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Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology, edited by Joy Priest. Louisville KY: Sarabande Books, 2023. 147 pages. $19.95.
As I read this powerful, important anthology, which originated in a July 2020 Sarabande Books workshop and grew to include work from other Louisville writing communities, two quotes from outside the collection came to me: Ezra Pound’s dictum, “Poetry is news that stays news,” and Paul Harvey’s tag line, “And now you know . . . the rest of the story.”
Joy Priest, Louisville native and author of Horsepower, winner of the 2020 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, notes in her introduction that Louisville is the fourth most-segregated city in the country and that “Disregard for Black life is often a socioeconomic barometer of the disregard for other marginalized populations.” The workshop was held shortly after the murders by police of Breonna Taylor in Louisville (March 13, 2020) and George Floyd in Minneapolis (May 25, 2020). These angry, despairing, clear-eyed, strong, poignant, resilient, sometimes even hopeful, poems intend to counter the “silence and insidious gentility of our city’s elite.” They deliver news that stays news. They are the rest of the story.
The principal images here of the socioeconomic gap between Black Louisville’s neighborhoods and the elite areas are Churchill Downs and the Derby. Priest’s introduction is titled “In the Shadow of the Spires,” where she grew up. Her poem “Derby” recounts her family’s connection to the First Saturday in May: renting out their yard for Derby-goers to park in. She, a child dressed in her best, waves the cars in: “I am my mother’s gimmick.” To her family, Churchill Downs was “that fortress/we’ve never been inside.” Alex Shull agrees in “Our Derby,” another poem about the neighborhoods near the racecourse:
The cars came and filled the lawns.
The streets were clogged with limousines.
……..
It felt like we mattered
to the world.
Symbols of city pride serve as an excuse for city neglect in Rheonna Nicole’s angry “Hot Brown,” which skewers, among other things, “Kentucky Fried Segregation,” then ends cynically, “Nevermind, no time to be selfish/’cuz in my city we getting ready for Derby. We’re always getting ready for Derby.”
The book’s title, Once a City Said, comes from a line in Mackenzie Berry’s poem, “In Which an Entrepreneur is Mayor:”
Once a city said,
How do we operationalize compassion? before firing 20 bullets into a
couple’s bed
and never have the masses been able to turn from it.
The mayor, of course, is wealthy politician Greg Fischer, who reappears in David Haydon’s long title, “Battleground State, or In an interview with Dawne Gee, Mayor Greg Fischer says his hands are tied regarding the murder of Breonna Taylor.”
Set against politics and the big symbols of Kentucky pride (eleven herbs and spices come up more than once) are compelling descriptions of the marginalized neighborhoods—take Steve Cambron’s “Rubbertown,” about the industrial district housing chemical plants and dumpsites next to single-family homes:
Summers smelled like cellophane melting on hot light bulbs.
We slept in sun-dried sheets, flecked with factory fallout.”
Notices to evacuate due to some chemical spill or other were routine, but did not save
the thirty-seven injured and twelve dead in the 1965 Du Pont plant explosion. Nothing to do but laugh:
The joke growing up—
We had breathed so much formaldehyde
The funeral home would give us a discount.
There is grit, energy, and a difficult nostalgia to be found down these mean streets, as the poets visit places both cherished and lamented. Kristi Maxwell’s two “pedestrian sonnets,” excerpted from “Stroll,” meditate on whatever the walker comes upon. Ken Walker takes a driving tour past old haunts in “As Preston Street Moves South to Highway” and makalani bandele takes the mass transit in “East Broadway, or On Catching TARC (Transit Authority of River City) Uptown.” To name the places where these poems go, unknown and/or forgotten by the majority, brings them alive for anyone who can read. But, cautions bandele,
It’s hard enough to get words to visit, nevertheless stay here. The center cannot
hold. Such hardship so concentrated and so continuous, terrifies
the majority onto the expressway.
No matter how deprived, these neighborhoods are home to families, and they have histories. Yet although the houses may be cheap, the land is not, so there is always the threat that urban renewal will sweep it all away, as in Bernard Clay’s “Recycling Neighborhoods.” Or, as Lance G. Newman II sees it in “Replaced,”
White flight
replaced by white return
replacing black bodies
erasing black life
And there are more specific erasures. Hannah L. Drake’s “We Were Here,” commissioned by the Frazier History Museum to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment and the 55th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, targets the obliteration of black women in the history of women’s rights:
There can be no full telling of women’s suffrage
Until we speak about the women that suffered
simply to have the same rights
……………
100 years is long enough for the story
of women’s suffrage to be whitewashed.
Then she names forgotten names.
The collection from these thirty-seven Louisville-connected poets begins with an epigraph from Muhammad Ali’s poem, “On the Attica Prison Riots of 1971.” His words float like a butterfly over the entire collection, and sting like a bee:
Better far—from all I see—
To die fighting to be free
. . .
Better now that I say my sooth
I’m gonna die demanding truth.
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