Once
- Feb 4, 2024
- 3 min read
Updated: Jun 22
★★★★☆
Browsing the poetry section at Jackson Street Booksellers in Omaha’s Old Market, I came across the Alice Walker collection Her Blue Body Everything We Know: The Earthling Poems 1965-1990 Complete containing her first four books of poetry, Once (1968); Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems (1973); Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning (1979); and Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful (1985); as well as a smattering of previously uncollected poems.
I wasn’t looking for Alice Walker’s poetry. Though I knew she wrote poetry (and essays), I thought of her first and foremost as an author of fiction (like most everyone else, I’m sure, and, like most everyone else, I too have read The Color Purple and nothing else). Fairly or not, I don’t often consider poetry by prosaists (see also: Margaret Atwood, John Updike, C.S. Lewis), thinking them dilettantes of the form and not proper poets like Carl Sandburg, Mary Oliver, David Whyte, or Walt Whitman. You may have noticed that I chose four poets who also happen to write prose (and are quite well-known for it), and so I will confess, sheepishly so, that my bias, however unsound, has run in only one direction. All of which is to say, I wasn’t looking for Alice Walker’s poetry. But I did find the subtitle, The Earthling Poems, intriguing, and it didn’t hurt that this was a first-edition hardcover in pristine condition with protective mylar—for only $10. So I bought it.
Once, published in 1968, but written several years earlier when Walker was a student in East Africa and during her senior year at Sarah Lawrence College, is dominated by several group poems (by which I mean, not knowing the technical term, individual poems, often self-contained, though not always, presented each to a page, and falling under a single title). The first of these, occupying the first 47 pages, “African Images: Glimpses from a Tiger’s Back,” is the poetic version of Polaroids: immediate and superficial (in the literal, not pejorative sense) and, as is often the case with off-the-cuff snapshots, the total proves greater than the sum of its parts. Here, however, the sum is richer still, as the written word carries meaning and invites imagination that we would not gleam ourselves from images alone. These very short poems are followed by “Love” and “Karamojongs,” more very short poems, which, though grouped separately, could just have easily been included within “African Images.”
Nearly halfway through and just three poems in, we come to the book’s titular work, yet another grouping. Unlike its precedents, “Once” is no mere collection of hastily captured Polaroids. Here, Walker unveils a series of 14 vignettes depicting life in the South during (or perhaps before) the Civil Rights era with humor, with empathy, with surprise, with anger, and with hope. From there, though there are several more poems about the South, the number of group poems decreases and the variety of subject matter increases, though is largely dominated by Walker’s, presumably, contemporaneous romantic relationship(s) back in New York.
I read the entirety of Once twice (ha) and many of its poems numerous times. With the first reading, I was underwhelmed. I think I’d held the fact that Walker was just 20 years of age (give or take) when these poems were written against her, as in, they can’t be that good because she was just a college student. And while there is a youthful optimism—perhaps naïveté—throughout, Walker is a keen, sensitive observer, whose insights reveal themselves more deeply with successive reads. She neither tells (or shows) everything nor draws conclusions, leaving plenty of space for the reader to enter into each poem. And if there is anything, at this early stage, she seems to display a mastery of, it is her use of enjambment (the running on of a thought from one line to the next without a syntactical break) combined with her selective use (and disuse) of punctuation and capitalization, to wit (from “Exercises on Themes from Life”):
If I were a patriot
I would kiss the flag
As it is,
Let us just go.
Oh, how that line “As it is,” wonderfully renders two ways to read the poem, in turn opening the poem up to multiple interpretations. There are many such delightful moments, moments within moments, throughout. Once is an auspicious start, and I can’t wait to see how she develops as a poet on the way to her second collection, published five years later.
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