“The high church silence in-between poems is a lonely place to be as a poet,” Iain Haley Pollock joked to the audience in Cheever House, lifting the mood of those who had gathered for his poetry reading hosted by The Kenyon Review.
It was hard not to fall into a contemplative silence, however, after hearing the first poem of the evening, called “A Black Mother’s Child Considers His Lost Dream of Immortality,” written in response to the 1985 MOVE bombing, where the Philadelphia Police Department dropped an incendiary bomb on the home of MOVE, a Black liberation organization, killing 11 people. The narrator of this semi-autobiographical poem imagines how his mom, a Black professor teaching classics, ponders the future of her child against political hostility after the incident. Images of Greek mythology stood alongside unflinchingly devastating lines such as “I think now she had learned that no Black mother can save her children.” The narrator calls to his country, “America, you have eaten your children / to keep your place on the honeyed mountain top,” transforming the nation into a mythical being with the ruthless filicidal tendency typically associated with the myth of Kronos.
One does not have to be well versed in Greek mythology to understand the poems, however, as the images speak for themselves. “I work hard … to make my poems intelligible and accessible,” Pollock said.
His intentional accessibility might be a reflection of Pollock’s interest in the role of a poet as a documentarian who records the current political and cultural events happening around him. “I think it becomes incumbent on artists to help fight against the spin that … helps control the narrative,” he said before reading the titular poem of his most recent collection, All the Possible Bodies. The poem’s narrator considers the fragility of his life as a node in the long family lineage: had his grandfather looked at an officer wrong or been a skin tone darker, he wouldn’t have come home, his mother wouldn’t have gone to college and met his dad and he wouldn’t have been here. George Floyd was not as lucky as the grandfather, the poem acknowledges, condemning the officer who kneeled on his neck and mourning “all the possible bodies dependent on that man and his neck to breathe, breathe, breathe, breathe, breathe.” The audience applauded quietly afterward.
Between the uncompromising poems, Pollock offered moments of levity and thoughtful reflections. At the beginning, Pollock said he would read eight poems before warning the audience not to trust “a poet’s math” (he did present eight poems). Introducing a poem about his experience organizing a public poetry event, he expressed hope that the United States would “return to funding the arts, because I do think it’s an economic driver.” The difficulty of separating the art and the artist was also one of his multiple concerns, as he read a poem detailing the complicated grief he felt dancing in a circle with other Black poets the day Michael Jackson died.
Pollock followed a tradition commonly seen in poetry readings — to start with hard-hitting works and end on more lighthearted ones, or those that “tilt toward joy,” as he put it. The last poem centers around the sight of a little girl dancing in an artless and carefree way after the COVID pandemic, as “each passerby / believes again in cloudless & cerulean. Again / in this day & the possibility of the next.” His selection of poems, alongside mourning the loss of all the possible bodies, ultimately believes in the possibility of change.
In the Q&A that followed, Pollock answered a series of questions, ranging from how his job as a teacher has influenced his poetic practice to giving advice to a budding poet on how to organize poems for a collection. The section ended with him speaking about the barrier between the personal and the political, which is that there’s none. “I think it’s interesting, like, who does write about politics and who feels like they don’t have to write about politics?” he said, leaving the audience considering the political possibilities of poetry.