Ledes from the Land of Enchantment

Beauty justifies the incoherence | Books

Ask Darryl Lorenzo Wellington if he grew up with religion and he laughs and rolls his eyes. He seems to think the answer is a given. “Well, I’m black and I come from the south.”

He grew up in Savannah, Georgia and moved to Charleston, South Carolina as a young adult. “It’s a very religious place,” he says with a clear Southern accent. “That’s the way it is. But I was only raised by my mother, and she wasn’t overly religious.”

He has grappled with his loss or lack of confidence in his writing for many years, but does not believe that God or religion has many appearances in his first full-length volume of poetry, Psalms at the Present Time, which will be out in November Flowstone press. The first poem is entitled “God and Death” and begins with “God is a resident of the veranda. God is a long-time neighbor who you always imagined could become a closer friend – someone you are used to judging from afar. “

The newest Santa Fe Poet Laureate soon recognizes that God is indeed everywhere in this book. He laughs again. In fact, he laughs a lot. Much seems to be humorous to him, although he doesn’t always share the joke.

“I just assume everyone knows what it’s like to grow up in Georgia. Most black writers will quote some religions for this reason. ”He pauses. “Protestant religion, gospel music. It’s very important to culture, whether you are a believer or not. ”He laughs again, shakes his head. “It’s such a big and complicated subject. James Baldwin was a preacher in his youth. Ministers are so important. All of that sounds a bit clichéd and is less true today than it was in the 70s when I was growing up, but they still have some power. “

During his two-year tenure as the city’s sixth Poet Laureate, Wellington, 54, will be responsible for coordinating and running literary events, including readings and writing workshops, to highlight the importance of poetry in society. It’s a continuation of what he’s done since moving from Charleston to Santa Fe a decade ago. He teaches, performs, writes for rent – and writes for himself. He spends most of his time alone and pursues these goals. He says the most important adjustment to being Santa Fe’s poet laureate in the semi-post-pandemic era is to leave your home to attend public events. While he never expected to be selected for that honor, it seems like an achievement speaking for a man who has focused his life on being creative above all else.

“A big part of my personality is wanting to be independent or to try the best I can. This is my rais-un dee’etre, so to speak, ”he says, stumbling through the French pronunciation of raison d’être or“ reason of being ”. In the mid-1990s he lived in Paris for a year and socialized with old-school surrealists. He returned to the States when he ran out of accommodations – and realized that he had to learn the language to really live in France. “I never learned. I would never learn. “

Pulling quote

“If I can do it nicely enough, that will justify the emotions or even the incoherence. If it’s pretty enough, if it’s eloquent enough, then that satisfies me on a childlike level. “

As a young man, Wellington paid his rent as a parking lot attendant in Savannah and then Charleston. In his spare time he wrote poetry and stories and short articles for local newspapers. It was the dawn of the internet, and a man he knew online asked him to write an entry about the poet Sterling A. Brown for the Encyclopedia Britannica.

“You can look it up if you don’t know it. He’s an amazing early 20th century poet, ”says Wellington. “An editor named Jabari Asim saw this article and called me. He wanted to know about me and whether I would be interested in writing for the Washington Post. He does that a lot, I think, especially with black writers. I said, ‘Of course.’ “

Says Asim, “Darryl’s comments on Sterling Brown were indeed knowledgeable, but his comments on Langston Hughes in the same entry caught my attention. Many African American critics, myself included, tend to fall into a state of worship when they write about Hughes. Darryl was respectful but strict. He is a fearless critic. “

Soon Wellington was writing for several publications and making enough money to quit his parking lot job. “You won’t get super rich [as a magazine writer]but it paid my rent. It was a preferable activity and there was more self-esteem in it. “

Wellington does not claim any fixed aesthetic or affinity with any particular school of poetry. Nor is he exclusively a poet. He does spoken word and performance art, has ventured into stand-up comedy, publishes short stories and book reviews, and writes a monthly column on races for the Santa Fe Reporter. He also has a strong journalistic background. He writes several articles each month on key social issues for the Center for Community Change, a Washington DC-based think tank.

However, poetry is close to his heart. In his eclectic collection he mixes a heightened, lyrical language with much more down-to-earth diction. He’s often funny and he can be downright rude. Sometimes he writes in persona, and sometimes the poems are anchored in his life, but he doesn’t think they are autobiographical. Or it doesn’t matter. The reader can do whatever he wants out of anything. He says that anything he could explain about the content of his poems takes a back seat, whether they are “pretty” or not.

He laughs because it’s such a subjective – even simple – concept. “If I can do it nicely enough, that will justify the emotions or even the incoherence. If it’s pretty enough, if it’s eloquent enough, then that satisfies me on a childlike level. “

In his book, Wellington riffs on God, the joy of rhyme, waking up slowly to write early in the morning, and the devil playing cards before fitting into a series of psalms. Most of them he wrote during the Trump era from 2016 to 2020, although Wellington says they are not all a direct response to the threat he felt from that administration. The psalms are elaborate, focused prayers that focus on sleep and rest, although this topic is not always explicit.

“Peace of mind will flit like fire ants scattering / a flight of frightened and submissive flags / a northward / southward / crouching and directionless migration,” he writes in “Psalm I: Peace of Mind”. In “Psalm II, The Remembered Past” he writes “and the most beautiful hours that you enjoyed this year / that are connected with threads / like ruffles hanging on a dragon.”

“Psalm III: Dwellings” is a prose poem that differs from the short-line pieces before it. Wellington adapted it from a monologue that he had included in a play years earlier. In it, a woman prepares change in a stale, possibly violent marriage. The syntax stops and begins, restless, like an idea that forms and holds on.

Pulling quote

This bread is my body. A photo. A man with full cheeks. A man chokes on his food. His mouth was open. His hand covers it. His style impeccable. A fake preacher. A table with a glass top. A table with a glass top filled with photographs. Above. A dangling symbol. A pretty ball. A prayer of the day.

Wellington’s closest friend in Santa Fe is John Paul Granillo, co-founder of the Alas de Agua Art Collective. They met three or four years ago at a live art event (neither of them can remember) where poets read from their works while Granillo painted. He had his back on the writers so that he could concentrate on his contribution. “But the moment Darryl read his article on time – the meaning of time, the traces time leaves on you, the impressions it leaves on your soul – I turned around just to see who it was. “

Granillo says they talk about art and their life several times a week. But Wellington was hard to spot at first. “He’s super private in some areas and super friendly in others. I think it is a defense mechanism of the south. But you overcome these barriers by showing him authenticity and genuineness. It reveals more quickly and easily. “

At least half the time, Wellington says, he’s just trying to make people laugh. He desperately wants to do stand-up comedy when it’s safe to be in the crowd again. Racism is one of the few topics that he immediately gets serious about, but he also thinks it’s legitimate fodder for his stand-up act. When trying it out, often in comedic monologues that also teach important history, “people are captivated, but they don’t laugh”.

His seriousness about racism is one of the reasons why he writes the column for the reporter, in which he uses his life experiences and perspectives to educate. If the column goes like “Introduction to Blacks” at times, it’s because Santa Fe is a kind of bubble, he says, in which some people think that racial problems that are tearing other cities apart are already resolved or don’t exist here. He thinks it is important to destroy this false utopia, a kind of deliberate naivety towards the outside world.

“I taught a class on poetry and protest,” he says. “There was a woman who said she took every poetry class she could. And I know this is just one person, but I was talking about Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner and she asked me who they are. It wasn’t a joke. She had never heard of them! ”He slaps the table a few times and practically screams with laughter. “That was definitely a ‘Santa Fe only’ moment. But I thought that is just great, because now you will only know who these people are, what I will tell you. ”

You don’t fall asleep anywhere.

They rank several places, states, Saturnalia

and balance them out. And walking suspension

no less than the mischievous display case

chase the bright red rubber balls,

Multiple cityscapes, lines. In this way

-Site the best of it. The final verdict

is no less accidental than criticizing a hotel

Whether that was good sleep, bad sleep

Good sleep, bad sleep: too many factors

gradually readjust the room

– From psalms for the present

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