Reading is a relationship outside of time and distance; however, the reader who encounters something personally known experiences a perceptual intimacy sometimes significant to the course of lives. That known element can be an aspect of identity, or of memory that gains potency in being shared. When an expressive work reveals these moments, there is the temporal consideration: how will time temper resonance?
The reader approaches a work with the entirety of their experience, the force of their life at the ready to engage the perceptions offered by the work. In the case of poetry, the history of the form itself offers potentialities of abundance, of profound reward for the reading experience. We read in search of that satisfaction.
A known place encountered in reading can spark personal memories as well, so that the reader and the author join without meeting for a collective experience. Such is the case in Taylor Byas’s I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times (Soft Skull 2023), which opens with a sensory survey of Chicago’s South Side and includes the specific half stanza “Harold’s Chicken steeped/ in so much hot sauce, the nose runs, the small/ piece of bread too wet to hold, drowning beneath (3)”—a vision familiar to anyone who habituated that city’s famous restaurant (as was the neon sign of an aproned running man with an axe chasing a chicken). The reader re-experiences their own encounter in that known place, and the work allows for the creation of shared experience within the intimacies of the interior landscape.
Chicago as an influence on the perceptions of the work becomes a structural element in the text, as there are seven poems in a sequence called “South Side” that intersperse sections of the book. Structural concerns are overt in both the poems themselves and in this collection. Byas, in a January 2024 interview with Ashley-Devon Williamston for Rumpus, says:
I just love form so much, and I would like to talk about it forever and ever […] when my speaker is feeling meditative, when she wants to meander, I might reach for a sestina. When she needs to cycle through something or process, likely a pantoum. When she wants to shout real quick, or whisper, likely a sonnet. And I stick with because I have to let the poem lead when I do that, and the best things happen when the poem leads.
Architecturally, the poems are thus deliberate constructs: Byas demonstrates an agility with the architecture of poetry that is in itself not often enough caught in full length publication.
Lest the reader fear a chalk-dust academicism, Byas’s work offers a generous banquet of prosaic but personal experiences. The book’s second poem, “Blackberrying”, contains a dedication to Plath, an epigram from Edmonia Henderson, and:
[…] Blackberries slit then squishes, berrying
down the sides of my fingers, wet splints for joints
I could not tell if my mother’s sighed requiem was for the fruit
or my ruined clothes. Perhaps she lamented the deep red stain
on my hands, mistaken for the first sample of womanhood (4)
This is not a sanitized and neutered childhood recollection, there’s an awareness of the arch of life. The archetype of the journey is overt in this work and was referenced in the Rumpus interview: “it only made sense to me that The Wiz…influenced this collection that is so much about my experiences as Black girl and woman moving through this world”. But this hero’s journey is not a young male in proof of competitive virility, but that of a female child; and while Dorothy’s lesson was a strangely anti-suffragette ‘There’s No Place Like Home’, one hundred years later, the girl child’s journey is a modern one.
What is striking about this journey is that is makes mention of a woman’s journey of her own sexuality, of the journey from girl child to grown woman. In “The Early Teachings”, seven stanzas of couplets, the second stanza of “because the boys may be tempted by your flesh,/ your safety is your responsibility (9)”, there’s the given edict to all women, which then undergoes the usual modern changes with a stanza in “South Side (II)” when the growing girls are observed by
the women cooking
on their balconies and patios […]
But this is a form of love as well,
the way they judge the length of your daisy dukes
and feed you, send you home with a plate (20)
And, in the poem following, this blooming forth of youth is again addressed:
The upstairs bedroom
we all owned once, the Barbie
sheets that unsexed me
in puberty, the dazzling doll
eyes that watched me touch myself (21)
There’s utter authenticity in these poems, the continuing explorations of place and place in it, of family and the extended families that used to be our communities. In “Cloud Watching” (35), the opening line of “it started innocent enough” continues with the elegant line “the two of us just falling into our bodies”. That the poem continues into the true but taboo “You/ hurt me, you grew through me like weeds” is a perceptual intimacy rarely read in contemporary work.
Especially provocative in the text is “Yes, the Trees Sing” (17), where the overarching journey of the text stops to consider a single nonhuman entity, “Our backyard’s weeping willow”. Byas makes mention of a revisionist motivation in the Rumpus interview that encompasses consideration of this poem:
Literature has the potential to provide counternarratives to the histories we are taught in school, which we know are intentionally incomplete and actively erase the marginalized and oppressed. […] As a poet, I am also a historian responsible for writing and rewriting history in ways that are deemed ‘inappropriate’ in curriculum…
That this poem says that the tree “is really a woman/ with micro braids, all the way down to her waist./ And if you’re close enough, you can hear her hummin’” is in itself a marginalized point of view, denigrated as perhaps tree-hugging, but more clearly an example of the “legacy of magic and myth in Black creative literature” (Williamston). That the opening line is repeated three times in six stanzas gives an incantatory feel to this poem that is consistent with the incantation aspect of other poems in the text.
While Chicagoans, and those who love that city, will find pleasure in the settings for the first half of this book, and while those who like to list icons of legacy have been thick with such lists in descriptions of the work, it ought not to be a shock that Byas, with a literary doctorate, would be generous in spicing the work with allusions—sometimes overtly. There is far more to this work than patriotism to Cincinnati or the other places named, just as there is far more to this work than academic experiments with literary forms, or with a renovated view of memoir. That the author and the work have been embraced in an identity context of race is still a superficial acknowledgement. There’s a glory here that transcends the specifics of the memoir, of the forms used to convey the perception, of the identity of the author. May the author’s purpose of endeavoring to speak to the future be found.
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