Humid Pitch: Narrative Poetry

by Cheryl Clarke, Betsy Bayley (Designed by)

Poems deal with childhood, the past, exile, art, sisters, music, identity, and school

Genres: Poetry, LGBT, Lesbian

129 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1989

About the author

Cheryl L. Clarke is a lesbian poet, essayist, educator and a Black feminist community activist: she lives in Jersey City, New Jersey, and Hobart, New York. With her life partner, Barbara Balliet, she is co-owner of Bleinheim Hill Books, a used and rare bookstore in Hobart.

Reviews

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I was taking undergraduate creative writing, I had the opportunity to hear Cheryl Clarke give a poetry reading. I know the exact date, October 18, 1990, because Ms. Clarke signed the copies of her books Living As a Lesbian and Humid Pitch: Narrative Poetry that I purchased following her moving reading. I remember being bowled over by the power and lyrical beauty of her poetry and her delivery of it, and I eagerly read the books and enjoyed them. Somewhere in the boxes of notebooks I have squirreled away in my attack is probably the journal I used to keep and would have written about this poetry reading and the books I read afterwards.

A prompt in this year's Book Riot Reader Harder Challenge is "Read a book of poetry by a BIPOC or queer author." I thought immediately of Ms. Clarke's poetry books -- she is a Black lesbian -- so I snatched this one off the shelf last night, spent some time with each poem again. Still very powerful although less startingly fresh than they were in 1990, the year after they were published. I wish I could have evoked Ms. Clarke's delivery, the cadence of her expressive voice. I could almost hear an echo of it in "Ella Takes Up the Slack," which I remember as one of the poems she read that evening. Two of my favorites in the collection are "The Day Sam Cooke Died" and "Epic of Song."

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 2 out of 5]

Cheryl Clarke, Humid Pitch: Narrative Poetry (Firebrand Books, 1989)

This book is quite possibly the best ammunition I've ever seen for something I have long hypothesized: that free verse narrative is well-nigh impossible to do correctly. You can versify narratively all day and well into the night in formal verse (and, for example, William Morris, who was infamous for writing some five thousand lines a day, did just that) and never worry that your work will be mistaken for prose if someone takes out the line breaks. After all, you have rhythm and rhyme to fall back on, which notifies the reader right quick that it's poetry, no matter how it's presented. And the longer a free-verse narrative piece goes on, I think, the more likely it is that it will eventually degenerate into prose with extra line breaks. Don't believe me? Assuming you've never read “Epic of Song”, the eighty-page narrative piece at the center of Humid Pitch, see if you can figure out where the line breaks go:

“The show ended early. Candy was the last one to leave the stage. She was shivering and her eyes running. Tears or mucus? Star gave her her coat. Candy seemed to keep a cold. Her clothes wasn't tight no more. She walked slowly ahead of her entourage, switching her hips, that switching which Star loved even though some of its snap was gone now.” (73)

Four lines when I type it here, and it's passable prose, though it could use a touch-up here and there (“Star gave her her coat” could use a bit of clarification, and the first part being short declarative then short declarative then short declarative then short question then short declarative then... gets a little repetitive). But what's poetic about it? What about it says “this should be sixteen lines of poetry” rather than “this should be four lines of prose”? I don't think that question gets asked nearly enough by poets today, and it's one of the most important a poet can ask. **