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The Poet That Connects
“I think of myself as a black person first
and foremost, because that connects me to Africans, African-Americans and
Caribbean-Americans.”
This
past January the entire nation celebrated Martin Luther King Junior Day. Poet Allison Elaine Joseph considers that day
to be sacred, but also considers the days of the “unknown” civil rights advocates
to be sacred as well.
“In terms of Martin Luther King, of course
he's very important. But what's really fascinating is the depth of the whole
civil rights movement, how many "ordinary" people sacrificed so much.
The books "My Soul Is Rested" and "Eyes on the Prize"
were texts I read in college that gave me a huge sense of how many people were
involved in the movement. Martin Luther King inspired many, but let us not
forget all the people that marched, protested, picketed and boycotted to assure
civil rights.”
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Joseph was
not highly aware of Civil Rights or Martin Luther King Jr. growing up. She was born to Caribbean parents in London,
England in 1967.
“My mom was from
Jamaica and my dad from Grenada. Our
family moved from London to Toronto, Canada when I was about four months
old. There’s a large West Indian
population in Toronto, and I still have extended family there.”
The Joseph Family moved to the Bronx, New York, where her
older sister Sharon and she were reared, and where Joseph considers her
hometown. By the age of 12, Joseph knew
she wanted to become a poet. In fact,
one of her favorite poets, Gwendolyn Brooks, was someone she could model
herself after.
“I do go back to Ms. Brooks as a sort of
model to live my life by. And wherever I
go, and particularly when I go to Chicago, and I mention my love of her work,
someone always has a Gwendolyn Brooks story about how they were helped by
her…And that’s an incredibly admirable trait particularly among writers who can
be mean to one another and not supportive.” She told reporter
Jennifer Merrifield in 2005.
Joseph attended the Bronx High School of Science in the
Bronx, New York, where many members of the student body were second-generation
immigrants who spoke a variety of languages.
Joseph thought of this as the norm, even though she just spoke English.
After graduating from high school, Joseph went on to Ohio’s Kenyon
College in the Fall of 1984 where she majored in History and English. While at Kenyon, she experienced her first
cultural shock, due to its lack of diversity and her being one of only three
black students in her class. It was the
first time she thought of herself as being different from everyone else.
While
at Kenyon, Joseph attended her first of many poet readings, intense workshops,
and published her first group of poems in the Kenyon Review.
She
graduated with a degree in English and History and entered the Master of Fine
Arts program at Indiana University, where she met her husband, fellow poet Jon
Tribble, whom she describes as her best friend and best critic.
The couple
married and moved to Arkansas where both taught at the University of Arkansas
at Little Rock. While at UALR, Joseph’s
first book of poetry What Keeps Us Here was published by Ampersand
Press.
The couple moved to Carbondale, Illinois where Joseph now
directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Southern Illinois University
Carbondale.
Tribble is managing editor of the Crab Orchard Review (http://craborchardreview.siu.edu), a
national journal of literary works, and series editor of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry.
Crab Orchard Review
was created in 1995 and is published two times a year. Richard Peterson, former chair of English
Department at SIUC, hired the couple and their friend Carolyn Alessio, to
fulfill his wishes that a literary journal be published by the SIUC English
Department.
“And he said to Jon, you be managing
editor, Allison, you be poetry editor, Carolyn, you be prose editor, I'll be
editor-in-chief and let's get this started.” Joseph told Merrifield.
Crab Orchard Review celebrated
its 10th year anniversary in 2005 and continues to be published two times a
year, featuring cream-of-the-crop creative pieces from fiction, nonfiction, and
poet writers. Crab Orchard Review receives about 12,000 poems and 6,000 prose
pieces in one year. Out of those pieces
only 150 poems and 50 prose pieces are selected for both issues.
Joseph is also director of the SIUC
Young Writers Workshop, a coed residential creative writing summer workshop for
high-school aged writers and serves as moderator of the Creative Writing
Opportunities List, an online list-serve that distributes calls for submissions
and literary contest information to over 3000 writers free of charge.
She is the author of six books of poems: What Keeps Us
Here (1992, http://www.ampersandpress.com);
and My Father's Kites ( 2010, Steel Toe Books http://www.steeltoebooks.com).
She is also the author of a chapbook, Voice: Poems (2009,
Mayapple Press http://mayapplepress.com).
Her most recent poetry collection is the second chapbook Trace Particles, published by Backbone
Press (http://backbonepress.org/chapbooks/).
Joseph describes herself as a poet who writes in longhand,
is accessible, constantly moving, and never gets writer’s block.
“There are periods where I’m not writing
because of my responsibilities to others, but I don’t worry about writer’s
block. I write anytime I feel like
writing. I have to work it around all
the other things I have to do.”
Joseph has
been giving readings since 1991 and all of her readings are different and
unscripted.
“I’d
never choose a poem to read at every reading.
To me that’s way too reductive.
Each time I do a reading I choose different poems. Different audiences connect with different
poems; so they all have merit, given the different types of readings I have
done.”
One of her most powerful poems is “Falling Out Of History” which can be found in her poetry
collection What Keeps Us Here.
“The poem was prompted
by a racist cartoon I remember seeing.
It popped up on a collection of cartoons a friend of the family bought
for her son. The poem explores
connections between different aspects of racism that added up to something
larger for me.”
Joseph
looks at the past year as a year of possibilities from being a poet, to
identifying herself as a black American, to electing the first African American
as president for the second time; but she hesitates to say that MLK’s dream has
come true.
‘I certainly don't know what's in the
hearts of people who hate President Obama because of his racial background.
Of course disagree with him politically if you do, but the fierceness of
the hate worries me. Martin Luther King
Junior’s dream has yet to come true. I
think a lot of the backlash to Obama’s election demonstrates we still have a
long way to go.”
PHOTO DESCRIPTION AND COPYRIGHT
INFO
Photo 1, Photo 27, Photo 28, and Photo 32.
Allison Joseph. Copyright by Allison Joseph.
Photo 2
Martin Luther King Jr. giving
his I Have A Dream speech.
Photo 3
Jacket cover of My Soul Is Rested.
Photo 4
Allison Joseph, age 5, meeting
Santa Clause at the A& S (Abraham and Straus) Department Store. Copyright by Allison Joseph.
Photo 5
Gwendolyn Brooks. Public
Domain
Photo 6
Jacket cover of Gwendolyn
Brooks: Poet From Chicago
Photo 7
Bronx High School of Science. Public Domain
Photo 8
Allison Joseph and her mother at her 1984 high school
graduation.
Copyright by Allison Joseph.
Photo 9
Allison Joseph, age 17 at the freshman orientation of Kenyon
College in Gambier, Ohio.
Copyright by Allison Joseph.
Photo 10
Allison’s father, Allison Joseph, and sister Sharon at Allison’s
graduation from Kenyon College.
Copyright by Allison Joseph
Photo 11
Allison Joseph and Jon Tribble in their dating years. Copyright by
Allison Joseph.
Photo 12
Jon Tribble and Allison Joseph on their wedding day on December
30, 1992. Copyright by
Allison Joseph.
Photo 13
Allison Joseph on the cover of the Southern Illinois University
of
Carbondale catalogue.
Copyright by Allison Joseph.
Photo 14
Jon Tribble. Copyright by
Allison Joseph.
Photo 15
Jon Tribble and Allison Joseph at Southern Illinois University
of
Carbondale. Copyright by
Allison Joseph.
Photo 16
Crab
Orchard Review copies.
Photo 17
Allison Joseph at the Southern Illinois University of Carbondale
booth. Copyright by
Allison Joseph.
Photo 18
Allison Joseph now runs.
View her blog on her running
life at www.cwrun.blogspot.com Copyright by Allison Joseph.
Photo 19 and Photo 31
Jacket cover of What Keeps
Us Here
Photo 20
Jacket cover of Soul Train
Photo 21
Jacket cover of In Every
Seam
Photo 22
Jacket cover of Imitation
of Life
Photo 23
Jacket cover of Worldly
Pleasures
Photo 24
Jacket cover of my father’s
kites
Photo 25
Jacket cover of Voice:
Poems
Photo 26
Photo of: Imitation of Life, Worldly Pleasures, Voice:
Poems, and my fahter’s kites
Photo 29
Allison reading at the Jazz Café, Music Hall for the Performing
Arts, Detroit, July 18, 2008.
Copyright by Allison Joseph.
Photo 30
Information on a reading by Allison Joseph and her book my
father’s
kites
Photo
33
President
Barack Obama. Public Domain
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