[BOA Editions; 2024]
Janice N. Harrington’s Yard Show is a study of the relationships between private yard and public commons, personal history and natural history, Midwestern Black identity and American national identity. For Harrington, the road to the yard, to herself, to the Black Midwest goes through the Jim Crow South; the social up-rooting and re-seeding that inspires these poems is the Great Migration. That perilous South-to-North and sometimes East-to-West epic—described by Harrington as a “middle passage” and a “self-snatching”—began over a century ago and is ongoing, with millions of Black Americans in Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, working to create that “irrevocable condition” that James Baldwin called home.
The enclosed private yard is Harrington’s main symbol for that hard-won condition. The yard is an activity of making—a “wild, original, unfettered” poesis—performed preeminently but not exclusively by Black women—“yard work, spirit work, woman’s work.” It is a process of enclosing land—“Beware of Dog. / Property protected by . . . / Chain link fences around the perimeter. / Steel padlocks”—that yields Black self-ownership—“Didn’t the hoe she drive / into that black dirt . . . / prove that this space—this / right here—belonged to her?” The yard is moreover the living world formed out of this human toil. It is an exhibition of aesthetic plenty thumbed at white perceptions of Black poverty: “They think Black people don’t have anything. / They think it’s all slums.” The yard is, as well, a neoclassical museum shot through with vernacular accents: “In her yard: / plastic waterfalls . . . tea roses, / bronze dolphins . . . / bird houses, a concrete Dionysus whitened with paint. / Tin basins tipped and staggered into fountains.”
The titular poems “Yard Show I” and “Yard Show II” link yard-words to yard-work, alliterating on two levels simultaneously. Sequences like “plastic” / “plaster,” “pool” / “paint,” “perimeter” / “padlock,” go together rhythmically without overcrowding each other, while the real objects to which these words refer alliterate visually, the “whitewashed Aphrodite” and the “concrete Dionysus” syncopating across half-acre sculpture parks to evoke “Black Versailles, Black baroque.” I could cite dozens of similar examples throughout the collection where Harrington’s poesis seems inextricable from the home gardener’s. At times, I wonder if the poet’s orientation to the yard show is at all akin to Seamus Heaney’s orientation to potato farming in his classic poem “Digging.” There, the seated poet watches his aging father sink his spade, “with curt cuts,” into the potato bog, writing: “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.” Heaney’s poetic “digging” is both continuous and discontinuous with his patrilineal heritage. His elder’s work inspires him, and yet, the old man digs in the soil as the young man toils at the desk. Is their intergenerational labor one unbroken tradition, or is the poet’s poesis a break with the spadework it canonizes? Heaney’s ambivalent answer echoes into his understanding of his complex national identity: North Irishman, UK citizen, Harvard don, and Beowulf translator who declined, for political reasons, to give up his “green passport” to become Queen Elizabeth’s poet laureate. Are there any analogous identitarian refusals or fraught translations in Harrington’s Black Midwest? For example, is a theoretical statement like “Black gardening as ideological resistance to neo-colonization and white supremacy” trying to invert John Locke’s colonialist theory of property, or is it nodding to the emancipatory power of claiming ownership over a parcel of land into which one has mixed one’s labor? A nearby line that reminds us of America’s past denials of self- and home-ownership to Black Americans may suggest how Harrington would answer: “Intersectionality of property rights and identity formation in Black women.”
The Black yard show is in dialogue with the Middle American landscape; the padlocked garden and the pockmarked prairie blur each other’s boundaries. Like another landscape poet, Walt Whitman, Harrington likes to enumerate the varieties of grasses and wildflowers that grow on Midwestern plains, cataloguing bluestem, switchgrass, redtop, turkeyfoot, sideoats grama, Canadian rye, and many others. In another poem, “Anything Dark Bears the Name,” Harrington lists eight species of dark-petaled prairie flowers, among them the Queen-of-the-meadow and the Black-eyed Susan, that some call by alternative epithets. “When Identifying Tallgrasses” makes music out of anatomy and taxonomy, the poet scrutinizing each leaf of grass down to its “spikes, panicles, [and] racemes,” before asking, “What figures, what patterns / make any life? / What shaped my own?” As in Ariana Benson’s Black Pastoral, Harrington’s autobiographical question links Black history to natural history, the poet’s family’s own rising out of a Birmingham bomb zone to the prairie’s relentless regeneration after centuries of expropriation. These personal and natural histories merge seamlessly in “What Place Is This? Where Are We Now?,” a poem that recounts how, in the first half of the nineteenth century, Illinois’s pristine prairies gave cover to runaway slaves who “[hid] in the thick brush behinds stands of tallgrass.” Yet “By 1900, the Illinois prairies were gone,” their grass-roots snapping under steel-plows like a “fusillade of pistols.” The grasses now sprouting from the prairie’s blasted topsoil have a slight “trembling” quality to them, as if they are shuddering out traumatic memories of America’s settler-colonial enclosure. In “On the Road to the Old Negro Cemetery,” the wind “frets” through shivering switchgrasses that Whitman himself might have likened to the “uncut hair of graves.”
Besides “Song of Myself,” Harrington’s landscape poems called to mind for me a 2018 poem by another Midwestern poet, Hanif Abdurraqib, “How Can Black People Write about Flowers at a Time Like This.” That poem finds its speaker at the edge of an Ohio swamp attempting to “fashion / something pretty out of seeds refusing to make / anything / worthwhile of their burial.” Contemplating how his own mind mimics a swamp dandelion’s seeding helps the poet to channel the social pain throbbing from the poem’s title. Harrington’s Yard Work, published in the foreboding months before the 2024 election, reads like an affirmation of Abdurraqib’s sentiment: To write about flowers is to write about Black people in these times. For those paying close attention to beauty, to dusted dandelions and trembling switchgrasses, the personal and the natural rhyme.
With attention to beauty, however, comes awareness of pain. “A wasp settles on my eyelid,” the first poem in the collection reads, “but / when is attention ever without risk?” The same point about beauty and pain resurfaces in the collection’s final poem, “The Art of Apple Peeling,” wherein “love resembles / the slow art of apple peeling—requiring attention, a sharp edge, a wound, a revelation, and a falling away,” and the poet resembles a “slayer of apples [who has] sucked peelings like the entrails / of the sacrifice.” The apple peel is a “curtain, a caul, a bounding wall,” like the silk robe covering a woman’s skin, beneath which an epidermal light gleams “apple bright.” An apple orchard full of swelling fruits is the last image of the enclosed yard with which Harrington leaves us, an American Eden tended by “Eve’s daughter,” whose trees yield foxwhelps and seek-no-furthers that the proprietor, once having flayed them, will boil down to ciders.
Janice N. Harrington’s Yard Work raises profound queries about the relationship between poesis and enclosing in the Black Midwest. The orchardists and backyard sculptors that appear throughout her poems speak univocally that the Earth’s beauty, and indeed our own human beauty, are keenest when our spades, plows, and pens are unafraid to disturb the dirt and call new life forth from it.
Kelly M.S. Swope is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Thomas More University in Covington, Kentucky. He is the creator of the documentary podcast Life on the Ark: The Zanesville Animal Catastrophe a Decade Later (2022, 2024) and resides in Cincinnati, Ohio.
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