often described as a confessional poet. I don’t necessarily self-identify that way, but I do know that I love to confess. It feels necessary to a healthy psyche and a poem’s success. It’s a powerful feeling to admit or come to terms with truth.
INTERVIEWER
How does spending part of your day thinking about yourself, thinking about poetry, thinking about these ideas, affect your roles as a teacher and editor?
PARKER
I’m very self-reflective naturally—possibly to a fault. If it’s possible for someone to be too self-aware due to too many years of therapy, I have that disease. It’s just how I live, but I do think it helps me when I’m working with other people. So much of editing and so much of teaching is understanding how people think. Understanding what they’re trying to say and helping them to say it better. Really, like a therapist, it’s asking them the right questions to get them there. When I’m editing a short story, for example, I kind of go about it the same way as when I’m editing my own work. What isn’t sitting right? What questions can I ask to get to the bottom of what I’m really trying to say? My editing process is rooted in a curiosity about psychology and how people think—and a tendency not to leave things alone.
Alex Dueben has written for The Rumpus, the Poetry Foundation, the Daily Beast, and elsewhere. His interview with William Gibson was included in Conversations with William Gibson.
Morgan What, Morgan Who?
Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Morgan Parker is the author of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé (Tin House Books 2017) and Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night (Switchback Books 2015), which was selected by Eileen Myles for the 2013 Gatewood Prize and a finalist for the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award. Parker received her Bachelors in Anthropology and Creative Writing from Columbia University and her MFA in Poetry from NYU. Her poetry and essays have been published and anthologized in numerous publications, including The Paris Review, The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, Best American Poetry 2016, The New York Times, and The Nation. Parker is the recipient of a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a 2016 Pushcart Prize, and a Cave Canem graduate fellow. She is the creator and host of Reparations, Live! at the Ace Hotel in New York. With Tommy Pico, she co-curates the Poets With Attitude (PWA) reading series, and with Angel Nafis, she is The Other Black Girl Collective. She is a Sagittarius, and she lives in Los Angeles.
Briefly Noted
Melvin Backman
The New Yorker. 93.16 (June 5, 2017): p97.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
http://www.newyorker.com/
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[...]
There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce, by Morgan Parker (Tin House). This singular poetry collection is a dynamic meditation on the experience of, and societal narratives surrounding, contemporary black womanhood: "I do whatever I want because I could die any minute. / I don't mean YOLO I mean they are hunting me." The book, Parker's second, responds to the work and the lives of women like Carrie Mae Weems, the Hottentot Venus, Michelle Obama, and Beyonce Knowles-Carter. Her language is by turns worshipful and profane, her tone colloquial and confessional. Ranging from orderly couplets to an itemized list titled after Jay Z's "99 Problems" to lines interrupted by gaping white space, these exquisite poems defy categorization.
Women poets who challenge boundaries: offering invaluable perspectives on gender, politics and life on the domestic front, these four diverse poets work in a range of styles to create work that's moving and deeply personal
Julie Hale
BookPage. (Apr. 2017): p20.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage
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Channeling the quick-change nature of contemporary experience, Morgan Parker's intoxicating There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce (Tin House, $14.95, 80 pages, ISBN 9781941040539) is both an of-the-moment book and a collection for the ages. In aggressive poems packed with
pop-culture references, Parker explores her identity as a black woman, often writing without the constraints imposed by punctuation. The freedom gives her work a sense of breathless, unchecked urgency.
From Beyonce to Michelle Obama, Parker invokes a gallery of cultural icons as she probes the nature of African-American womanhood. "Will I accidentally live forever/And be sentenced to smile at men/I wish were dead," she writes in "The President's Wife."
Filled with mid-stanza mood shifts, the poems track the movement of Parker's mind, flying high on a cloud of grown-up sophistication one moment ("records curated to our allure, incense, unconcern"), then telling the world to go to hell ("I don't give any/shits at all ..."). "I live somewhere imaginary," Parker writes. That place, the reader suspects, is poetry.
Five women poets: strong new works for language lovers everywhere
Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal. 142.3 (Feb. 15, 2017): p93.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
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Parker, Morgan. There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce. Tin House. Feb. 2017.80p. ISBN 9781941040539. pap. $14.95; ebk. ISBN 9781941040546. POETRY
Cheeky and luscious yet ever aching, this collection from Pushcart Prize winner Parker (Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night) uses a tough vernacular to unfold the story of a black woman. She's sybaritic with a reason ("When I drink anything/ out of a martini glass/I feel untouched by/ professional and sexual/rejection"), battles anguish her way ("I could die any minute of depression/I just want to have sex most of the time"), and sees the world measuring her harshly even as she measures herself ("I'm not woman enough for these days"). In her quest, Beyonce serves as touchstone, both dream icon and arguing point (see the title), and it's refreshing to see her entertain possibilities ("Today your open eyes are two fresh buds/ anything could be waiting") as she tiptoes through the "garden of soiled panties." VERDICT Passionate and engaged, honest yet not earnest, this work has the occasional stretched phrase but is highly recommended.
There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce
Briana Shemroske
Booklist.
113.11 (Feb. 1, 2017): p17.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
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There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce.
By Morgan Parker.
Feb. 2017. 96p. Tin House, $14.95 (9781941040539). 811.
"Today your open eyes are two fresh buds," Parker concludes in "Poem on Beyonces birthday,"--"Anything could be
waiting." And in this simmering stew of pop culture and politics, history and humor, wild imagination and wit,
anything really could be waiting. Parkers second collection, following her prizewinning debut, Other People's Comfort
Keeps Me Up at Night (2015), exquisitely examines American values, often summoning its celebrities--Beyonce,
Michelle Obama, Lou Reed--to illuminate society's staggering shortcomings and the intricacies of black womanhood.
"These are Dangerous Times, Man," Parker titles one poem, and so they are as she takes on various personas. As
Michelle Obama, Parker considers invisibility ("Am I a moon no one sees"); as Beyonce, she ponders performance
("Never give them / what they want, when they want it"); as the Hottentot Venus, she laments captivity ("I am
technically nothing / human"). Yet despite fluctuations in voice, these poems are, without a doubt, Parker's as she
encapsulates vulnerability, feminism, and utter fearlessness in rhythmic, glittering verse. In a nod to Mickalene
Thomas, Parker writes, "We bright enough to blind you." Her words truly are.--Briana Shemroske
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Shemroske, Briana. "There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 17. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481244741&it=r&asid=f87f8101cae59c83e6a8dc3a29079d2d.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A481244741
9/30/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night
Publishers Weekly.
262.20 (May 18, 2015): p63.
COPYRIGHT 2015 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night
Morgan Parker. Switchback (SPD, dist.), $15 trade paper (80p) ISBN 978-0-9861876-1-2
In this debut collection, 2013 winner of the Gatewood Prize from Switchback Books (selected by Eileen Myles),
Parker plays with pop culture and personal history to craft poems of deep intelligence and quick wit. The poems
inhabit a world of Real Housewives and Jay-Z, repurposed song lyrics and emptied drinks, where "Touching you on
the shoulder/ is the most honest I've been/ all week." These declarations have their own style of confident fun, as
"Cinderella jams to Curtis Mayfield/ while scrubbing her/ own vomit from the bathroom/ tiles. On her hands and
knees/ she's all like,/ Damn why/ I gotta be the man of the house?" Parker displays mettle when, instead of writing a
simple ode to the Moon, she spits bourbon at it: "you said you'd never disrupt space/ I said hell I own it." It's all the
more exciting because that mettle reveals itself to be vulnerable and desirous, to be as set on understanding the world
as on changing it. Like the best poets, Parker moves conversations forward--conversations about poetry, race,
femininity. Readers will do themselves a favor by paying attention to this powerful debut. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night." Publishers Weekly, 18 May 2015, p. 63. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA415324365&it=r&asid=6ac86283537099bfa5de2ba2995c0f56.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A415324365
‘There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé’ and other best poetry collections
By Elizabeth Lund February 21
“There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce,” by Morgan Parker. (Tin House)
There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé (Tin House) by Morgan Parker is a brash, risqué collection that explores what it means to be a black woman in contemporary American culture. Parker, whose first book won the Gatewood Prize, is as self-assured as the women who appear in these pages, including Queen Latifah, Nikki Giovanni and Michelle Obama. Cultural references, old songs and classic poems spark observations about feminism, sex and desire at a time when “There’s far too many of me dying./ The present is not so different.” A variety of speakers make cameos, including Jesus’ wife, who has been erased from history, and Beyoncé and Lady Gaga, who have traded bodies in a “Freaky Friday”-like incident. Each woman in this fierce collection wants to be seen for who she is, not what society wants her to be, and each demands respect. As one woman explains: “There are more beautiful things than Beyoncé”: self-awareness and education, for example. Wryly celebrating personal growth, the speaker notes: “Combing your records you’ll see the past and think OK/Once I was a different kind of person.”
BOOK REVIEW: THERE ARE MORE BEAUTIFUL THINGS THAN BEYONCÉ BY MORGAN PARKER
Reviewed by Ryan Boyd
There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé
Poems by Morgan Parker
Tin House Books, February 2017
$14.95; 80 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-194104053-9
One way (of many) to describe how good poetry operates is to say that it reorganizes reality in some pleasurable or bracing manner. In concert with a reader, it enacts a spacious, flexile, indeterminate vocabulary for paying more attention to the world, for italicizing human and natural events, for vocalizing selfhood. It offers new visions of old spaces. There is a long humanist tradition of saying this, but it bears repeating under market capitalism. Moreover, it suits Morgan Parker’s new collection of poetry, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, very well.
For an American poet who wants to write honestly, this reorganization entails uneasy questions about race, gender, and sexual identity; in particular, who gets to describe them, and how. This would be true of any era, but in the shadow of Donald Trump these questions are especially grave. Parker, who completed her graduate work at NYU and now lives in Brooklyn, is young, African American, and a woman. Identity alone would not necessarily make her a keen observer, of course, but fed into the kind of lyric arsenal she has, lived experience makes for a vivid, nimble mode of poetic cultural critique, one that encompasses far more than the poet’s single self.
Beyoncé Knowles, as you might guess, hovers over the volume like a demiurge or guiding mythos. She appears in various guises and moods, different situations and positions, never quite the star we think we know from her public appearances. In one poem there is even a white Beyoncé. Behind it all is the suspicion that Knowles, like us, is hurting and vulnerable, and that this produces both art and alienation. As the speaker of “What Beyoncé Won’t Say on a Shrink’s Couch” asks, “what if I said I’m tired / and they heard wrong / said sing it”?
Dominant though her presence is, Beyoncé takes her place amid a larger network of famous African Americans: Audre Lorde, Tina Turner, Jay Z, Nina Simone, Michelle Obama, Fred Hampton, Billie Holiday, and Amiri Baraka, among many others. In turn, the constant scrutiny under which the famous labor mirrors the broader surveillance of black bodies across the United States. This racialized economy involves great material violence (witness the disproportionate killing of black citizens by police or the obscene reality of America’s prison system) but also conceptual and imaginative distortion by discourses of politics, economics, ethics, medicine, and historiography. (In “All They Want is My Money My Pussy My Blood,” “They ask me about slavery. They say Martin Luther King. / At school they learned that Black people happened.”) Such erasure can be enabled by literature, too. Think of how little Jim gets to talk in Huckleberry Finn; think Kipling’s “white man’s burden”; think about how Saul Bellow’s later fiction depicts black people. Indeed, language entangles its users even when they mean to be honest: the way “The President Has Never Said the Word Black” interprets it, codes of racial silence and fatuous civility muzzle the biracial leader of the free world—“When he opens his mouth / a chameleon is inside, starving.”
Thus, Parker’s restorative project—her vision of democratic and psychological health—comprises many smaller battles over how to describe, archive, and remake the world. She has as much faith in the human imagination as Wallace Stevens, to whom “13 Ways of Looking at a Black Girl” explicitly alludes, ever did. A new poetics might point toward a new politics.
Our bodies are always on our minds. Women’s bodies in particular remain a site of intense conflict, with various institutions, often dominated by men, seeking to survey and administer them. Here too the poet seeks a counter-discourse of what you might call exuberant anxiety. Parker’s typical speaker is an edgy, loquacious introvert, alive to the world, especially its cities, but wary of its terrible shocks and slow-motion losses. “I am an elastic / winter,” asserts “Hottentot Venus.” The speaker of “Afro” is “glowing like / treasure in my autopsy.” “Black Woman with Chicken” centers upon a “Blurry / princess, self-narrating,” who in turn finds the world to be a “wondrous glut.” “It’s Getting Hot in Here So Take Off All Your Clothes” (named after the hook to a Nelly song) is narrated by someone who escapes men that “shout like lizards” and finds ecstatic annihilation: “I step into a volcano / & melt like the witch I am. I want to be flawed // all the way to bed.” That same speaker concludes with a challenge to would-be lovers, declaring “How, even with flaws / under these clothes I could be the boss // of you without them.”
Parker’s power doesn’t emerge from ideological hectoring or topical reportage. Nor does it consist in blunt confessional disclosure. These poems are not essays with line breaks. Hers is a poet’s labor, which means that it is more broadly aesthetic and imaginative than any journalistic prose could be, and stranger. What does it mean to have an embodied mind in America in 2017? What if that body is black, or a woman’s, or some other marginalized individual’s? What if it isn’t? Poetry and the police both drag their subjects into view, but the former is much more likely to have the citizen’s best interests in mind.
Ultimately, Parker conceives of contemporary, technologically mediated selfhood as a messy, contingent endeavor rather than something governed by theoretical exactitude. It never ends, and you never get the results you want. “I am a tree and some fruits are good and some are bad,” concludes the first poem. The best we can do, suggests “Another Another Autumn in New York,” is pay attention and sing when the world deserves it:
I bless
the dark, tuck
myself into a canyon
of steel. I breathe
dried honeysuckle
and hope. I live somewhere
imaginary.
Parker has been taking detailed notes; her lyric exegesis of life in America is unlike anything I’ve read in a long time. One could list forebears: Gwendolyn Brooks, Frank O’Hara, Adrienne Rich, William Carlos Williams, even John Ashbery. But Parker has created her own voice. There are many things more beautiful than Beyoncé, or as beautiful, and a whole lot of them ended up in these pages.
Ryan Boyd (@ryanaboyd) is a poet and critic living in Los Angeles, where he teaches at the University of Southern California.
Flaws and All
For Morgan Parker, there is no divide between what can and cannot exist as poetic language.
By Christopher Soto MARCH 17, 2017
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Soto_Parker-Review_AP
Beyoncé performs in Flushing, New York, 2016. (AP Photo)
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With no one else to call on, not even God sometimes, Beyoncé represents a model of perfection in Morgan Parker’s newest collection of poems, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé. The pop icon exemplifies confidence, glamour, beauty, and grace; she is an idol that many fans use to generate visions of their best selves.
But Parker’s poems are mostly concerned with those on the other side of the screens: What does it mean to be always striving toward the perfection of Beyoncé? What does it mean to constantly regard yourself as less than perfect?
In the book’s title poem, Parker writes,
There are more beautiful things than Beyoncé: self-awareness,
Leftover mascara in clumps, recognizing a pattern
This is for all the grown women out there
Whose countries hate them and their brothers
Who carry knives in their purses down the street
Maybe they will not get out alive
There are things more beautiful than Beyoncé—maybe a controversial position to some—and, Parker is saying, Beyoncé is the conduit through which many people could find those things. That is if, Parker implies, we could manage to get past the idolatry. By acknowledging, if not embracing, imperfection, Parker allows the struggles and the messiness of life—with a particular focus on black womanhood—to breathe.
Originally from a suburb of Los Angeles, Parker completed her undergraduate studies at Columbia University before moving on to receive her MFA in poetry at New York University. In 2013, she was selected for the Gatewood Prize by Eileen Myles, which led to the publication of her first book, Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night (Switchback Books). And she’s received fellowships from Cave Canem and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. Currently, she works as an editor for the Amazon Publishing imprint Little A and teaches the occasional creative-writing course.
In many ways, Parker is a millennial poet. Her new collection is filled with allusions to contemporary black visual art, music, culture. The predominance of pop culture in Parker’s work feels intrinsically like New York School poetry and brings Frank O’Hara’s poem “Having a Coke With You” to mind. What would be lost if popular culture were not incorporated into poetry? What if Frank O’Hara wrote “Having a Drink With You” instead?
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Contemporary poets often shy away from popular culture, possibly because it marks the poem’s relevance to a specific time, leaving little room for the oft-desired timelessness. However, popular culture has become a trademark of Parker’s work. She doesn’t seem to be preoccupied with timelessness as such. Rather, her poems are concerned with specificity of both time and place, depicting the intimacies and intricacies of contemporary life as a black woman in America. It is through popular culture that a shared experience is created; it’s a way to bridge differences. And yet, Parker is also able to reach the elevated language of poetry, most directly by using works from the canon of fine art as the other main referents in her poetry.
In “Slouching Toward Beyoncé,” Parker enters into conversation with William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming.” “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” Yeats asks, alluding to the second coming of Christ after a time of social turbulence. Parker responds,
O BeyoncéI love you
your fragments like a map.
I think I am addicted.
You soaked blueyou trouble
in my sight. The beast has come
at last:hair of a cattail
and legs of a palm.
What is also of particular interest is how the signifiers of glamour (sequins, bubble baths with lavender and cucumbers) in her poems are juxtaposed to mental health. There is an admiration for leisure and luxury at the same time that she questions what it means to desire or to be desired or to be alone. In the poem “Beyoncé in Third Person,” Parker writes, “I’m a little unpolished / behind the scenes. I am lonely / and so are all my friends.” For Parker, loneliness and depression are not issues to hide but rather issues to be discussed openly. Wine becomes a way to cope with trauma and also a way to celebrate survival. These poems throw glitter and humor and lavishness onto deep hurting. In “Welcome to the Jungle,” Parker writes,
With champagne I try expired white ones
I mean pills I mean men
I think I’m going crazy sometimes really
you think I’m joking I’m never joking.
For Parker, there is no divide between what can and cannot exist as poetic language. Her lyrical poems are often arranged in couplets, with occasional internal spacing to dramatize temporal and idea shifts. The images are often clear and direct and sometimes surreal, punctuated with social commentary, raw feelings, and wit. Parker’s brilliance is found in her ability to complicate the gaze on black womanhood. By depicting the varieties of experience, from Hottentot Venus to Michelle Obama, Parker is able reclaim black womanhood as beautiful in its entirety.
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Christopher SotoChristopher Soto is a poet based in Brooklyn, New York.
OTHER PEOPLE’S COMFORT KEEPS ME UP AT NIGHTGINA MYERS13.08.15
book_coverOther People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night
by Morgan Parker
Switchback Books
$16
In Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night, Morgan Parker looks America in the eye and doesn’t blink or run away. Instead, she keeps coming at it with an unrelenting fierceness that is at turns funny, biting, and heartbreaking. Selected by Eileen Myles for Switchback Books’ 2013 Gatewood Prize, Parker’s debut pulls no punches as it delivers poem after poem of smart, insightful criticism of our current age, where the American dream is no more and the struggle is real for so many as we live in, and attempt to push back against, our patriarchal, racist, capitalist society.
Drawing on reality tv shows, music, and life experience, Parker creates sharp poems that explore the every day in concise, straight-forward language. There’s evidence of a New York School influence, especially in poems like “I Was Trotting Along and Suddenly,” which echoes (and cleverly updates) Frank O’Hara: “I’m at parties acting perfectly a fool.” However, these poems move beyond that into something fresh, delivering an urgency and realness that feels necessary right now. Parker is New York School meets BreakBeat, which Kevin Coval describes as “poems readable, listenable, relatable, and unfuckwitable,” in his introduction to The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop. It’s a poetry that is “alive and relatable, a language of the working: all the horror and hope and humanity.” And Other People’s Comfort treats the reader to precisely that: poetry that is alive and full of horror, hope, and humanity.
From the very opening poem in the collection, “There Are Other Things I Want to Explain but They Are Mysteries,” Parker comes out strong and delivers poetry that teems with life, effectively using enjambment and a lack of punctuation to create lines that rush forth to its conclusion that hits like a brick wall, temporarily stunning the reader:
What is usually said about love I ignore
worship instead wilted flowers gleaming
in our throats what you don’t know is
I envy this world and want to save it
squeeze its bloodied hand like so
saying this will sting but only for a minute
our primary concern will always be
the gnawing feeling like when I wake up
to wonder how many serial killers have entered
my life how the truth can feel like
ant hills their sandy curves their tiny crests
like nipples what I really want to ask is
what do you think of the idea of progress
and is it an injury I can fix
Throughout the collection there are a number of poems that share this effect of stopping the reader dead in his or her tracks with the final line, such as “Hot Serpent in the City,” whose cascading lines end suddenly with the declaration, “you don’t give a damn.”
The speakers throughout the collection are streetwise and tough, prefer Timberlake to Plath, and find inspiration from Gwendolyn Brooks, Curtis Mayfield, and Jay-Z. In “Boys, Boys, Boys,” the speaker declares:
The wanting more
can make a sister crazy so I settle
for free shit: Trade you digits for dinner
and treat this like the business it is.
I can make a mixtape my own
damn self.
morgan_headshot
Alongside this toughness, there is a vulnerability too. The voice that emerges throughout the collection is smart, complex, and one of someone who knows heartbreak, who carries pain, and who sometimes uses toughness as a mask in order to get through the day, but that doesn’t mean the toughness isn’t real too. In “Everything Is Bothering Me,” Parker writes:
All my friends say baby
don’t go to work tomorrow
I go home quietly
wake up and go to work
I can do it forever
She knows the bad feelings—the reason to stay home from work—don’t disappear in a day, and so she goes on, as we must if we want to survive. We must always go on. In another stanza of the poem, the priorities of a capitalist society are questioned as the notion of “being present” is turned on its head:
So I can be more present
I am getting e-mails on my phone
there are other places
ways of living
we have ruled them out
The pain the speaker experiences is existential, captures a modern day loneliness, and is grounded in generations of white supremacy. In “Epistolary Poem For Reader, Brother, Grandmother, Men (or, When I Say I Want To Spit You Up),” Parker writes, “Maybe if I knew my grandmother / and the white family she worked for, / I would feel different / about everything around me.” Later in the same poem:
The past has not been as rewarding
as I had hoped.
Instead it feels
like something dark and hard is back there.
I spit it up
like a stringy peach.
In a strong series of poems called “Miss Black America,” Parker offers her own spin on the Curtis Mayfield classic, asking what this hypothetical woman is like and how will she be seen by others (“Do the white boys back it up / Are their mothers terrified”). The poems effectively employ anaphora, asking again and again “does she”: “Does she grind slow / on back-when harmonies”; “Does she got that good hair / from her mama’s side // Does she let her / white friends touch”; “Does she wish for world peace / equality or has she given up // On the platform is she for sale”; “For her crown does she get / 40 acres.” Of course, this woman isn’t hypothetical, nor is it a single woman.
Alongside these sharp critiques, there are also humorous moments throughout the collection including a poem called “I’d Rather Sink…Than Call Brad For Help!” in which the speaker insists, “Brad if you’re / out there I am / doing just fine.” Parker’s reality TV poems also offer humor while simultaneously providing criticism. Through her examination of their tropes and characters, she turns the cameras back on the audience, calling attention to the performative nature of so-called reality and the viewers’ own complicity in it. In a fake audition tape for The Real World, the speaker says, “The viewers want me / at a three-drink minimum.” And later, she promises, “Give me a drink and I will do a service.” In “Real Housewife Considers Feminist Theory While Sketching Designs for Her Handbag Line,” the speaker concludes, “Women / are a problem with a name” and “Power is money and my body glistens.”
Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night is a powerful debut collection from a promising new and necessary voice. Parker’s collection is hyper-contemporary, drawing on what it means to be alive today when our phones autocorrect our texts and we’ve given into a kind of living that prioritizes work, money, and power over justice, equality, and happiness. But as Coval notes in The BreakBeat Poets, “[W]e, this country and culture, are at a breaking point.” And it is writers like Parker who will help lead the way, through both bearing witness to this life and calling it to our attention, shaking us awake from the mind-numbing drudgery many have slipped into.
Tags: reviews
Prodding the Line
reviewed by Chrissy Martin
Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night (Switchback Books, 2015) is filled with electricity; it is a book of quick-moving poems throwing sparks of humor and discomfort. Morgan Parker’s debut collection does not come into the poetic world muffling the rattle of the doorknob, gently closing the door behind it. Rather, it strides in confidently, walking around the house with its shoes on, demanding a place for itself and collections like it. Parker’s book is powerfully unapologetic, giving way to a refreshing and necessary voice. Through fable, personal narrative, music, and reality TV, her poems navigate through what it means to be black, female, and working class in America.
Parker creates a careful balance of critique and humor, leaving the reader satisfied but never allowing them to feel completely at ease. In her series of reality TV poems, she plays with femininity, performance, and privilege through modern tropes of Real Housewives cast members; the continuous presence of an audience in this set of poems works to constantly remind the reader of the viewers’ desire to see women—in this instance, black women—in this role. In “If My Housemate Fucks with Me I Would Get So Real (Audition Tape Take 1),” the speaker brags to the camera that she is:
Brooding tatted over my art.
Otherwise, black.
Can do angry, can’t do
accents. I need a little coaching or
provocation. Opinionated and
everything a man wants.
Lips and boobs camera-ready.
In “Real Housewife Defends Herself in Front of a Live Studio Audience,” the speaker tells the audience, “To behave like a lady / is to refrain oneself from pulling fake // hair extensions out of the head of a fake- / ass bitch . . . .” Though in “America This Is For You (Audition Tape Take 2),” the speaker closes the series by pointing directly at America’s desire for her performance, promising, “Give me a drink and I will do a service.”
Parker actively works in the contemporary, employing modern voices such as Jay Z for epigraphs, while reworking familiar voices such as Frank O’Hara. Her poem “I Was Trotting Along and Suddenly” borrows its title from O’Hara and modernizes the piece by declaring:
I’m more inclined
to Timberland than Plath, and I like
to get stoned, make my stomach
a living drum. I’d let down my hair
if I had any, step out of this golden
barbershop fresh as a cold pear.
In her poetry, Parker entwines what is privileged and what is othered, and in doing so, calls attention to the divide between the two. She unabashedly prods at the line with poems in this collection wearing titles such as: “How to Piss in Public and Maintain Femininity,” “Greetings from Struggle City,” “Real Housewife Considers Feminist Theory While Sketching Designs for Her Handbag Line,” and “Poem Made of Empty Prescription Bottles From the Garbage in Front of Bill Murray’s House.”
The most striking critique in the collection is the series of poems “Miss Black America,” which highlights the separation of blackness from femininity and traditional notions of beauty. Toying again with commonly held tropes of black women, these poems work in repetition, engulfing the reader in questions: “Does she flat-iron / or out-of-package-relaxer”; “Does she let her / white friends touch”; “Is she a doll for you does she come / with a special comb”; “Is she lathered in cocoa butter / under her swimsuit.” In the final poem of the series, Parker abandons satire, silencing the room and writing starkly, “Does she wish for world peace / equality or has she given up.”
-3/26/16
OTHER PEOPLE’S COMFORT KEEPS ME UP AT NIGHT
Morgan Parker
Switchback Books,
Morgan Parker’s debut collection Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night embodies the discomfort of otherness via social narratives of race, class, and gender. As a black woman combating America’s central dogma of racial anesthesia, her personas and conceits dismantle the machinery of white patriarchy by means of her incisive gaze.
In “White Walls White People,” the speaker interprets black art for a white audience. The audience isn’t interested in art; they’re interested in her. Closely-watched, she navigates the gap that exists between their “cutting-edge / mission statements on white letterhead” and their fearful attention. At first, she feigns a caustic nonchalance toward “the nerds today,” in the gallery in which she holds the power of the interpreter: “see how when I hang black / on my white walls it’s fine.” Gaps of white space between words become more frequent. The divide between speaker and audience grows. Her air of nonchalance chafes. She grasps for her own vision of herself in this space but still holds them up in comparison:
they’re impressed with my work I’ve lived
I am very Afro-centric They make pictures
where lips are faces and in them the dark is what stands out
She is compelled to compare her own perception to others’, fragmenting any self-knowledge with social context that has “framed what I’ve framed.”
Each position Parker’s poems assume, from confessional speaker to reality TV diva to pageant contestant, critiques its own performance in the ever-present light of white male dominance. Her “Miss Black America” series revamps a tired trope with camp and satire drawn from across black history and pop culture. The isolated installments may at first leave a reader wanting, but in total, these short pieces instruct the slow, deliberate ways of seeing the book requires:
On the platform is she for sale
or a raised fist
Is she lathered in cocoa butter
under her swimsuit
Is her body filled up darker
than blue does it shine
There she is, displayed, as a slave. There again, as Angela Davis. Then she becomes a body, devoid of agency, passively “lathered” and “filled up.” This line of argument pushes toward objectification of that body but line breaks and spatial play pace the lines to engage the reader in genuine shock and understanding. With each line of these poems, Parker controls breath and rhythm, creating a distinctive affect that she transforms into protest.
Morgan Parker's "Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night"
The title grabbed me in such a way, I had to buy Morgan Parker's Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night without reading a single line. I tore through about half the poems, before realizing I was exhausted and emotionally drained.
Parker is an accomplished poet, publisher and creative writing instructor. She builds vivid pictures, and transmits such strong feelings, in so few words, I am thrilled! Parker shares a vivid portrait of life in America, pulling no punches and guided by an unerring moral compass. This collection of poems observes life, from how we use social media to outright discrimination, with an immediacy and power I've rarely found in modern American poetry.
Here one of my favorites (via Pank Magazine):
If My Housemate Fucks With Me I Would Get So Real (Audition Tape Take 1)
I didn’t come here to make friends.
Buildings spit their stomachs at me
and I spit back, down the sidewalk
into a bitch’s hair. I am a forehead
careening in clouds, a dirty tree branch
brushing against the shingles
of the production room. I am
groundbreaking: two as one.
Brooding tattooed over my art.
Otherwise, black.
Can do angry, can’t do
accents. I need little coaching,
provocation. Opinionated and
Everything a man wants.
Lips and boobs camera-ready.
If I hear you’re talking shit about me
in your confessional interview,
please know
seven birds have fallen dead at my feet
right out of the sky.
I learned this right hook here
when I was only six. Bitch, please.
I’m so real my hair is going gray,
legs bruised up like tree bark,
veins of my neck as swollen as
ripe fruit, the cheeks of what is growing.
Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night by Morgan Parker via Amazon