LAN

I changed my mind; I think Sundays will be a better day for this. Color Online hosts CORA this week:

1)Post a poem by a woman of color. Your choice must be a poet who has written in the last forty years. Do your best to avoid the most anthologized, popular poets unless poetry is new territory for you. In that case, check out why the popular poets are well loved.

Finding a poem by a female comics creator of color turned out to be easier than I thought - and I didn’t have to search far! Nominated for two Glyph Comics Awards, Shatia Hamilton’s webcomic Fungus Grotto is something I’d never heard of before (though I do recall seeing her name over at the Ormes Society page). It’s a fantasy series done in the manga style that all the cool kids love these days, and it begins with this poem, which I’m only gonna link to because it’s pretty long and I don’t wanna have to type it all out.

2)Tell us why you like the poem you chose. Don’t worry about the technical aspects of writing poetry, devices or forms. Give us your reader’s response. How does it make you feel or what does it make you think about? What questions does it raise for you?

The poem sets the proper tone for the story to follow, which is about a human teenage girl who stumbles into an enchanted world that lies literally beneath her feet, populated with unusual characters. A familiar storytelling trope, perhaps, but FG doesn’t come across as a children’s story. (A proper comparison might be to Neil Gaiman’s Stardust.) The poem is cleverly composed in the sense that it starts off sounding sweet and innocent, before taking a sinister turn. The enchanted world lulls the reader into a false sense of security before revealing its hidden agenda, and indeed, many parallels to this can be found in nature. Perhaps it’s no surprise then, that FG is set in a forest.

The poem, even if it comes across as a bit cliched, definitely makes one wonder how its tone will be reflected in the story, what challenges the heroine will face, and how they’ll be overcome, if at all. People tend to forget that the fairy tales we all have grown up with over the generations have become sanitized and have had its rougher edges smoothed off. Much of modern children’s entertainment in America sticks to the middle of the road and makes a conscious and concerted effort to be as inoffensive and tame as possible. Though FG is not meant for young children, I would argue that it has more in common with those long-ago original incarnations of fairy tales, when parents were much less uptight about content.

3)If you are a poetry reader and you can recommend a contemporary woman poet of color, who do you recommend and why? I would really love to hear about emerging or lesser known poets. Introduce us to poets from around the world.

I am not a poetry reader of any kind (though I do own a book of Langston Hughes poetry) and I certainly don’t know of any black women poets outside of Maya Angelou and Nikki Giovanni, who everyone knows. As for FG, to be honest, it’s not the kind of comic that I could seriously get into, but I can attest to its superb art and excellent storytelling skill. Hamilton is immensely talented and deserves both her GCA nominations, and if you dig girls’ manga, then you should definitely give this a look.